YMMV / Cruelty Squad

• Anvilicious: This game's not particularly subtle about its critique of capitalism and gig economies, showing the world as a dark, depressing, and incredibly unconventional place where capitalism is woven into every facet of life, including biology itself. To drive the point home, as a Golden Ending, the main character is even implied to have destroyed the universe when you beat Trauma Loop, and is implied to be what Life itself wanted. The final piece of text shown is a scientific quote about how clinging to excess resources goes against the very laws of nature and the universe.
• Awesome Music: Despite the game's use of Sensory Abuse, it puts out some good tunes.
  • Rent Due, the theme that plays in Apartment Atrocity (and is used in the trailer, for good reason). The harsh synthetic beat is the perfect backdrop for the most combat-oriented level yet, inviting the player to go on a killing spree of all the cops and Cruelty Squad ops thinking they're the hunters when they're really the prey.
  • Soverign Citizen, which is Seaside Shock's song. The distorted seagull squawk and water dripping-like instruments give it a surprisingly chill and unique audio.
  • The Rain Hat song is the most calming and normal sounding track in the entire game akin to a lullaby with its soft tone and wind and plays when it rains in a level or you have the Rain Hat equipped. Given how incredibly surreal the game tends to be, this track is possibly the strangest out of them all.
• Best Level Ever:
  • Paradise is the first real level where the game's open ended structure and Immersive Sim elements become apparent. You're given an open-ended objective (kill three targets somewhere in the level), put in a huge environment, and given all the time and resources needed to explore to your hearts content. There are hidden weapons, implants, enemies, secrets, and even the entrance to a hidden level strewn about the area, and exploring even a tiny bit of this sizeable level will reap large rewards. Special mention goes to the crypts underneath the town, which are sprawling unto themselves.
  • Alpine Hospitality, one of the secret levels, is a simple but memorable assassination mission set in a ski resort. Not only is the setting unusual for this game, but the freedom with which the player can complete the mission makes it a favorite among speedrunners.
  • Office, the penultimate mission, is a climactic and brutal slaughter through a massive skyscraper. Not only is the level totally nonlinear with multiple avenues to reach the CEOs you need to assassinate, but the entire mission is set to the Awesome Music track "Divinity Of The Office". Whether you choose to go in guns blazing and armed to the teeth, as stealthy as possible, or loaded down with as many mobility implants as you can carry, this is the first level that makes you feel like a genuine badass instead of a disaffected loser.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: While the game is bizarre and twisted, it usually does at least puts up a halfhearted pretense of locations trying to resemble real-world equivalents. The final normal level, Archon Grid, missed that memo. It's a floating smattering of rooms containing very-obviously-videogamey Block Puzzles, with NPCs remarking on its similarity to the Game Within a Game, and brighter and more eyesearing graphics than usual. Why it exists, how your character got there, why he's killing the Final Boss, and how it's necessary for the ending (if it even is) all go unexplained. While the true final level Trauma Loop is equally eldritch, how the player got there and why he's there (a portal in Cruelty Squad's deepest recesses, and becoming a god of death respectively) are leagues more clear than what Archon Grid is doing.
• Crazy Is Cool: The protagonist might not be in the best shape mentally, but he's able to pull off some impressive feats throughout the game despite this, including:
  • Slaughtering his way through an entire police station and killing their Eldritch Abomination of a chief
  • Successfully fighting off a task force sent by Cruelty Squad itself.
  • Single-handedly destroying the Eternal Swamp Cult on their home turf.
  • Outright barging into the office building of the people who control Cruelty Squad and killing all of them
  • Killing Death itself.
  • This gets to the point where, if two of the endings are to be believed, his sheer misery, stupidity, and emptiness causes him to ascend to godhood.
  • And the biggest one of all, destroying the entire universe.
