Video Game / Cruelty Squad

Acid trip? No. This is going to be an acid adventure.

"Hey it's me. Did I wake you up from your depression nap?"

— The Handler, upon starting the game

"Cruelty Squad is what happens when you gut Rainbow Six and Hitman, invert their corpses, and write cryptic, funny messages on the floor with their guts. The basic idea is simple. You're a depressed loser assassin on a budget."

— PCGamer.com

Cruelty Squad is the debut game by Finnish solo developer Ville Callio, under the studio name Consumer Softproducts. It is a highly-surreal tactical immersive sim first-person shooter, with deliberately garish, eye-melting aesthetics, excessively bit-crushed auditory pieces and trippy visuals influenced by underground, ultra-violent video games from the early 2000s.

The plot, as explained by the game, is that you are an assassin and depressed loser recently discharged from a death squad, and a 'friend' of yours offers you a job in the gig economy, doing the only thing you're good at: killing people. Welcome to Cruelty Squad, my friend - for your own punishment and pleasure, killing insane corporate executives, dirty cops, and other assorted social trash for a measly grand per head.

Gameplay boils down to this: your victim(s) are somewhere in the level, and you need to go in, kill them, and escape to beat the level. Enemies' weapons will eviscerate you in seconds, and yours do likewise to them, a disempowerment to a guns-blazing approach that highlights an Immersive Sim influence: stealth and avoiding combat are just as valuable as being powerful in fights. As such, it's up to the player to figure out how they want to solve each level, with an expanding assortment of guns and technological augments enabling each player to take a unique approach to the game's challenges.

For Ville's upcoming project and the game's Creator-Driven Successor, see Psycho Patrol R.

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Cruelty Squad provides examples of the following tropes:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: Several levels qualify, including Androgen Assault, Mall Madness, Apartment Atrocity, Seaside Shock, and Bog Business.
• Advanced Movement Technique:
  • Kicking surfaces pushes the player away from them, as does hitting them with a baton. Combining either (or both) with a normal jump can propel the player fair distances, and the Alien Wetware implant improves the kickjump boost further.
  • Strafing in the air allows the player to accelerate up to speeds faster than just aiming a direction and holding forwards.
• Advert-Overloaded Future: Pizza House's establishments in Paradise and Mall Madness are textured with their name all over their walls, just in case you happen to forget the name of the chain when you're looking elsewhere.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: In the good ending, the protagonist dismantles the entire universe. This is initially communicated by him peeling an onion.
• A.K.A.-47: Most of the guns in the game are real-world firearms given new names and sometimes slight modifications. These tend to be prototypes that never truly make it out into the gun market.
• The Almighty Dollar: The third triagon is the god of finance, who releases transactional value into the world.
• Arc Symbol: Cancerous growths, which symbolize the overabundance of LIFE plaguing this world.
• Arc Words: The four values of this world are Power, Virtue, Strength, and Punishment, and can be seen written on many of the mid-to-late game level textures.
• Armor Is Useless: Armor on enemies works as advertised. Armor used by the player does reduce damage but not as much as you're likely expecting. In fact, until May 2023, armor literally provided no damage reduction.
  • Averted with the Tactical Blast Shield, which actually does what it says and renders the player immune to explosive damage (which makes certain enemies utterly harmless and allows one to Rocket Jump).
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Certain weapons (such as the AMG4 and Stern AWS 3000) are explicitly noted to fire anti-armor rounds, which makes them able to damage the likes of Shocktroopers, Golems, and Necromechs.
• Ambiguous Ending: The GOLDEN AGE — while it's strongly implied that the protagonist reduced the universe to nothing, the ending also implies that reintroducing death to the universe was an act of mercy considering that an overabundance of life has caused it to become worthless. NPCs and the protagonist himself are shown marching towards the golden DEATH symbol to a distorted, albeit triumphant, tune.
• And I Must Scream: Bioslaves (read: humans that are produced for the purpose of slavery, a description that fits non-bioslaves as well) are perpetually screaming whenever you talk to them.
• And Then John Was a Zombie:
  • Implied with the DEATH surgery, which gives the player immunity to radiation and changes the LIFE glob to a DEATH glob, in addition to a mild speed boost and the ability to walljump.
  • Also implied with POWER IN MISERY, where "due to your wasting of company resources by hogging the genetic recombinator, you've been selected to participate in an experimental biological enhancement program". Said program allows you to absorb more bullets, eat people, and turns you into a deformed freak.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Because the world is chock-full of visual noise and laden with hitscanning enemies, the game evens the odds a bit and causes a small eyeball symbol to show up on the HUD if you've been spotted. In addition, enemies and civilians are usually the only moving objects onscreen, meaning it can be pretty easy to pick out your opponents mid-level; targets have a unique indicator that can be seen through walls to aid in exploration. Lastly, the Exit sign is one of the few objects that is visible through fog and at long distances, meaning locating the exit is rarely a hassle.
  • If you die enough times, the game shifts to Power in Misery mode, which allows you to eat corpses to regenerate health. At one point of health per corpse this isn't much, but every bit helps. The game also clears your financial debt if you have any when transitioning into this mode. Additionally, dying while in this mode no longer costs money.
  • The final main story level, Archon Grid, has an easily accessible Divine Light orb within a short jaunt from the starting position. Because some of the postgame secrets are tied to Divine Light status (and the only other way to access Divine Light is by beating a level on Punishment Mode), this becomes an easily accessible way to go after said secrets. Similarly, all one needs to do to access Hope Eradicated is equip the Cursed Torch and enter a level. This is helpful due to the fact that the two Hope Eradicated shrines are located in difficult to access areas.
  • Your health dropping to zero gives you an additional timer and a second set of temporary health that'll persist until your timer drops to zero and you actually die. While this doesn't seem like much, it's very useful if you're speedrunning and an enemy manages to tag you, or if you're undergoing Toxic Crisis in Bog Business and the exit is taking too long to get through.
  • If you're aiming at an Organ Drop and Ludicrous Gibs, the game will prioritize picking up the monetarily valuable organ and ignore the gib if you press the interact key.
  • The Angular Advantage Tactical Munitions Pinball Projectile bullets will also helpfully identify where they will ricochet to when aiming at a wall, pointed out using a red line extending from your crosshairs.
  • Don't want to bother waiting for the market to multiply your investment returns? The Eyes of Corporate Insight greatly speeds up the rate at which stocks, fish, and bodyparts fluctuate in price.
• Anti Poop-Socking: A secret NPC in Androgen Assault, accessible only with the Cortical Scaledown+, will show concern for your homunculus for playing too many videogames and remind you to take breaks for 15 minutes every hour.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The two highest-priced pieces of armor. One offers 50% damage reduction at the cost of cutting your speed to a quarter, which turns most missions into a tedious crawl as you trundle through the landscape like a printer on legs (especially if you're carrying heavy weaponry), and in a game where you can die in a few shots, just like in real life, might not be worth it. The other one offers 40% damage reduction without the speed penalty, but fucks up your HUD (you can't see how much ammo or health you've got left, or if enemies have spotted you), gives you tunnel vision and panics all civilians if you try to talk to them.
  • The CSIJ Level VI Golem Exosystem provides a ton of benefits: doubled HP, 40% armor, immunity to poison, mild jump height increase, and reduced falling damage. The downside? No guns, at all. This absolutely cripples the player's ability to pick off dangerous foes first, fight in wide-open spaces, and kill anything with armor (such as other enemies with Golem suits, who can punch you back with no issue).
  • The Stern M17, which may be the first armor-piercing weapon you get. While it's armor-piercing, based on a gun known for having a smooth Space Age design, and is mostly accurate, it doesn't have a scope like its competitor (the X20), runs out of bullets and magazines fairly quickly, and full auto quickly turns into spray-and-pray. Meanwhile, both the AWS and the AMG4 pierce armor, and the former does a ton of damage (as befitting an anti-materiel rifle) and the latter has a massive mag size and reserve, plus a better rate of fire. The only reason you'd want to take it is for mobility purposes or if you don't have a better option.
  • The Angular Advantage Tactical Munitions, which gives guns ricocheting bullets. You can use it to hit around corners, but you're probably not going to have sight of whatever your intended target is. It only affects hitscans; projectiles like a shotgun's flechettes or the Stern's darts won't bounce. You're also endangering yourself if you're shooting an enemy and your aim is perpendicular to the wall behind them, risking the shots to reflect back and hurt yourself. And, finally, its benefit of hitting around corners is generally moot since the game has a button to lean left or right to hit around corners anyway.
  • The DEATH surgery grants the ability to Wall Jump, among other things. But by that point in the game, you should reasonably have the Grappendix, a much more versatile and easier-to-use movement option. Wall jumping can only really come in handy if you really need something else in the arms slot that the Grappendix usually occupies. However, Trauma Loop disables your implants until you find and kill the Limit Chancellor, so you'd best become familiar with wall-jumping before you enter it.
• Bio-Armor: Some of the upgrades lean in this direction. The CSIJ Level IIB Body Armor upgrade merely resembles a ballistic vest with a fleshy appearance, but the CSIJ Level V Biosuit is a full-body suit of fleshy armor that plays this trope in full. The latter is tied with the CSIJ Level VI Golem Exosystem for the second-highest armor bonus in the game, but it obscures your field of view badly enough to also cover up essential HUD elements, and trying to talk to anyone while wearing it will send them fleeing in terror.
