When Cruelty Squad came out last summer, I didn't really know what to make of it. I couldn't bring myself to buy it because its whole aesthetic was too vile. It looked like a gunman from a voxel-based shooter had been let loose in the Windows 95 'Maze' screensaver (with all the wall textures randomised); or perhaps like a crude homemade Quake mod on a CD that police officials dug out from under the bed of a 90s teenager who'd just gone on a murderous rampage.

And yet Cruelty Squad intrigued me, falling right between my beloved immersive sim and boomer shooter genres, offering plenty of player freedom in its sprawling levels, and a vast arsenal of equipment that let you gut-rope-swing, super-jump and jet-boost around these psychedelic nightmare levels, set in a near-future corporate dystopia.

Clearly, this aesthetic is deliberate, and befitting of a game world in which I understood that you feast on human flesh, buy and sell human organs on the stock market, and run around assassinating various corporate weirdos while the civilians mindlessly run around in the streets quipping about how much they love their meaningless zero-hours jobs. It seemed there was a method behind the madness.

Finally, last week, I took the plunge into this pool of gore and high-viz gunk. It's not easy to find your feet here, partly because through both aesthetic and design it's a game that doesn't really seem to care whether you like it or not. But it still makes a hell of an impact, offering a cold commentary on disenfranchisement and corporate alienation that is usually the reserve of more conventional cyberpunk games. In fact, it's the total defiance of cyberpunk - or any other, for that matter - visual language that make Cruelty Squad such an effective conduit for these themes.

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Everything about Cruelty Squad is designed to discomfort. The eerie Adlib-like title music - played while the camera rotates slowly around a car with a dead man inside that has a chunk of its skull missing - wouldn't be amiss in an obscure 90s point-and-click horror game; the menu is incomprehensible, at least at first, and there's a permanent border around the play screen. Your health display is a snotty globule that's way too big and way too close to the centre of your screen, while your ammo display is also jarringly intrusive.

It's a game that puts you on the back foot from the start, goading you with its artful repulsiveness and throwing you straight into a mission where you need to kill some CEO of a Big Pharma company who's embezzling funds and flying into rages and 'vomiting blood all over the office.' The environments are dizzyingly wrong, with maddeningly repeated textures slathered all over the place; an entire room may be wallpapered with a pattern depicting the same weird face leering at you, while secret doors are meaty orifices that you need to stick your hand into. There are crowds of civilians in the game, wandering without purpose, and spouting inane platitudes about the value of work while only sometimes revealing how worthless and alienating that work is in this gig-economy-run world.

Everything in Cruelty Squad adds up to evoke a state of detachment in the player. Just about any other game set in this world would opt for a cyberpunk setting of neon lights and giant ad screens adorning skyscrapers that tower over the steaming, struggling streets far below. But where the cyberpunk setting in games often feels too familiar now, often falling too comfortably back on themes and tropes popularised by Blade Runner back in the 80s, Cruelty Squad permeates those themes out of every oozing pore - from its aesthetic to UI, to its missions and, dialogue.

Its exploitative corporate world isn't filled with slick, suited sociopaths with eerie ocular augmentations, but much weirder figures, like cult leaders and executives of toy companies who are so obsessed with their own product (Chunkopops, the game's equivalent of Funko Pop Vinyls) that they line their entire office with them. In one mission, your target is a successful aerospace CEO who needs to be killed because his commercial space flights had too low a rate of failure, which means they've failed to fulfil the 'human sacrifice' quota.

This isn't your typical cyberpunk story of corporate dictatorship, but rather of corporations gone full-on amok.

You get body augmentations in the game, but instead of being the kind of smooth flesh-tech mergings that make you look like the second coming of Deus Ex's Adam Jensen (i.e. cool as shit), they go full-on into the realm of Cronenbourg body horror; huge holes gouged into your back that spurt a "jet of sticky liquid" serve as a hyperspeed booster, an "external intestine" that lets you rope-swing across levels, and a suit of writhing flesh for body armour. All the tropey slickness of cyberpunk fiction is replaced for a visceral squelchiness that really makes you question whether a world in which man and machine fuse - Elon Musk's dream - is really all it's cracked up to be.

Even if you're making a killing on the stock market and blitzing through levels with maximum efficiency thanks to a perfectly synergised mix of weaponry and body augmentations, you feel grossed out and alienated from the world and your own body in it.

Even when you're clearly much more powerful than everything and everyone else on the level, there is no sense of heroism here, no meaningful journey for you to go on. In a way, you're just as much of a wage slave as those civilians you talk to, obsessively checking the stock market in the middle of murderous missions to see if you can flog that brain you just pulled from a pile of gore.

Do I actually like Cruelty Squad? I don't know, but maybe that doesn't matter, because it has a powerful vision, opening up staid cyberpunk themes and splattering them all over the lurid, leery walls.

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