• Creepy Cute: The Grid Crabs are among the scariest enemies in the game, being giant crabs with large, seemingly bloodshot Black Eyes of Evil that can't be killed, stunned or harmed in any way, meaning all you can do is run like hell while they hunt you down at a slow but unstopping pace, killing everything that happens to be in their path. It's therefore pretty strange that they off all characters have easily the most appealing design in the game: they are a vibrant orange, their model is pretty much made out of orbs and the aforementioned large, black, shiny eyes do look weirdly adorable. If they appeared in some kids game, they would probably come off as all creepy and no cute, but they look downright huggable compared to everything else in this game, looking more like an enemy in a Kirby bootleg and less like the scariest acid trip in a Deus Ex fan's life.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • This game practically crosses it thrice, starting with the game opening up with the butt-naked protagonist receiving an introductory phone call from their new employer, all while some maniac with a machine gun runs around outside shooting up the street and killing scores of civilians. His reaction to all of this happening, or rather his lack thereof beyond something that looks like a vague depressed smile, demonstrates this games approach to humor and worldbuilding.
  • Most of the dialogue that NPCs have usually veers into this territory.
    NPC: When the beat drops, I'm going to fucking kill myself
    NPC: I never had sex before I moved here, but now I'm fucking a different bioslave every day
• Demonic Spiders: The Necromech enemies, which are huge flesh golems armed with dual AMG4's. Not only are they surprisingly fast for their size and capable of taking you out in two or three seconds of sustained fire, but their thick armor makes it impossible to damage them with anything but the heaviest weapons. Any level where they exist has the difficulty ratcheted up by their mere presence, with several Hope Eradicated mission variants placing a healthy amount of them around the level.
• Disappointing Last Level: Archon Grid is a linear and boring finale which takes place in an environment that's abstract even for this game- a recreation of an in-universe video game known as Gorbino's Quest. In order to get to the end, the player must descend into a cramped maze of sliding block puzzles, all while being chased by an invincible, slow-moving Gorbino that instantly kills anything it touches. Even if the player manages to get to the end, the final boss is a pitifully easy target to take down, only requiring a sustained burst of gunfire to each of its three weak points to kill. From there, the ending is similarly anticlimactic. All of this is an Invoked Trope, however- Archon Grid being a purposefully underwhelming finale is meant to mirror how the protagonist has just made the situation with the imbalance between Life and Death even worse. Instead, the player is meant to use the easily accessible Divine Light and Hope Eradicated orbs to go after the postgame content, which reveals sufficiently harder levels, much more powerful implants, and eventually unlocks the true final mission: Trauma Loop.
• Fan Nickname: For the protagonist there is "John Cruelty" and "Empty Fuck", the latter having become Ascended Fanon with his appearance in Brigador with him being given the coded version of the name "MT Foxtrot".
• Funny Moments: One of the levels takes place in your apartment building, because someone has hired the company you work for to hunt you down. After fighting your way out and escaping the scene, you finish the level. Do you take down Cruelty Squad as retribution? Do you quit the business and strike it out on your own? How about none of the above? Your handler tells you the hit on you was a clerical error with social security numbers and it's back to the grind as normal. It's such a deflating Anti Climactic Subversion of the typical "protagonist defects from their Evil, Inc. employer" trope that it loops back around to being hilarious.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Grappendix upgrade increases your mobility and allows you go wherever you please, potentially skipping the entire level since you can grapple onto anything in range. With some experience you can use this to climb onto anything you want to or cancel out any fall damage as long as you're near a wall, pretty much invalidating almost every other Advanced Movement Technique like kicking to gain extra jump height or Rocket Jumping with the Tactical Blast Shield. The one exception is the Abominator, which lets you invert gravity at the touch of a button. While the Abominator does allow you to fly more effectively than the Grappendix, the latter can be used to more effectively move around the level at top speed, ultimately leaving it to player preference as to which one they want to take. However, using the Abominator in Trauma Loop deals damage to you at a lightning-fast rate.
  • The ZKZ Transactional Rifle as it does more damage the more stocks you have invested allowing you to potentially one-shot every non-armored enemy in the game with a body shot from long-range with it's high accuracy, though you'll still need explosives for any enemy immune to bullets.
  • The Parasonic C3 DNA Scrambler, a silenced pistol that instant kills every non-heavy enemy without giving your position away regardless of where you actually hit them, meaning it's great for stealth as long as you don't miss.