• Bio Punk: A lot of the upgrades and technology falls under this genre - things such as 'biocurrency' (which seems to be massive chunks of flesh), biobreeders responsible for creating some of your upgrades, glands that produce ammo, and mutated creatures that serve as guard dogs.
• Bizarrchitecture: Very few of the buildings have layouts that bear more than a passing resemblance to a real-life building. Paradise, a level that ostensibly takes place in a wealthy suburban area, includes things like a giant, neon castle that only has two rooms and a building that has two constantly-spinning towers on top of it. Even one of the more normal-looking houses still has a door that opens onto a five-foot drop for no apparent reason.
• Blackout Basement:
  • A literal example, the basements in Paradise are all pitch-black. A player who wants to explore them will need to grab the flashlight from Androgen Assault or Cursed Torch from the catacombs in the same map.
  • Darkworld, one of the secret levels, is also totally unlit. You can find some night vision goggle implants that make successive visits much easier to complete, but those are only found towards the end of the level, in the massive manor just outside town.
• Bland-Name Product: Chunkopops [sic] for Funko Pops. The Chunkopop G-Tech Exec from Paradise has walls upon walls of them.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The world of Cruelty Squad has a fairly alien view of life itself. Because everyone has biological immortality thanks to recombinators, the functional value of life is zero. Death isn't inevitable anymore, and because of this, individuals throw themselves into endlessly grindy pursuits, such as fishing, finance, or cultism. Many of the late-game targets even point out how the protagonist killing them is utterly pointless, since they can use the recombinators all the same, meaning they'll never truly be killed. The endgame is all about the protagonist fighting to end this cycle.
• Body Horror: Despite the game being shown in crude, low-polygon graphics, it can still channel this effectively since you don't know for sure what are the horrors you see.
  • Many of the implants are pretty grotesque, including things like creating large holes in your heels to shoot out biological waste and gave you a mid-air boost, or partly lobotomizing yourself so you can jam a gun into your skull.
  • Quite a few of your targets are marked for death for fucking around with drugs, "biocurrency", or some other eldritch thing. Your first target in Pharmacokinetics is half-insane and has a visibly deformed skull - the mission description also talks about him "vomiting blood all over his office". Later, in Androgen Assault, the Chief of Police, as a result of one too many experimental steroids from the Narcotics division, has turned into a fleshy bouncy castle-esque thing that spews corrosives at you.
  • Psykers and Fleshmen would look like "normal" humans, save for the fact their heads and faces have mutated into a horrific hive-like tumor.
  • Bioslaves. Even for how crude-looking humans are in the game, their faces are more ''off' than others. All they can do is walk around naked and scream endlessly. Killing them also causes them to burst into toxic gas.
  • You, potentially. If you're forced to undergo the "experimental regenerative treatment" after dying too much, you apparently turn into a faceless freak, if the other Cruelty Squad member you meet who underwent the same treatment says anything.
  • The C3 DNA Scrambler takes the cake, as it's a gun that so utterly fouls up its target's DNA that they immediately turn into a mass of cancerous flesh.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Among grappling hooks, grenades and other Arm slot upgrades one of the most useful ones is the First Aid Kit. Being able to restore 50 HP at any point during a mission is exceptionally useful, especially in the early levels.
  • The Helmet upgrade provides a good consistent benefit that's useful for almost every build- one hit does zero damage per mission.
  • Out of all the zany weapons you can get your grubby mitts on, the K&H X20 probably will likely stay in your loadout for a good while. It does good damage, fires very quickly with manageable recoil, and has an integrated scope for long-range combat. The fact that it's so versatile is only balanced by its relative scarcity in the hands of enemies (meaning ammo can be hard to come by), but that's not too much of an issue if you ration your shots or use ammo-granting implants.
• Bottomless Magazines: You can't reload at all with the Ammunition Gland implant equipped. In return, you get a single regenerating magazine that never runs out for your weapons. This can be useful when combined with other implants.
• Burial at Sea: One "fish" you can get from certain bodies of water is the "Human" fish, which is pretty transparently just a dead body wrapped up in duct tape and disposed of in the water. The market description of it seems pretty clueless to this fact though; it only observes that the "fish" is always wrapped in plastic and smells awful.
• Capitalism Is Bad: The running theme of Cruelty Squad is that practically everything bad can be traced back or otherwise linked to capitalism.
  • The Cruelty Squad that the player character is part of a gig economy-like business, but instead of delivering food or providing ride sharing, they're a Professional Killer.
  • Death Is Cheap at just 500 bucks thanks to machines allowing Resurrective Immortality, which permits an irreverent attitude towards the value of life and permits groups such as Cruelty Squad to get away with the atrocities and cruelty that they get away with:
    • Stealing organs from people you killed and selling them on the stock market is completely acceptable, socially.
    • Hell, one of the levels puts you on the receiving end of a Cruelty Squad hit, and you're supposed to shrug it off and come back to work the day after.
  • The NPCs that promote biocurrency, a mockery of cryptocurrency, all fit on the scale of Jerkass to derangedness.
  • The game makes multiple allusions to real-world failings of capitalism and real capitalists being awful people, as noted under Take That!.
• Cast From Hitpoints:
  • The Skull Gun is a head implant that fires 3-round bursts of explosive bullets at the cost of 1 HP for each bullet fired. On lower difficulties, the cost is reduced to 1.5 HP per burst.
  • The Security Systems Cerebral Bore takes up a weapon slot. Listed as having no limited ammo, the projectiles it launches take 5 HP per shot.
• Central Theme: Life and its (lack of) value. The player character laments wasting his youth and his inability to change this way of life. He kills people for a measly couple thousand bucks at the behest of callous corporate employers who doesn't even penalize him for killing civilians. Even then the widespread use of recombinator technology implies that this is futile in the end as the targets can resurrect themselves for cheap much like he does.
• Controllable Helplessness: A variant: your health dropping to zero begins a countdown timer. Unless you're close to an exit after killing a target, you're going to be running around like a chicken until you explode - though the countdown gets shorter if you keep taking damage.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Not only are they corrupt, some of them are literal demons. Even among the human executives there doesn't seem to be an honest sort in sight. The one non-corrupt exec you do "meet" is marked for death for trying to improve the survival rate of Mercury space missions, apparently not realizing that said space missions are a giant demonic sacrifice for the other executives.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The lategame bonus content transitions into this genre quite quickly. As it turns out, the overabundance of Life is becoming a serious problem and is affecting the world on a fundamental level. This explains the presence of zombies, the cancer-like mutations on some of the mutants, the widespread proliferation of recombinators and your own biological implants. If you complete Archon Grid, you end up killing the avatar of Death itself and turn the entire world into a thoughtless, placid plain with nothing to do but march. Forever. Meanwhile, killing the avatar of Life at the end of the Cruelty Squad HQ causes the character to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence and enter the Trauma Loop to unmake the universe, restoring the natural balance of life and death. Either way, reality is shaken for good, and both endings result in the universe breaking in equally unpleasant ways- but at least the latter ending could be seen as somewhat positive.
• Creation Myth: In the House level, as revealed by the targets, there were three Triagons: the first spread Germs into the world, creating Life; the second introduced digestion and decay, creating Death and putting limits on Life; and the third introduced Transactions and value to the world, allowing things to assume souls and bringing with it conflict and discord. The House level also contains three Snakes that, when killed, grant boons seemingly related to the three Triagons: one drops a gift of Life in the form of the Golem exosystem implant which doubles HP; the second, a gift of Death in the form of a semi-automatic shotgun with barely any weight penalty; and the third, a gift of Transactional might in the form of exactly one million dollars.
• Creator Cameo: One of the businesses you can invest in is called "Consumer Sotfproducts". They're responsible for the Game Within a Game, Gorbino's Quest.
• Creator Thumbprint: Many elements in Cruelty Squad — such as the noisy and fleshlike texturework, incomprehensible dialogue, deranged and foul language, and loose military tech theme — can be seen in creator Ville Kallio's YouTube videos. Kallio's Venmo Combat, for example, has imagery of a vehicle powered by human legs and a fellow in tactical armor doing the floss dance, overlayed with what appears to be dialogue cussing out an enemy player from a game, in which the speaker imagines himself choking his adversary after asking his Google assistant to order a hit on him. None of it would look particularly out of place in Cruelty Squad.
• Cruise Episode: The targets of Seaside Shock are a group of rich "biocurrency" traders who bought their own cruise ship to live on far from the shores of any nation. They did this not for any principled reason but because they don't want to pay taxes or worry about government laws forbidding slave ownership. Finding a painting of a ski lodge on the boat unlocks it as a secret level.
• Cult:
  • The police department in the world of Cruelty Squad is instead "The Cult of Order", tasked with upholding the interests of governments and corporations. Members are constantly seeking to enhance their performances with drugs, steroids, and other augmentations.
  • The Eternal Swamp Cult is a pocket of resistance against the operations of Cruelty Squad and their allies, known for launching assaults against fracking^Notea real and highly-pollutive method of extracting natural fuels that is prone to contaminating the environment with various chemicals sites and recruiting Bio-Slaves they've freed.
