Are you an uncultured swine for not liking Cruelty Squad?
Cruelty Squad is Super Mario 64, with its abstract lego block architecture and color anti-theory texturing, its joy of movement for the sake of movement, and (more explicitly) its hidden worlds inside paintings
Cruelty Squad is Kid Pix, with its garish airbrush coloring and arcane hieroglyphic button interfaces that demand experimentation and play
Cruelty Squad is Deus Ex mutated with Postal 2 and Bubsy 3d: Bubsy visits the James Turrell Retrospective
Cruelty Squad is the “greater gaming community” unearthing discoveries the modern and contemporary/postmodern art world learned, refined, and swallowed themselves into over the past 100 years. In terms the difficulty level of analysis, it is somewhere around the level Marcel Duchamp’s readymade urinals.
Cruelty Squad’s text and subtext are subversive enough to confuse gamers acclimated to the realist and blockbuster movie stylings of most popular games (especially shooters), but not so subversive to be impenetrable and with a thick enough layer of irony and humor to facilitate analysis. It has reference points to contemporary/postmodern visual arts, but its strongest reference points are other videogames.
Cruelty Squad is “Overwhelmingly Positive (5,724)” on Steam. Don’t you get it? Its intentionally bad. Oh but also a lot of the intentionally bad parts are actually good.
Like much analysis of contemporary art, analysis of Cruelty Squad is at a certain point recursive and shallow. The moment-to-moment experience is ultimately what matters.
A week before I played Cruelty Squad, I went to a Jasper Johns career spanning exhibition, a massive victory lap for one of the premier American 20th century contemporary artists. I had very limited experience with his work (what do you expect? I am a gamer). I am not going to lie: i was, frankly, unmoved. The contextual and didactic importance of his most famous work from the 1950s and 1960s (mixing representational and abstract art, reconsidering a painting as a 3D sculpture) seems quaint 60+ years later, what was once subversive is at best familiar and at worst overbaked. When you remove the historical relevance, what remains is the aesthetic and emotional experience of the art itself. This aspect is (at least for me) a major weakness of much contemporary and postmodern art, as they often veer far too didactic and are less about craftsmanship or revelation or inspiration (again, for me). I did not have the “standing in awe of a Rothko in person” experience.
Or maybe I am just too uncultured to appreciate Jasper Johns’ work? I enjoy going to art museums but I more often than not find modern art exhibitions frustrating, empty , and contextualless, and I leave a little in denial. Did I miss something? Should I trust the tastemakers or my own instincts? How much time should I spend trying to like this?
False Start by Jasper Johns (sold for 80 miliion dollars in 2006)
One week after the Jasper Johns exhibition I played Cruelty Squad and found it to be, at the very least, a bit more of a visceral experience. I dont care too much about the subtext or didactic components of the game*, it is the experience of playing Cruelty Squad that I find exciting and still enjoy playing with. I love dumb games that throw paint at the wall to see what sticks and Cruelty Squad revels in this. To list some select examples from my Cruelty Squad experience:
- The aforementioned arcane icons scattered all over the level and weapon select screens, from the beginning you have no choice but to just click around amd see what happens
- That you have to manually reselect your augmentations and weapons every time you restart, somewhat encouraging you to try new things rather than stick with what you’re comfortable with
- The writing for the weapon and augmentation descriptions
- That several of the augmentation descriptions either hide critical aspects of how they work or just lie about what they do
- How broken and fun the grappendix grappling hook is
- An surprisingly pretty good poison swamp level
- The “residue” the DNA gun leaves behind
- Patch announcements are “added a new hidden implant to cruelty squad, good luck finding it”
At the end of the day, I quite like Cruelty Squad. I think there absolutely is an element of “emperor has no clothes” and peer pressure, people can easily read intention into every single part of the game including the not so good parts and I would not be surprised people are afraid to properly critique it lest they appear not in on the joke. Ultimately though, for me it’s a fun game that didn’t waste too much of my time and a novelty that cannot be imitated in the future without looking hacky.
*One major exception: I quite like the (essentially invisible and unspoken) introduction, immediate loss, and late game return of “divine light” and its relevance to the gameworld and gameplay. It’s cliche to invoke Dark Souls, but this was akin to the revelation of understanding how critical bonfires were for that game’s narrative and gameplay.