  • The Life Sensor is similarly quite useful in many situations - it allows the player to "sense holes in the background death matrix", revealing the locations of all living things. This can help the player spot fleshrats or enemies that are behind walls and doors. Where it truly becomes this is during the Darkworld mission before you get the Night Vision Goggles. Since the Life Sensor allows you to see blips of enemies nearby without needing to quickly switch between the flashlight and a weapon, it makes that mission significantly easier to complete.
  • The Bolt ACR fires clouds of radiation, which can rapidly deplete the player character's health if they make contact unless you attain the Death health bar, which grants immunity to radiation. Upon doing this, the Bolt ACR transforms from a weapon that will probably end your run in under three seconds into an extremely powerful tool. Because the clouds of radiation which it fires float through every object in the game world, the Bolt ACR can be used to snipe enemies through walls if they are close enough to you. This allows for serious Sequence Breaking in levels like Neuron Activator and Office. In addition, the weapon has infinite ammo and is classified as a "light" weapon by the game, meaning it's a fantastic speedrunning tool. The clouds of radiation can also stack on top of each other, making it a viable alternative to the fully powered ZKZ Transactional Rifle when dealing with the target in Cruelty Squad HQ. Just tranq him and continually blast him with radiation while he's unconscious. Lastly, the weapon is easily attainable in Office. Overall, the Bolt ACR is an extremely solid weapon that speedrunners and average players alike can get massive mileage out of.
  • The Stealth Suit, ammo gland and sniper rifle combo can be a deadly combination. Normally the ammo gland is difficult to use, since the recovery rate at which ammo regenerates is quite slow. Pairing this with sniper rifles, which have naturally low clip sizes and slow firing rates, allows for you to rarely run out of ammo. Slapping on a stealth suit is the final nail in the coffin, since it will make you almost completely invisible and impossible to see at long ranges. This combination even leaves room for a head and feet slot, allowing you to mix and match mobility and utility implants as you please. In any mission where your target is out in the open, such as Seaside Shock or House, this can allow you to easily cheese most of the mission. Switching out a sniper rifle for a silenced pistol has a similar effect.
  • Using advanced knowledge of the game's stock market can allow you to make a killing. Most notably, the stock of GamesGames starts very low and dips even lower for the first few missions. After Mall Madness, their stock value skyrockets and continues pushing higher until you complete Apartment Atrocity, where they will crash out and leave the market. Investing into their stock early and cashing out before completing that mission, especially if you leave your game idle after completing Mall Madness, can give you potentially millions of dollars in profit.
  • The same upward climb also applies to almost every stock in the game, meaning it's a viable tactic to save harvested organs (except pancreases, which never change value) for when this stock jump takes effect. It also enables a powerful trick similar to, and even more effective, than the GamesGames method, civmaxxing. CIV is a fish type that can be purchased, with a price averaging around 1-2 dollars early on in the game, compared to GamesGames starting at about 100. This means the player can have thousands of stocks in it by the time they complete Mall Madness, greatly magnifying the effect the price explosion has. It can easily become several times more efficient than the above strategy just from how many more CIV you can buy for the same amount of money. Take a side detour to unlock and play the first secret level Darkworld, if you haven't already, and you can easily have over a million without having to deliberately kill time, and without ever touching the Eyes of Corporate Insight (an item that greatly speeds up how fast stocks change price).
• Goddamned Bats: Fleshrats. All of the hallmarks are present; tiny, hard to hit, and they come in groups. Worst of all, taking a hit from them gives you the Toxic status effect, and unless you have the hidden Hazmat suit upgrade or eat the right kind of Berries in Bog Business (and only in Bog Business), you'll take a lot of damage from it. Woe be to anyone who gets caught by a Fleshrat while low on health.
• Good Bad Bugs: It took three years after release for the armor system to get patched in the game, and until then, it just didn't work. For the longest time, players just assumed that the various damage-reducing equipment was shit on purpose, as it plays into the theme of life being worthless. On the bright side, the speed-enhancing augments that reduce armor had no actual downside until the patch.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • A fairly minor example that nonetheless stands out in the game's Crapsack World, there's a door in Pharmakokinetics that only opens when the player has died enough times to have the experimental regeneration treatment administered to them. Inside is an NPC that's had the same treatment, and he offers a bit of sympathy for your character.