  • Miner's Miracle has an entire underground cavern of fleshmen, people infected with parasitic fleshrats, devoted to harvesting meat grown from the Earth. Led by Michael Brain, former CEO of the famous Godhead Heavy Industries and newly infected himself, they are responsible for the recent mysterious entrance of "Veggo's Meatoids" into the food industry. Locals made note of their bizarre behavior as they constantly dragged their populace into the mines for an unknown purpose.
• Cyberpunk: Has all the trappings of the genre; Megacorporations that rule over the world, the value of human life being almost nothing and cybernetic augmentations. Surprisingly enough, it seems to still be relatively contemporary in other elements such as phones, weapons and clothing - probably to make the satire elements work.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: The hidden target at the end of the Cruelty Squad Headquarters has an insane amount of health, far, far more than any other character in the game by several orders of magnitude. It's essentially impossible to beat him in a "fair" fight, you need to break the game by using one of several different exploits to either deal enough damage to kill him or stop him from attacking so you can grind down his health. Makes sense, as he's either the avatar of LIFE itself or said avatar's bodyguard.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Cruelty Squad has some rather unusual default key bindings. The R button is Interact, X is crouch, and Left Shift is zoom. Fortunately, almost all of these can be rebound through the options menu. The one exception is reloading: while the button to reload can be changed, the actual action of reloading also involves jerking the mouse downwards. Try playing another game after playing enough Cruelty Squad, and your muscle memory will send your aim straight down whenever you try reloading.
• Death Is Cheap: $500 bucks, in fact. This is a lot of money in the early game, but after finishing a couple of missions and gaming the stock market it's pretty much chump change. Dying too many times will make resurrections free of charge at the cost of couple other things. It's equally cheap for everyone else, too; the targets of each mission are all resurrecting themselves after they die, and near the end of the game the player will be actively killing off beneficiaries to Cruelty Squad as well as Cruelty Squad itself, unprovoked, yet nobody will treat them any different for it.
• Deconstruction Game: Of Power Fantasy style games such as Deus Ex, Hitman, Grand Theft Auto and so on. Instead of playing as a stoic, invincible super-badass who can shrug off gunfire like no problem and sneak through any heavily guarded compound, the main character of Cruelty Squad is a deeply flawed and depressed loner who dies in just a few hits. The main character murders hundreds of enemies and kills powerful people, not out of some grand quest or moral obligation, but because it's his job, and he treats it as such. Lastly, the world is a contrast to the inviting, intricate and detailed environments of Triple-A gaming, instead taking place in an actively hostile and uncomfortable environment with Bizarrchitecture, Uncanny Valley, and Sensory Abuse. In essence, while those games seek to provide an accomodating and enticing experience, Cruelty Squad is all about breaking the player down and getting under their skin.
  • The protagonist is a clear deconstruction of common videogame main characters, especially the ones common in military-themed shooters. Background with military training? Check. Silent, stoic, and subdued personality? Check. Able to equip themselves with all sorts of fun upgrades? Check. Where the main character of Cruelty Squad differs from characters of this type is that these tropes are used to point out how much of a loser he is rather than build him up as a badass. The game minces no words on how scummy the player's job used to be (not a soldier, not even a mercenary; a part of a death squadron), and he's using his advanced training to kill for whoever pays his company the best. His silent personality is the symptom of depression and apathy at his situation in life, while the upgrades he gets destroy his body and debase him as a human.
  • Cruelty Squad itself is a shadowy, Obviously Evil corporation that sets the scene perfectly for the player to defect, but the plot thinks otherwise. The first time it's because someone fudged data entry and sent Cruelty Squad to the player's apartment rather than an actual target, and the second time it's the player's handler just thinking it'd be funny to do. Ultimately, for someone who is complicit with killing people for their job, bureaucracy and incompetence poses more opposition from Evil, Inc. than any actual set of moral standards. The player character is even still expected to just show up to continue working the day after both those incidents, and he will, since that's his job and he needs to make money, slaughtering any change in the plot in the process.
  • Many common game tropes such as Resurrective Immortality, Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000, and Equipment Upgrade are canon to how the Cruelty Squad universe works, and their implementation is pretty horrific. The player character coming back after death with a cheap 500$ penalty? Everyone else in the world can do this too, which ultimately drives many people completely insane since they can never die. The extreme ultraviolence the game revels in is part-and-parcel of this world, since everyone is immortal anyways. While dying might be painful, it's no more of an inconvenience to your targets than paying a phone bill, and ultimately renders much of the carnage you cause to be pointless. Lastly, the implants you get are useful and fun, but are often underscored with some kind of horrific effect on your body. Speed implants replace your organs, stealth suits make you literally smell like shit, heavy armor suffocates your body, and so on. In choosing to enable videogame upgrades on himself, the protagonist ruins his body and becomes a mutant. In summary, the Cruelty Squad world is a place where people can never truly die, are tortured endlessly by immortal and extremely powerful beings, and slowly have their bodies and spirits transformed by the suffering they endure. Does this sound familiar?
  • Most video games have their economies based around buying and selling items of fixed value. Cruelty Squad ties its economy to an extremely volatile stock market, where not only stock prices but the prices of organs and fish are prone to wild swings during and in-between missions. The stocks are also influenced by what happens in missions too. Get a mission to take out the CEOs of a company on the market? You better sell your investments in that company before going through with that mission, lest you lose your shirt when the stock plummets afterward.
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: Depleted uranium rounds, the partial Trope Namer, make an appearance in this game as variants used for man-portable arms. The Stern AWS 3000 has 30 cm long saboted penetrators, the AMG4 uses "7.62×51mm DU" rounds, and the completely fictional Nailer PDW sprays needles of depleted uranium.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: Killing what seems to be Death makes the world even worse, since Death allows great things to happen, if at a cost—without Death, all that's left is your character's mediocre misery.
• Double Jump: The Gunkboosters implant, which gives the player character large holes in his feet that spray out body waste to propel him upwards in mid-air.
• Down the Drain: Casino Catastrophe manages to cross a sewer-themed level with a casino level, of all things. From the sewer theming, there are janitors everywhere, a dirty river bisects the indoor area in two, the side route is narrower and claustrophobic, and sewage pipes deocrate the walls; from the casino theming, slot machines occupy the main playing space, patrons mingle around idly, expensive security guards keep everyone in check, and a quiet, exclusive lounge overlooks the rest of the casino. In-Universe, "minimal scandanavian sewers" are apparently the latest interior design fad, which some of the characters comment on.
• Dynamic Difficulty: The game has an one-directional element of this, with dying just once with Divine Light on or few times as Flesh Automaton downgrading the difficulty by a tier. Bumping the difficulty up involves beating a mission on punishment mode or a more convoluted method and the trope does not apply at all under the Hope Eradicated difficulty.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Of a sort. Die enough times and your employers force you to undergo an experimental regenerative treatment for spending too much time in the standard revival machines. You now can eat corpses to regain 1 point of health and don't get docked pay if you die during a mission, but you're now apparently a grotesque, faceless abomination. Even your Handler offers you his pity.
• Elite Mooks: Comes in several different flavors, all of them painful:
  • Some mooks are simply better armed or armored than the others. Nothing fancy, but they can really screw up your day if you're using a lighter weapon or they catch you by surprise.
  • Cruelty Squad operatives have several times the amount of health as regular Mooks and come equipped with full-auto shotguns that can shred you in about half a second. You only fight a handful of them, and only in a couple of levels.
  • Psykers inflict an Interface Screw and empty your ammo - a death sentence if they're accompanied by a squad of normal mooks.
  • Shocktroopers are Heavily Armored Mook enemies, who look distinctive in their red bouncysuits. They're Immune to Bullets against non-armor-piercing rounds unless you shoot them in their exposed eyes. They're only encountered in the secret levels or on special difficulty settings.
  • Finally, Necromechs, towering zombies with twin machine guns. Getting close to them is near-instant death.
• Empty Shell: Our protagonist is basically all but explicitly stated to be one of these, to the point where fans gave him the nickname "Empty Fuck".
• Establishing Series Moment: The game opens with your depressed loser of a protagonist getting a call from his employer about a wetwork job, as he's looking out the window watching a madman with a gun decimating a crowd of civllians, which establishes both the irreverent tone of the game and how the world sees loss of life. All of this rendered in garish, low-polygon graphics.
• Expospeak Gag: The description of the Icaros Machine implant states that it was discontinued after a squad of supersoldiers "ended up decentering biological life against the pavement."
• Eye Scream: Implied with the Zoom N Go Bionic Eyes. The description implies that installation is as simple as shoving them into one's existing eyes.
• Fantastic Drug:
  • Whatever the hell the police chief in Androgen Assault has been smoking, the mission briefing blames it for his current state of mind. It turns out that it's his state of body that's the more relevant problem, given that he is now a psychopathic, ranting zombie blown into something resembling a bouncy castle of flesh who spits acid at people.
  • There's an implication that Biocurrency can serve as this, as your very first target is more interested in screaming about investing in Biocurrencies, becoming God, "vomiting blood all over his office", and has a noticeably deformed face.
  • The yuppies in Neuron Activator regularly talk about ingesting Gore, some kind of party drug that overclocks your biological processes. Side effects include exploding into agonized meat.
