I wish I was at home playing Gorbino's Quest.
Content Warning for every horrifying subject I touch upon. On this page I'm going to list out all the videos I've been watching on Cruelty Squad as well as all the articles I've read about it, as well as a couple other resources I might have to refer to as I'm working on my piece for it. I'm more than likely also going to write out a few random, unstrung observations about things I find interesting or notable about the game, as well as try to work out what I want to say about it. Nothing more, yet nothing less than external subjective reflections.
| Cruelty Squad Dialogue (All Levels) |
| Cruelty Squad Wiki |
Cruelty Squad solicits me to imagine a world where the Boogalos, Proud Boys, and Atomwaffens of the world are the privately sanctioned wetworks department of Jeff Bezos, the Walton Family, and Mark Zuckerberg, among others. After gaining meaningful employment they can upgrade their tacticool AR-15s for the scoped brilliance of the K&H X20. When I try to visualize what the world of Cruelty Squad would look like if we quite literally lived in it, I see on the Titanium Princess a resurrected run-of-the-mill pervert CEO composed of synthflesh, dangling black market organs and spiderweb steel dripping with putrid fluids; all granted by a company credit card with profits from a bioslave corporation. Rather than being quietly scrubbed off the internet, Bestgore and Ogrish would be daytime television in every household. I don't believe the game is a shitpost, but it's set in a world populated by shitposters, where the current mode of production is an outright object of religious worship, where it's assumed the status of not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, though where it came from, none of us can tell.
A blood and pus smeared world where capitalism is ideologically justified not only by Forbes, Bloomberg, or our beloved elected officials, but also by eternally online hierophants of the institutionalized Gnostic theology of meme magic, working together in a macabre unison.