    Stay as long as you want. As far as I'm concerned we're family.
  • After a few missions, some NPCs at Cruelty Squad HQ encourage your character to keep going, and tell you you've made great progress. Sure, you made great progress in killing people, but, hey!
  • While it visually is certainly creepy, The seemingly physical manifestation of Life you encounter in Cruelty Squad HQ actually gives the player character some life advice and encourages them to not waste their life.
• Jerkass Woobie: Your player character, officially named "Empty Fuck". "Empty"'s a mercenary working for a sociopathic and eldritch corporation, and slaughter hundreds of people, from sociopathic businessman to honest politicians that oppose his company's interests, to the dozens of civilians that will certainly be railed down over the course of the game. However, they're also a severely depressed failure who has been broken down by the bleakness of the world into accepting the horrific nature of their job, will inevitably equip upgrades and be subjected to "Power In Misery" mode, which inflict unpleasant body modifications on them, and has their apartment invaded and is forced to flee because their company was too incompetent to file paperwork in a proper fashion. They can progress into Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds if you get the Golden Ending.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • DIVINE LIGHT SEVERED - YOU ARE A FLESH AUTOMATON ANIMATED BY NEUROTRANSMITTERS^Explanation The oddly striking message you get when you die and enter Flesh Automaton mode, accompanied by a bizarre, startling abstract portrait of a screaming man. It quickly became a source of edits for suffering or visually distorted characters and generally one of the game's more iconic/quotable moments.
  • CEO Mindset. ^Explanation The second ending found in Cruelty Squad HQ has your character meet... something that looks like a face labeled "LIFE", who proceeds to give you advice ending with this phrase (The full quote being "SET GOALS. HAVE A TEN YEAR PLAN. INVEST. WAKE UP EARLY. CEO MINDSET."). The term "CEO Mindset" quickly caught on in the fanbase, both as a term of favor (such as good gameplay) and as a satirical/sarcastic joke about being a self-destructive Determinator.
• Misaimed Fandom: According to an interview with developer Ville Kallio, the cannibalism mechanic was introduced as a way to demonstrate how low the player character has fallen, and Kallio didn't think players would utilize it very much because he thought it was too depraved. Much to his surprise, streamers and many other players ended up eating tons of corpses just to eke out as much health as they could.
• Nausea Fuel: The music for Bog Business - Toxic Crisis. It seems to be sampled from what sounds like water sloshing and gurgling and slurping and mouth noises, and it can only be described as the sounds of bubbling sludge and the insides of a sewer. If it had a genre, it would be called "slurpcore".
  "Mother of God, it's all toilet sounds!"
• Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
• Nightmare Retardant: The invincible and highly deadly "grid crabs" that relentlessly pursue you in "Archon Grid" have a pretty freaking adorable design.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The sound of footsteps can immediately put the player on edge. Enemies are moving around, but are they converging on your location, or just walking idly? And even one enemy creates a ton of footstep sounds, making it seem like there are more enemies than there really are. This goes especially so for mazelike levels such as Androgen Assault, with tons of enemies around on multiple floors, giving the impression that players are surrounded. Even moreso for players who aren't aware that only armed opponents make footstep sounds, opening the possibility that the rapid footsteps are just random civilians.
  • The eyeball HUD indicator does nothing but alert you to the fact that you're being looked at, which is the bare minimum of information of your stealth and instantly arises a number of other questions to be anxious of. You're seen — but from which direction? How many enemies are looking at you? How lethal are they? Can they path to where you are, or will they snipe at you from a distance? Should you shoot at them before their hitscans touch you, or dive into cover before their rockets reduce you to giblets? Have they seen you for long enough to aggro and engage? Do you even still have line of sight to them? That the HUD indicator exists will give players more anxiety than if they're left blissfully unaware of if they've been spotted.