• Fishing Minigame: You can fish using the Fiberglass Fishing Rod on any body of water. Emphasis on any. It doesn't matter if it's an ocean, aquarium, sewer, or even a hot tub. Each level has its own unique list of catchable fishes and they all can be bought and sold in the stock market. There's even an implant, the Tattered Rain Hat, to help with the RNG.
• Fishing for Sole: Zig-zagged. Fish range from actual living fish or their reanimated skeletons, to (at first glance) inanimate objects or even a human bodybag. No matter what you reel in, it can and will hold value; The DOSfish resembles a computer and is worth a ton of money, while a Broken Zippy gun is barely more than a dollar.
• Flechette Storm: All shotguns in the game have been made to fire flechette loads. The Flechette Grenade arm equipment lets you throw up to 2 grenades that explode into a burst of tungsten needles. Thanks to its ridiculous fire rate, the full-auto Nailer also qualifies.
• For the Evulz: In the last few missions, you and your Handler turn against the powerful corporate forces that control Cruelty Squad and the world, seemingly for no reason other than being good for a laugh.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: There's an NPC you can find early on in Archon Grid who claims that a 640x480 screen resolution is a gift from God and that it allows you to "see the unseen." This is actually a hint that the Cruelty Squad HQ has a secret room with Divine Link and Hope Eradicated shrines found behind a wall that dissappears if you set the game's actual resolution as low as possible.
• Fragile Speedster: The speed-enhancing implants all lower the player character's armor. The Speed Enhancer Total Organ Package is the most extreme example, massively boosting the player's speed while doubling the damage taken.
• Future Food Is Artificial: In this hellish future world, your choices of sustenance include things like "vegan meatoids" and "goofoods", implying that this trope is in effect with artificially created foodstuffs.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • The Stylistic Suck and Sensory Abuse-laden art direction isn't just there to make the game appear unique. It's a necessary element to make the world feel as hostile, depraved, and crapsack as it is made out to be by the story.
  • One of the buyable items is a massive three-story house with its own car, but it comes at a whopping $1,000,000, and is the most expensive thing in the game. The multiple ways to get that rich all reinforce the Capitalism Is Bad theme of the game:
    • Money Grinding by fishing or doing missions repeatedly. This is a massive exercise in monotony, which tells the story of capitalism being bad because to be "rich and successful" you need to do things that make you miserable and won't leave the rest of the world in a state better than it was before.
    • The other way to buy it is with "shortcuts", such as buying stock in GamesGames before it hits its massive boom in stock price, or finding rare, high-value fish in the casino level; for someone playing the game with no prior knowledge, this requires getting lucky. This communicates the message that, at its best, capitalism is bad because people are allowed to live in squalor or luxury for arbitrary, unpredictable reasons. And at its worst, the system rewards under-the-table cheating, as a player who starts the game knowing about the aforementioned stock explosion essentially has insider knowledge that they can use to get what they want through means that are unfair to others.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Completing certain missions where your victims are key players of certain stock market businesses leads to their stock utterly bombing in the market. This would only make sense if not for the fact that Death Is Cheap being a story point of the game for everyone, and because the missions rarely involve destroying other assets, it's not obvious why killing targets leads to their businesses flopping.
  • The DNA scrambler weapon reduces enemies to a mutated mess of meat, and its associated lore text says it's intended to render enemies Deader than Dead to prevent being brought back by recombination. However, killing enemies with it does not appear to affect their reappearance when replaying missions, despite Death Is Cheap being an in-universe justification for being able to revisit and kill the same targets repeatedly. Moreover, the one time an enemy uses it on you, its effects are non-fatal and don't affect respawning.
  • Certain implants you can get your hands on are enemy equipment but given completely different effects. When you wear the Bouncy Suit, it protects against fall damage, but when Shocktroopers wear it, it requires Armor Piercing weapons to get through and appears to slow down their movement. The Golem Exosuit you can wear buffs your health and defense, but doesn't make you bulletproof, and while your punches will bounce off of enemy golems, theirs can easily deal damage to you.
  • According to the description of the Balotelli Hypernova, all shotguns have been made to fire shells loaded with flechettes to counter rapid advancements in body armor. Despite this, none of the shotguns are capable of piercing the heavy armor of golems and the like. This is probably due to their projectiles being made of different metals compared to the depleted uranium needles fired by the actual piercing weapons.
• Gameplay Grading: Each mission has a rating system based on how fast you completed it, with the actual rankings themselves being similarly grotesque to everything else in the game.
• Gameplay Randomization: Additional enemies will rarely spawn during missions, often catching players familiar with the enemy locations off-guard, however playing on Hope Eradicated guarantees rare enemy spawns.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The tougher security guards wear green gas masks and wield hard-hitting K&H X20 assault rifles.
• Genre Shift: The game starts as a depressing tale about a Cyber/Bio Punk hitman and ends up with Zombies, Demons, apparent gods and other supernatural elements and the final boss being some sort of abomination.
• Giant Mook: Necromechs are huge, have a pair of machineguns for arms, and require explosives or armor-piercing weaponry to damage.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • It's not explained what any of the difficulty levels do.
  • Getting the DEATH surgery involves returning to the very first mission of the game, finding a hidden clinic whose existence is barely given away by a misaligned texture, and being in Hope Eradicated mode, which itself requires finding secrets (namely, finding the cursed orbs hidden in Cruelty Squad HQ or Archon Grid, or equipping the Cursed Torch in Paradise's secret catacombs).
  • Most secret levels are indicated with a painting portal (or staring right at you from the implants screen, in the case of House); except one. Cruelty Squad HQ presents itself as a chill Home Base level, whose actual mission component is sealed behind an impenetrable door that can't be accessed without the aforementioned DEATH surgery, and Hope Eradicated mode.
  • Speaking of which, the Cursed and Divine orbs in Cruelty Squad HQ being hidden behind an innocuous wall. The only way to get past is by using the Divine Scope (it's not indicated that this specific wall is foiled by the scope), or by changing your game resolution to the lowest possible setting (which is hinted at by NPC chatter in Archon Grid, but again it's not clear that this specifically is what they meant).
  • Most of the implants operate on a "experiment and see what happens" logic, prime examples being the Cursed Torch, Eyes of Corporate Insight, and Tattered Rain Cap, whose descriptions are vague nonsense that could only allude to their effects with a lot of interpretation and multiple leaps of logic.
• Hand Cannon:
  • The 5-shot double-action revolver carried by the Cult of Order, Psykers, and Swamp Cultists can easily take a huge chunk off your health with a slow firing rate. In your hands, it has a second-long delay before actually firing, can instantly gib enemies, and is capable of ricocheting shots without the use of the arm implant. The gun even runs on Rule of Cool, as the cops choose it over other viable options "due to masculine associations created by the film industry".
  • The Raymond Shocktroop Tactical is a pistol-grip semi-auto shotgun, and unlike the other shotguns in the game, the protagonist wields it with only one hand thanks to its light weight. It can fire just as fast as you can pull the trigger but has ridiculous recoil as its main drawback.
• Hard Mode Mooks: Some enemies, such as the Heavily Armored Mook Shock Troopers or the clocked enemies, only appear in regular (non-secret) levels on the secret Harder Than Hard difficulty, Hope Eradicated.
• Hard Mode Perks: Playing a stage on Punishment mode will double all incoming damage but also double the cash reward. It will also restore your Divine Link.
• Have a Nice Death:
  • Dying for the first time while Divine Link is active will show a pleasant image accompanied by an encouraging message of Empty Fuck going through something unpleasant.
    DIVINE LIGHT SEVERED
    YOU ARE A FLESH AUTOMATON ANIMATED BY NEUROTRANSMITTERS
  • Entering Power in Misery mode is also accompanied by a message and a picture of Empty Fuck looking ugly.
    POWER IN MISERY
    TRAVERSING THE GRID OF DEATH
• Heavily Armored Mook: Shocktroopers, Golems, and Necromechs all have heavy armor than renders them Immune to Bullets that aren't armor-piercing. Shocktroopers can still be shot in their vulnerable eye slots, and Golems are limited to melee attacks.
• Heel–Face Turn: One of the weirdest in fiction. due to the Blue-and-Orange Morality of the setting. Near the end of the game, you and your Handler decide to turn against Cruelty Squad, apparently just because it'd be funny, but also because it's clear the system is brutally corrupt. Your Handler, specifically, goes from somewhat passive-aggressive and apathetic towards you to both him madly cheering you on and crying for the blood of those who control you both.
• Horror Comedy: More on the "horror" side: the overarching setup of the game is extremely bleak satirization of the horrors of capitalism at its most dehumanizing and violent, with much of the atmosphere being made as deliberately unsettling and uncomfortable as possible. However, it very much has an edge of Black Comedy regarding its satire, with the twisted mechanics and morality of this world being so callous and absurdly ultra-violent that much of it is farce
• Hostage Spirit-Link: Averted, as expected from a game called Cruelty Squad and a world where Death Is Cheap. You don't get any penalties from going out of your way to injure or murder civilians in your missions. Your handler doesn't even scold or comment on it either.