  • The opening to Miner's Miracle has you walking out into an open plain... and then the camera suddenly switches to a sniper tracking your movements from a ledge above. Somebody's watching you, but if you attempt to get up there yourself, whoever's there will have vanished.
• That One Level:
  • Androgen Assault is a fairly tough maze filled to the brim with cops. The level is rather tough for how early on in the game it is, as the sheer volume of enemies can overwhelm the player character. Finding your targets is a sizeable task, since the mazelike interior of the building makes it difficult to find the entrance to their particular rooms. This is also the level to first introduce Psykers.
  • Not too long after is Apartment Atrocity, if you don't explore. Taking out the hitmen and cops sent after you isn't a big issue - the Necromechs guarding the obvious exit are, because one is scripted to corner you in the garage, and no amount of armor or firepower is going to save you in close quarters from twin anti-materiel machine guns. Even if you survive that, you've got the second Necromech to deal with and the cop blockade in a street without cover.
  • Bog Business is a Swamp Level shrouded in perpetual fog. Not only is spotting your enemies rather difficult through all the haze, but the cultists that infest the level pack some serious heat- they carry either Mowser SP99 snipers, Riot Pacifier toxic-gas grenade launchers, or New Safety M62 revolvers. If you're not being blasted apart by the enemies, you're being drowned in the Toxic Crisis status effect from stepping foot in the stagnant waters that infest the ground level of the mission. The only solace is that the mission is fairly linear, and that certain berry trees around the level can be consumed to restore health or immediately cure Toxic Crisis.
  • House is the largest levels in the game, and is also one of the most difficult. No matter where you go, you're assailed with rather difficult challenges. Head to the village just down the road? You get gunned down by enemies packing serious heat, and no cover to hide behind thanks to the wide-open structure of the town. Head around the lake to explore? Dozens of Golems are sitting there, waiting to pound you into the dirt. Take two steps outside your front door? Get blasted by the Triagons for massive damage. The level will take multiple attempts to clear, and it speaks volumes about the sheer difficulty of the level that the recommended loadout is a sniper, stealth suit, and ammo gland to pick off every enemy in the town at maximum range before they even get a chance to see you.
  • Idiot Party. Taking place in a tower-like complex that descends down into the earth, the objective of Idiot Party is to get to the bottom and take out a cultist leading a sermon. That's much easier said than done, since the majority of enemies in Idiot Party carry weapons like the AMG4, the Spectacular Dynamics MCR Carbine, and the Stern AWS 3000, all of which are capable of reducing you to a pile of gore in one well-placed shot. While the level does have a large open area in the center, this is more of a liability than a bonus, since a net sits just above the bottom to bounce you back up if you try and skip large portions of the level. Plus, the open nature of the level means enemies can take pot-shots at you before you register where they are, which can make progress slow and frustrating. Essentially you have two choices for completing this level: either take your chances with the net and try to land along to the bottom floors of the level while avoiding being shot at, or carefully and tediously creep through the level, taking out every enemy as you go. Alternatively, if you have a way to negate fall damage, just go through the elevator shaft in the back.
  • Neuron Activator. While a club level does sound cool, it turns out a high-saturation environment filled with bright, flashing lights doesn't exactly play well with the garish art style of Cruelty Squad. As a result, just finding your way around the level is a huge pain in the ass, not to mention the framerate troubles this level can cause as a result of all the civilians and enemies packed into such a small place. To make matters worse, enemies carry the Parasonic MP-1 Nailer, an extremely strong, borderline hitscan submachine gun that can tear you apart in moments. It's very easy to walk into a room, struggle to pick out any enemies amongst the crowd, and then get gunned down in moments after passing by who you thought was just a normal civilian.
  • Trauma Loop. The name is fitting. The majority of enemies split between invincible and nigh-invincible and have a habit of inflicting Toxic Crisis on you, the architecture is... not very friendly at first glance to put it lightly, and you're completely stripped of your implants at first, until you kill one specific civilian called the Limit Chancellor hidden deep in the level. Unless you're going in with pre-knowledge of it, you'll be facing a very uphill battle.

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