• Human Sacrifice: The true purpose of the efforts to colonize Mercury are as mass human sacrifices to the corporate archdemons. You get sent to kill the guy in charge of the colonization efforts since he's been trying to decrease the fatality rate of the missions.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Eating food will restore 5 health. Eating the cooked gibs of dead people (via a flamethrower, or the barbeque at Paradise) also heals 5 health; eating them raw will only restore 1 (provided you die a lot).
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • In "Power in Misery" mode, the player can consume dead enemies (assuming they haven't been gibbed) to regain a small amount of health.
  • Even outside of that mode, you can cook dismembered body parts with the RPO-80 Sanitization System (a flamethrower) and eat them. There is also a barbecue grill in Paradise you can use for this purpose.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The game has several "difficulty modes" that can be accessed through convoluted means. While they don't have actual names, they're referred to in bizarre ways (Power in Misery mode is announced by "Transversing the grid of death", for example).
  • Divine Light — The default mode of the game and removed after dying. Can be restored by beating a level on Punishment mode for the first time, touching secret Divine Link orbs (such as the one in Archon Grid). Several doors require you to be in Divine Light mode before opening. Indicated by silvery-white screen border with glowing red details.
  • Flesh Automaton — Dying on Divine Light mode knocks you into this mode. Incoming damage is cut by half, but otherwise is identical to Divine Light. The screen border becomes half-mechanical, half-organic.
  • Power in Misery — The "easy" difficulty obtained after dying several times in Flesh Automaton mode. You take half damage as before, but also gain the ability to eat corpses for health and no longer lose money on death. The screen border becomes fleshy.
  • Hope Eradicated — Activated by starting a level with the Cursed Torch equipped or touching cursed orbs. A "hard" difficulty mode where rare enemies spawn and additional objectives are added into missions. The screen border becomes stringy and colored dark blue.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: The Cortical Scaledown+ gives the player the ability to shrink in size. Useful for getting into otherwise too-small gaps and enemies have a tougher time aiming, but one hit will instakill the player.
• Interface Screw: Four notable examples:
  • Being poisoned will cause the Toxic Crisis status message to flash on your screen along with periodic damage flashes, and more annoyingly constant aim sway.
  • Being targeted by a psyker will cause your view to distort and sway like crazy, steadily zooming in uncontrollably in the direction of the enemy causing the effect.
  • Wearing the CSIJ Level V Biosuit obscures most of your field of view with a fleshy filter, which also covers up most of your HUD. As a result you can't tell how much health or ammo you have left. You can still tell when your weapon is running dry by the audio cue of the firing sound lowering in pitch, but you won't be able to tell if you have any ammo in reserve.
  • The Nightmare Vision goggles gives the screen a monochromatic red-and-black filter, making it nigh impossible to discern features out of surroundings, especially if they're of similar brightness.
• In a Single Bound: The Icaros Machine, which gives the player a massive bonus to their jump height. It doesn't cancel out fall damage though, so you're likely to smear yourself against the pavement if you're not careful.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Once the belt-fed AMG4 is obtained, it will be a near constant pick in your equipment loadouts from then on. It's incredibly accurate, has a ton of ammo, deals a huge amount of damage per shot, and even has a high penetration rate to punch through enemy armor, which is a must when dealing with Golems, Necromechs, or Shocktroopers. The only potential weaknesses are a lack of obtainable ammo in levels where enemies don't carry the gun, movement speed penalty, and being incredibly loud, but the former can be mitigated by bringing an Ammo Gland and the latter two are necessary drawbacks.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Four contenders, each suiting a stealthy, high-speed, long-distance or loud approach to completing missions.
  • The Parasonic C3 DNA Scrambler is an electronic pistol that instantly kills any target it hits by mutating their body into what can only be described as a tree made of cancerous growths. The weapon is totally silent and makes levels with enemies that don't wear advanced body armor much easier, since you no longer need to land headshots in order to safely take down enemies while sneaking around.
  • The Bolt ACR is a modified assault rifle which fires radiation instead of bullets. Infinite ammo, extremely high damage output, a lightweight frame for minimal impact on your speed and the ability to fire through walls makes the gun a speedrunner's dream come true. This, however, requires DEATH mode to be more useful.
  • The ZKZ Transactional Rifle is a semi-auto Russian rifle which increases in damage the more the player invests in the stock market, up to being the most damaging weapon in the game when hitting bare flesh. Its accuracy and sheer stopping power make it the sniping weapon of choice so long as you can accommodate for the lack of a scope, though it also functions as a solid midrange option too.
  • Lastly, the Abscess Ironworks Lux ff374f727ce9d6de93be0793733c321 (yes, that really is what it's called) is a powerful laser rifle which fires slow moving balls of energized light. While the orbs it fires do move fairly slow, the deal extremely high amounts of damage on contact, rivalling even the ZKZ Transactional Rifle in damage. Even better, it also penetrates through armor, making it an effective weapon against heavily armored troops and the towering Necromech enemies.
• Invincible Minor Minion: Zombies and Grid-Crabs. The former can be knocked down but can only be permanently dealt with via the Parasonic C3 DNA Scrambler. The latter are totally unstoppable.
• Invisible Wall: Shockingly absent in this game. Cruelty Squad usually works on the pretense of "if you can see it, you can go there", and this often means using something like the Grappendix to get out of bounds, seeing the "exterior" of stuff like underground tunnels floating in the void. You can even jump off the level entirely and fall into an endless pit, and the game won't bother killing you for it.
• Joke Item: The Extravagant Suit. At a price tag of $500,000 it is the most expensive piece of equipment available by a wide margin (the second-most expensive costs about 100,000), and the description openly states that it offers no protection or any other benefit whatsoever, and in fact reduces you to a One-Hit-Point Wonder. It does make Rich Snobs have nicer dialogue towards the player in certain levels, but this is merely a cosmetic change.
• Joke Weapon:
  • The SNOOZEFEST Animal Control Pistol. Coming from other immersive sims, you may think a tranquilizer pistol would be useful for Pacifist Runs, but Cruelty Squad does not give rewards for such a run (if anything, the game encourages doing the exact opposite), it has terrible range, very low ammo count, and tranquilized enemies will wake up eventually, making it rather pointless. It does have one true purpose though- hitting the target in Cruelty Squad HQ with it causes them to get knocked out, allowing you to line up a perfect headshot with the hardest hitting weapon in your arsenal. This is beneficial because not only do they carry a DNA Scrambler, but their health total is far above anything else in the game.
    • Additionally, you are able to achieve Not the Intended Use with the Animal Control Pistol as a means of speedrunning or exploring levels; As the dart fired by the gun is a physical item in the game world, unlike most other available guns which are traditional hitscan weapons, you can grab onto the dart with the Grappendix and achieve Not Quite Flight in the process, allowing you to move forward faster than even the Biothruster.
  • The Zippy 3000, which is based on the infamously bad real-life USFA ZiP .22 pistol. You must play a slot machine that has an extremely low chance of spitting it out. Just like in real life, it's got a third of a chance to damage you instead, a third of a chance to jam, and a third of a chance of doing measly damage.
• Law Enforcement, Inc.: The Cult of Order PD are effectively a privatized police force, with all the horrific corruption and abuses of power that would entail. The mission briefing for Androgen Assault states outright that their role is to enforce the will of Cruelty Squad and other corporation on the general public.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Cortical Scaledown+'s description ("Gives you the psychogenetic ability to shrink your body by influencing its scale value") seems more like it's written as a description of what the game does to achieve the implant's effect, rather than an actual in-universe explanation.
• Life Drain: In older versions, one of the effects of the Cursed Torch item was that the player restores 1 HP for every enemy killed, on top of the health they get for eating corpses.
• Lonely Bachelor Pad: To drive home the point of how bad of a depressed loser the player character is, the intro cutscene shows he only has a mattress on the floor, a shower, and a television on static. Visiting the location in Apartment Atrocity shows it's slightly better furnished than previously: his bathroom has a shower stall and a sink and there's a kitchen room with a table, but there's a noticeable lack of a living room despite there being an obvious space for it.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Even the slightest excess damage will turn a mostly-unblemished corpse into a bursting mass of viscera. Which is convenient, because sometimes they leave lootable organs that can be sold for cash.
• Magikarp Power: If you know what you're doing, investing in certain stocks and knowing when to sell them can generate a nearly-infinite supply of cash.
  • Over the course of the game, the stocks for Cruelty Squad will steadily climb in value as more missions are completed, encouraging the player to buy CRUS stocks early to capitalize in the lategame.
  • Any stagnant or downward stock that doesn't belong to any of your previous targets will soar once Mall Madness is completed and Bill Gurney is taken out. The market stabilizes after completing Apartment Atrocity, making this the best window of opportunity to commit insider trading.
  • The ZKZ Transactional Rifle inflicts more damage depending on how much money you have invested into the stock market. It is weakest at $0 and becomes one of the most powerful non-armor piercing weapons once you've invested at least a million dollars.
• Megaton Punch: One of the few truly cool things about your character is that your boot is so mighty it makes Duke Nukem look like he has marshmallows for legs. You're wholly capable of kicking a guy clean over the horizon. The Alien Leg Wetware implant takes this even further, allowing your kicks to instantly gib most enemies. Later, a hidden mech suit replaces all your attacks with superpowered MEAT PUNCHING.
• Mercy Mode: The Power in Misery mode can be considered this, considering it's activated by dying enough times in a single mission outside of Hope Eradicated mode.
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: Over the course of the last few missions, the Handler's briefings degenerate into semi-religious ranting about the meaninglessness of life and the sublime power of trauma.
• Murder, Inc.: The titular Cruelty Squad is a company that provides assassination services for wealthy clients. With the reveals about how regeneration in this world works, the title of the company makes a bit more sense: you're not being sent out to kill people, but perform "cruelty" on them for failing to meet your employers' standards in some way.
• Nail 'Em: The Parasonic MP-1 Nailer, a PDW (personal defense weapon) that specializes in spraying nails made of depleted uranium.
• Nerd Hoard: One of your targets is a techbro who made a killing by taking their corporate sponsor's seed money to instead go buy a nice house with his co-conspirators. His house is literally wall-to-wall with "Chunkopops", low-quality toys derided as "plastic crap" by others in-universe that are only slavered over by children. If you talk to the target, he claims he spent "over $100,000" on them and considers them his children.
• Nightmare Fetishist: The target of the secret level Darkworld hires Cruetly Squad to kill him, for funsies. If you approach him during the level and speak to him, he openly fantasizes about the ways you can potentially kill him, wishing to be kicked over the edge above all else.
• No Communities Were Harmed:
  • A large house in the corner of Paradise is based on the Pakistani compound Osama Bin Laden lived in. Paradise also features a hut that looks like the cabin the Unabomber lived in.
  • The club in Neuron Activator is modeled loosely on a real club: Club Kaiku,^note "Kaiku" means "Echo", which is the name of the club in the game in Helsinki, Finland, where the developer comes from. Both of them are remodeled from buildings that used to be factories.
• No-Gear Level: The final level, Trauma Loop, disallows use of your implants, forcing the player to make do with the weapons that you do get to keep as well as the wall jump. It's being caused by an NPC hidden away in the level named the Limit Chancellor. Killing him allows you to use your implants again.
• Not Completely Useless:
  • Players' first reaction to seeing the catacombs under Paradise might be to try using the Nightmare Vision goggles to get past them, only to immediately stop once they see the insane red-and-black Interface Screw the goggles cause. As it turns out, the Nightmare Vision goggles are a completely valid choice to use to get into dark areas; while they don't completely remove the darkness, they will cover nearby shapes in a bright red regardless of the lighting. The catacombs even seem to be modeled and textured with the Nightmare Vision Goggles in mind, since level geometry is somewhat still visible with them and the dangerous gun-wielding enemies become highlighted in red.
  • The Extravagant Suit is a chest implant and the most expensive implant you can buy. Its main effect is to cause any taken damage to instantly activate the death timer. That also means hitting the instant-kill barrier in Trauma Loop will actually not kill the player upon contact, but instead activate the timer, giving a skilled enough player the ability to bypass a chunk of the level with a 5 second window to quickly make their way to the home stretch. One could easily use the Cortical Scaledown+ for the same purpose, however.
• On-Site Procurement: Weapons can't be bought like augmentations. Instead you have to find the weapon itself in a level and carry it with you to the exit, after which it becomes unlocked for the rest of the game.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder:
  • The Extravagant Suit costs $500,000 and causes all damage taken to kill you instantly even when firing the Security Systems Cerebral Bore which costs health to fire. ^note Your health is directly set to zero, which means your self destruct sequence cannot be skipped from taking too much damage.
  • The Cortical Scaledown+ has the same effect as the Extravagant Suit, and has the same quirk of preventing your self-destruct sequence from being skipped. Although it also shrinks you to a fraction of your normal size, meaning enemies have a harder time landing that one shot.
• One-Man Army: The protagonist of the game might be an empty, unstable, and hopeless loser, but if there's one thing he's actually good at (outside of fishing, perhaps), it's killing people. Lots of people. He's even able to fend off an attack from Cruelty Squad itself, gunning down several members of his own task force.
• Optional Boss: Three large creatures can be encountered in the House level. All three are passive until provoked, and reward the player with something after dealing enough damage to them. They're effectively the only creatures in the game you face that you can't really kill (as meaningless as that is in a setting where Resurrective Immortality is commonplace). Given what the mission targets have to say if talked to, it's widely suspected that these are either the Triagons or something associated with them.
• Organ Drops: Gibbing human enemies occasionally cause them to drop valuable organs. These can be picked up and traded in the stock market.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: One way to complete the final level goes against everything the game might have taught the player up until then: not killing everything in sight. Throwing away your weapons when approaching the final stretch to the Cradle of Life is a valid strategy, since there are too many enemies that don't wield weapons to bother to try to thin the herds and weapons will only hinder your speed.
• Pause Scumming: The game is aware enough to take away your ability to pause if You Are Already Dead, but you can still pause the moment before that and retry the level or exit without any of the consequences of dying.
• Pet the Dog: One secret mission sees you taking out a bunch of yuppies who "accidentally" released a bioplague in Helsinki, killing 99% of the population, and turning the resulting ghost town into a rich asshole's rave-dungeon-cum-hipster-property. Your Handler notes that they normally don't run these kind of missions for the relatives of the deceased who scraped together enough to order the hit as revenge, but money, like love, is blind.
• Player Nudge: The extra targets you get on "Hope Eradicated" difficulty are placed in out of the way locations near hints towards the secrets of the game.
• Punch-Packing Pistol: The Cult of Order use a revolver known as the New Safety M62, chambered in ".38 Suspicious" ammo. While only giving 5 shots in the cylinder, it compensates by dealing 50 times the damage per shot compared to your default semi-auto pistol.
• Punk Punk: Mostly Cyberpunk, with plenty of Bio Punk mixed in.
• Rabid Cop: The cops are literally cultists, combined with a dash of Law Enforcement, Inc. — violent at the drop of a hat, looking for any excuse to throw people in jail (like seeing someone naked in their own home through a window), and in the case of the police chief you're assigned to take out, getting high from drugs confiscated by the Narcotics Unit and turning into a giant acid-throwing flesh machine.
• Refuge in Audacity: The Slurper "fish", which is pretty obviously just a used condom, can be found in Cruelty Squad HQ by fishing. The fish's stock market description calls you out for trying to sell it, for obvious reasons. It goes for about a thousand bucks, depending on how the stock market feels.
• Reliably Unreliable Guns: The Zippy 3000 (based on the infamously jam-tastic USFA ZiP .22) has 1/3 chance of failing to feed a bullet, 1/3 chance to misfire and hurt you, and finally 1/3 chance to shoot correctly.
• Ranged Emergency Weapon: While the game centers around using a variety of firearms, Skull Gun head implant falls under this category. It fires off a suppressed 3-round burst of explosive rounds at the cost of your health. It serves a very niche function by providing a silenced weapon option if your arsenal doesn't have one, can break past barriers or enemies that would require armor-piercing ammunition, and can be seen as a last resort for when you run out of ammo from your main weapons.
• Restart the World: Your ultimate goal, accomplished in the Golden Ending.
• Resurrective Immortality: Thanks to Recombinator technology, the player character can't truly stay dead, though the handler will complain if the player dies too many times for hogging the device and put them through an experimental resurrective treatment instead. It's implied that the mission targets also use this service, hence why you can replay missions to kill them again and get more money. The Parasonic C3 DNA Scrambler was created as a counter to this, since it mangles the victim's genetic makeup beyond repair.
• Retirony: The ski resort manager on Alpine Hospitality has a hit called on him for the day before he retires from the job.
• Retraux: The game has a low-poly graphical style very reminiscent of early PS1/N64 era 3D games and a layout and sound system similar to 90s edutainment games.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The description for the New Safety M62 states that, despite more efficient options existing, many cops swear by it simply because Hollywood makes the M62 (and thus, anyone who uses it, especially cops) SUPER masculine. The gun itself does massive damage and a single shot will instantly gib anything that's not heavily armored, but there's about a half-second delay between pulling the trigger and the gun actually firing; giving how fast enemies can kill you, not being able to shoot them instantly can be a huge drawback. Though the revolver can be surprisingly useful once you get used to the firing delay.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: The player character is only slightly tougher than basic guards; that is, not at all. This puts extra emphasis on stealth as getting the jump on enemies can dictate whether you live or die, as well as exploring the level to find alternate paths to the target.
• Rod And Reel Repurposed: Beyond the Fishing Minigame, you can use the Fiberglass Fishing Rod as a weapon to drag an unarmed NPC to you or to yoink enemy equipment right out of their hands.
• Satire: Of corporate overreach and the dehumanization of ordinary people that results from such.
• Scary Impractical Armor: The CSIJ Level V Biosuit is impractical to the player, and scary as hell to the civilians.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • The stock description for G-Tech (GTC) simply advises "Buy." The second mission (Paradise) involves taking out G-Tech's CEOs, which causes the company stock to crater and leads to G-Tech outright folding.
  • A hallway of skull-faced doors leads to a room with a unique weapon that fires poison gas grenades. Don't actually enter the room, though; the floor is fake and leads to an inescapable pit.
  • The CSIJ Level V Biosuit for your torso is one of the more expensive implants, advertising an impressive amount of armor. Its description claims that it provides "extremely good protection with no immediately apparent downsides". As in, the flaws only come around after purchasing it and putting it on; it makes the UI somehow even more obscured than before while putting everything into grayscale. Its terrifying appearance also takes away your ability to interact with NPCs.
• Sensory Abuse:
  • The music is bit-noise over-and-undersampled - like someone trying to make gabber out of a broken education game from The '90s.
  • The game's textures are warped, low-res, and stretched out, with some just being Nightmare Faces and others being garish kaleidoscopic rainbow colors.
• Secret Level: Six total, with the final one being unlocked after beating every level in the game. One of them, House, must be bought from the implant store, while the rest are found hidden away in other levels.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: If your health drops to zero or below you start a five second countdown, after which you violently explode, destroying everything and everyone in the immediate vicinity. If you take too much damage at once, you explode immediately without a countdown.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: One of the pretenses for Alpine Hospitality is that you're going there to eliminate executives of Cruelty Squad's competitors. If you bother talking to tPhe targets though, you'll learn that the deals fell through (one of the execs came to the resort knowing that it'd likely fail), but your handler won't let you finish the mission without killing them first anyway.
• Ship Level: Seaside Shock takes place on a massive cruiseship known as "the Titanium Princess", full of degenerate biocurrency traders, their bioslaves, and armed security personnel.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: If you enter Cruelty Squad HQ while in Hope Eradicated mode, all of the friendly NPCs with unique dialogue that have appeared there throughout the course of the game instantly die and don't come back, even if you reenter without Hope Eradicated.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The Balotelli Hypernova (which you can swipe from the first mission) packs an excellent punch up to medium ranges with fairly good fire rate, making it a godsend for close-quarters room clearing (and, contrariwise, a close-range blast can one-hit-kill you). Lorewise, it's a cheap and effective gun. The later AS15 is fully automatic for even more firepower at the cost of being heavy enough to significantly hinder your movement. Both shotguns completely Avert Short-Range Shotgun and can one-tap regular enemies at distances of about 100 feet or so, thanks in part to firing fletchettes.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Averted with the pump-action Balotelli Hypernova and full-auto AS15, which remain effective at medium ranges. Played Straight with the secret unlockable Raymond Shocktroop Tactical, which spews its flechettes with a ridiculously wide cone to shred unarmored enemies but becomes significantly less effective at longer ranges.
• Shout-Out:
  • The loading screen art (also used for the store page, as seen in the page image) is a dead ringer for the The Terminator poster.
  • The image of the player character's body being modified is based on a shot of Shinji screaming in The End of Evangelion.
  • The means of accessing the above-mentioned secret levels is based on Super Mario 64's painting courses.
  • The Cerebral Bore acts identically to the weapon of the same name in Turok 2: Seeds of Evil.
  • The "Psyker" enemy's behavior is almost identical to the Controller in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: them spotting you causes your vision to zoom in on them. The only difference is that they've got guns, and also force you to empty your weapon if you don't kill them quickly.
  • The Skullgun implant is a reference to Deus Ex, where in an e-mail Gunther Hermann filed a request for a "skul-gun" so he can "kil just by thought".
  • One of the companies on the stock market is GamesGames, a video game retail company described as failing in reference to the real-life GameStop. After a certain point in the game, their stocks will undergo a short squeeze that drastically increases their stock value for a time, much like the GameStop short squeeze event in January 2021.
  • One of the pieces of headgear you can equip is a cheap ten dollar pair of "Nightmare Vision Goggles", which reportedly offer nothing of use and leave you essentially as you were. They're a reference to the meme of the same name, but whereas the meme says the goggles don't work because everything is the same with or without them on, this game's goggles do have a visual effect... in that the infrared goggles make everything harder to see. The goggles changing very little besides that does keep in tone with the original meme, though.
• Shower of Angst: We're introduced to our protagonist doing this at the start.
• Ski-Resort Episode: Alpine Hospitality tasks the player with eliminating top executives planning some secretive business deal at a ski resort and taking out said resort's owner so it can be inherited by his more profit-focused children. Fittingly, this is where one can find the Microbial Oil Secretion Glands, causing your movement to become slippery when equipped.
• Sound-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • The sound of your guns lowers in pitch based as it gets closer to empty, making it possible to estimate how much is left in the magazine without looking at the ammo indicator.
  • Enemies will make footstep sounds, but civilians won't. This gives you a means to discern if there are any active enemies in the area. Enemies killed will also have a deeper-pitched death noise compared to non-hostile characters.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The official trailer uses a very tense synthetic beat to score the player swimming to an island and going fishing.
• Spike Shooter: The Flechette Golem is a unique enemy guarding the second-to-last chamber of the ZKZ Transactional Rifle. Upon death, it will drop two Flechette Grenades of its own, quickly covering the area with an absurd amount of flechettes.
• Stock Market Game: The game has an incredibly volatile stock market where you can buy and sell stocks (as well as body parts and fish) for money. There are certain stocks that will jump up or crash after completing specific missions.
• Stylistic Suck: The game is designed to be incredibly appalling to look at. The graphics are comprised of blocky low-poly models and eye-searing textures. Uncanny Valley is everywhere, such as wide-grinning faces being plastered on the UI and on walls or objects such as cars having a bizarre fleshy appearance to them. The opening cutscene has hard-to-ignore texture warping as the player character's Idle Animation looks out the window. The creator himself even advises against playing this game if you suffer from photosensitive epilepsy.
• Surplus Damage Bonus: Enemies can do this against you. If your health goes to 0, you die after a short delay, a delay that might be just enough time to get to an exit and win the level anyway. But if enemies deal enough damage to reduce you to -40 health, you just explode on the spot with no opportunity to escape.
• Take That!:
  • Anyone who's obsessed with "Chunkopops", which are totally not Funko Pops at all, are depicted as either bizarre manchildren or actual children. One of the targets has a room literally walled floor-to-ceiling with Funko Pop vinyl figures, and sure enough, he won't shut the fuck up about them.
    A Dad You Meet in the Mall: I'm here to buy Chunkopops for my son. He can't get enough of that plastic crap
  • "Biocurrency" is a caricature of cryptocurrency. It is portrayed as having a detrimental effect on people involved with it and many of your targets are lowlifes who are both obsessed with the stuff and oblivious to how hazardous it is. One of your first targets calls it "the future of currency", despite the fact it's turned him into a psychotic mutant.
    • Meanwhile, the targets in Seaside Shock are biocurrency traders who bought a cruise ship ostensibly for "freedom" (much like libertarianism-obsessed nerds big into cryptocurrency) and "government tyranny" (read: taxes), but really so they can live with a bunch of sex slaves. Even the Handler calls them "pathetic losers living out their depraved fantasies". Not only does the mission lampoon the "sovereign citizen" movement and right-wing libertarians in general, but the set-up for the mission directly references an infamous real-life "sea-steading" experiment undertaken by crypto traders off the shores of Panama.^NoteMuch like the targets in the mission, the group purchased an old cruise liner called the "Regal Princess" (the ship in-game is called the "Titanium Princess") and rechristened her the "Satoshi," so-named for the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. Their plan to create a 2,020-person floating city predictably failed when it became clear the expenses and logistics of such an undertaking were beyond their means.
    • A lot of the loony libertarians on the ship brag about their Myers–Briggs personalities when you talk to them. The Myers–Briggs test, despite long being outdated, is often used by corporations (and is run by a corporation in itself) to maximize worker happiness (in other words: give them something to act cultishly over so they get along better, as happier workers mean better productivity).
  • More often than not, CEOs are literal demons. One such example is the main target in Office, Elsa Holmes, who many astute players will note has a similar name to the ex-Theranos CEO and convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes.
  • Speaking of which, NPC dialogue in Office reads a lot like it's been written from someone who's had to live through the tech industry and had to deal with Executive Meddling. Company leads overpromised a release date and put everyone on perpetual "death march" crunch time to an impossible goal, their idea of cleaning up the code involves throwing more people at the problem and causing the situation to worsen, and at least one disgruntled ex-developer sabotaged the entire computer system into going down for the workday using a logic bomb (which some employees are relieved with). invoked
  • Your downstairs neighbor in Apartment Atrocity is a take-that to "Dark Enlightenment" thinker Nick Land. His dialogue references Land's earlier cyberpunk-inspired writing with a parody of "Meltdown" and other lines reference Mr. Land's later life as a far-right internet celebrity. He also happens to keep a Sex Slave (not a bioslave: an actual human, and a woman at that) who he may or may not have cannibalized by the time you talk to him. The cops are about to raid him, and in a world where casual murder and mass shootings are considered everyday and the cops throw people in jail for being naked in their own homes, it's implied even he is too much of a gross dumbass for the cops.
  • G-Tech, the targets of the second mission, are a mockery of tech startups. They were funded by Cruelty Squad and recieved proprietary research data, but produced no results and sold the data to Cruelty Squad's competitors, using the total cash they got for cushy houses in an elite gated suburb and a shitload of Chunko Pops. Most of them are antisocial, and the only one that seems to be doing any actual work speaks in incomprehensible Technobabble buzzwords that tech startups are mildly infamous for. The latter specifically is a spoof of "Dark Enlightenment" thinker Curtis Yarvin and his Urbit "personal decentralized server framework", notorious for its esoteric programming language.
  • There's an implant that gives the entire screen a hazy, nausea-inducing monochromatic red-and-black color scheme, a-la the Virtual Boy. It's named the "Nightmare Vision Goggles".
  • Not as harsh as the others and mixed in with Shout-Out: in Apartment Atrocity, one of your fellow tenants' legal name is Cock Le Dooty. Dialogue implies naming yourself after mainstream media franchises is seen as classy in-universe, as opposed to trashy.
• Take That, Audience!:
  • The difficulty of a level will lower the more times you die, with the easiest setting being "Power In Misery". This mode makes sure to really mock your lack of skill, with lore explaining how your character has been "wasting company resources" for constantly respawning and accumulated so much debt he needed to sign away his bodily autonomy to pay it off as a Test Subject for Hire. It's also the only mode with regenerative health and easier access to healing consumables... in which you'll be resorting to cannibalizing any corpses you make out of desparation to recover a measly 1 HP from each. To get a better understanding of this depraved state, there's an exclusive NPC sharing this form that has become a nearly-faceless freak of nature that tries to downplay how bad it is, and mentions it'll be very hard to reverse the process.
  • The Stealth Suit torso implant is a bit expensive but known to severely decrease detection from enemies, which can end up trivializing much of the game. It seems that the developer is somewhat aware of this and wrote its lore to emphasize how embarrassing it is to use, utilizing chameleon bacteria that gives off an overbearing stench to the point where gunmen that make use of it are referred to as "shitmen" (and are an actual enemy you'll occasionally encounter). And just to drive the point home, there's an unarmed target whose whole personality is smugly using the Stealth Suit just because he can as the child of a trillionaire, yet notes their own lack of self-esteem and worth despite such wealth.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: There are a variety of weapons that come in all shapes and sizes, capable of tearing targets to shreds with their own unique flair.
  • The Stern AWS 3000 is a bolt-action anti-materiel rifle that fires depleted uranium sabots. When used on soft targets, its description states that the result often "leaves more wound channel then target [sic]".
  • The Precise Industries AS15 is a full-auto shtogun that is recognized In-Universe as "complete overkill" with its aility to shred anything upclose. It is apparently the weapon of choice for killers under combat drugs, using it just to feel something past their dulled emotions.
• This Loser Is You: The player character might be real good at killing people, but he's still a depressed sad sack whose only real career path is carrying out paid killings for uncaring employers. He complains about wasting his youth and other characters imply the only thing he's really good at is killing people. Any gamer who's had to hold a retail job can empathize...
• Trippy Finale Syndrome: Despite the game's incredibly garish art style, the levels are at least identifiable as real world locations such as offices, a shopping mall, a casino, etc. However the final normal level, Archon Grid, is a bizarre maze whose design is significantly even more divorced from reality than anywhere else, filled with NPCs who comment on the bizarre nature of the surroundings and seem confused as to how they ended up there. It's apparently supposed to be a manifestation of a level from the in-universe popular video game Gorbino's Quest. Trauma Loop, the game's true final level, is likewise a bizarre Eldritch Location.
• Turned Against Their Masters: Towards the end, you and your Handler decide to go against Cruelty Squad and the cosmic forces behind Cruelty Squad. Why? For the Evulz.
• Where It All Began: One of the final levels the player must complete is Cruelty Squad HQ, a chill hub level available from the beginning of the game which gains a new target if played in Hope Eradicated mode.
• Unique Enemy: There are a couple, with Hope Eradicated mode either adding them as new targets or simply making them guaranteed to appear.
  • The Casino Owner in Casino Catastrophe is a Psyker with a unique clothing texture that consists of a green dress shirt and a tie. He is otherwise identical to normal Psykers.
  • On very rare occasions but guaranteed to spawn if playing on Hope Eradicated, Neuron Activator will include a miniboss only referred to as "Freak". Waiting around one of the exits of the level, he resembles a Gutworx employee with a unique face, is armed with a Nailer, boasts larger HP than most enemies in the entire game, and moves extremely fast. Fortunately, he's counted as a unique NPC, so when you kill him, he won't respawn on subsequent playthroughs. Power in Misery players can also cannibalize his body up to 3 times compared to every other enemy only allowing it once.
  • The Ambassadors in Trauma Loop are Psykers armed with ZKZ Transactional Rifles instead of New Safety M62s, one of them only appearing in Hope Eradicated. The normal Ambassador does not respawn when killed, although the one affected by Hope Eradicated will.
  • Trauma Loop contains the only instance of the Giant Flesh Pig, only guaranteed to show up in Hope Eradicated. It is identical to normal flesh pigs, only bigger and with more health. It also has the ability to launch green rockets at the player.
  • The Flechette Golem, which appears at the very top of Cruelty Squad HQ. It acts like a normal golem that's merely textured with the flechette grenade's image, but when it dies, it sprays an innumerable amount of flechettes in all directions. Don't be in the same room as it when it croaks.
  • Additional targets only found in Hope Eradicated versions of levels:
    • The Pizza Golem is the extra target for Apartment Atrocity, functioning like any other golem but carries the additional trait of bursting into pizza slices when its body is gibbed.
    • The Flame Castle, a variant of the already rare Bouncy Castle enemy, only appears as the third target in the Hope Eradicated version of Androgen Assault. It has an incredibly trippy animated green texture all over it, spews a green flame instead of the standard vomit, and also drops armed grenades upon death. It's also responsible for the sound effect of crowd chattering heard throughout the level.
• Unorthodox Reload: A meta example. The actual animation of reloading is pretty benign, what's unorthodox about it is the actions you as a player have to do: hold right mouse button down and yank your mouse downward, rather than just pressing one button. It fits into the "bizarre, off-putting, but surprisingly well-designed" nature that most of Cruelty Squad puts up; while it takes some getting used to, reloading has a surprisingly tactile feel to it and is skill-based to the point where having the muscle memory of being able to reload quickly can save you while fighting off enemies.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The opening scene of the game punctuates how cheap death is. The protagonist looks out the window to see a man going on a killing spree with a machine gun, and doesn't care in the slightest.
• Unusual Weapon Mounting: The Skullgun implant, which is literally a gun implanted in the wielder's skull. They have to scoop out a bit of brain matter to make it fit properly.
• Variable Mix: Pharmacokinetics and Cruelty Squad HQ have two tracks each: one if you're in combat, and one if nothing's currently going on.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Subverted. Over the course of the game, completing certain missions will add new friendly NPCs to Cruelty Squad HQ. Plenty of them end up being thankful to the player for giving them a better working opportunity, but they were simply absorbed into the fold after your operations wrecked the companies that used to employ them. Unlock and enter with Hope Eradicated mode on, and they will permanently die as part of your newfound mission to replace the CEO of the company.
• Videogame Cruelty Potential:
  • Civilians exist for two reasons: providing dialogue (with the occasional odd actual level hint), and being killed for shits and giggles. Go slaughter them — blow them up with rockets, blast their heads off with a sniper rifle, fry them with a radiation gun, throw poison gas grenades into a crowd — they'll panic and scatter but nobody will care at the end of the day. The game actively incentivizes killing civilians too, since their organs are decent early-game Shop Fodder once you pry them from their gibbed bodies.
  • Certain NPCs are named and permanently killable (unless you edit your save file). The "potential" mainly applies to characters that are neutral or openly friendly to the player, like those recruited at HQ following certain missions. Upon entering HQ with Hope Eradicated active, said friendly NPCs instantly die. The "Life Ending" after replacing the CEO paints this as a positive trait for the protagonist, saying "YOUR FRIENDS ARE IN HELL YET YOU SMILE".
• Videogame Flamethrowers Suck: The RP-O Sanitization System is a flamethrower that does a lot of things badly. Its fire stream travels perhaps an unexpectedly long distance for a game flamethrower, but still only goes a finite distance and won't beat out normal bullets. It also won't beat out normal bullets in time to kill: it deals pitiful direct damage, if it deals any at all. Furthermore, it gets completely foiled by Fleshrats and armored enemies, who can shrug off the fire like it's nothing. The fire particles are massive and cause mild Interface Screw by obscuring enemies, and they can also set yourself on fire. It can be used to set up hazardous traps to cull enemies, but the longer-distance blind-firing Riot Pacifier and terrain-piercing, infinite ammo Bolt ACR do so with more stopping force and with lower risk of self damage. The only niche it can really claim for itself is cooking gibs to heal health.
• Villain Protagonist: You're not even at the top of the food chain: you're a gig economy assassin who lives at the mercy of his corporate overlords.
• World of Jerkass: Practically everyone is a jerk or evil in this world. The setting is ruled by corporate overlords paying mercenaries to slaughter each other. The player character is one such mercenary, and is perfectly complicit not just with gunning down CEOs for cash, but will also target actual good people, shoot down civillians nearby, and eat their dead bodies. His handler is a jerkass who openly insults him over the phone in the opening cutscene and siccs him on his own boss just for fun. Everyone is so used to evil in this world, it's not the exception, it's the norm.
• You Are Already Dead: Having the player's health drop to 0 (or below) prompts a few second countdown after which the player would presumably explode and the mission ends.

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DIVINE LIGHT SEVERED
YOU ARE A FLESH AUTOMATON ANIMATED BY TV TROPES