Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is allegedly a video game.

Some have suggested that Suicide Squad is a four-man open-world co-op looter-shooter with a focus on gunplay and traversal mechanics. It has been said that the game details the titular Squad in their efforts to kill the titular League, who have been corrupted by the non-titular Brainiac and his invading forces. Evidence exists which could reveal that the game went over poorly with fans and critics, with player counts plummeting in response to two forms of DRM, a weak core loop, repetitive missions, and poor writing.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, however, does not actually exist.

There is no "game" here, there is no "art" — there is nothing that can be engaged with. There are colors and flashes and numbers, so many numbers, all in service of nothing. All meaningless, all incremental; a procedurally-generated hell comprised of more, more, more, engorging itself on the void. This is vacuum. It is not. Reach out and touch it, and your fingers meet only stale air. You are staring at the shimmering heat-waves in a wide, wide desert, tricking yourself into believing that you see water and palm trees. Playing Suicide Squad is bordering on an act of self-deception, but your brain doesn't allow for you to perceive that; your gray matter has evolved over millions of years never once grappling with the conception of things that are not, and so instead shifts to a low-power state. What isn't cannot be thought of, and that nothingness dulls. You slip into a gentle trance. You think about what is — that which is beyond the game. You stare through your screen. Your hands move of their own accord. Sound enters your ears, but you hear nothing. For a moment, what you are disappears.

Hofstadter wrote in Gödel, Escher, Bach that it is impossible for a human to be unobservant. Essentially, we all make observations about the tasks that we perform, and these observations distinguish us from machines; a machine is capable of doing rote tasks over and over, which is an advantage over us in some respects, but a machine is incapable of making its own observations. Even if the machine is designed to make observations, it is strictly and necessarily limited by its programming — its system — and human beings are always capable of looking and acting outside of a system. We can spot patterns without needing to be told that there are patterns, and we can stop performing a task whenever we want to. Even in rote work, we find patterns. We attach our work to those patterns, and in doing so, attach meaning to work.

Hofstadter's problem, though, was that he'd never played a bad video game in his life. It's an odd form of visual clutter and over-stimulation on display here that I haven't seen elsewhere; rather than inundating the player with several systems that all need to be tended to and tracked at once, the game will take great pains to reiterate the same instructions over and over and over again. The most common phrase I said during my time with Suicide Squad was "let me play", followed closely behind by "I get it". One sequence asks you to defend Poison Ivy's plants for a short period of time, and gives the player the ability to trigger a freezing blast from one of the plants. You are given eight on-screen reminders of what to do and how to do it. There are three text cues, one audio cue, three floating icons, and a minimap marker. You can get this up to ten if you look directly at the plant, which gets you a visual cue in the form of a glowing texture effect as well as an additional button prompt. This worthless, redundant UI takes up so much screen space that you can barely see what's going on past it. It feels like you're trying to play the game while peeking through the blinds. At least, that's what it would feel like if Suicide Squad existed; as we've established, it doesn't, and thus the point is moot.

I cannot conceive of this as something that was created to be enjoyed. Unlike in nature, we can say with certainty that this was created by an intelligent being. There is a cruelty in the indifference of nature, in the struggle for survival of all the birds and bugs and plants, suffocating and biting and feeding on one another — but there's no assurance that there's a purpose to it. God's creation of our world is an idea, and not a compelling one. Since, then, we know that Suicide Squad was made with intent and with purpose, what possible justification could there be for it to be so hollowing? This goes beyond executive meddling and poor execution; there is something malignant here. It is above the game itself, whatever it is — this pestilential energy cloud hovering around the product of Suicide Squad, seeping into its corners. It's a fungus, or a tick, grown swollen and round from drinking the blood of venture capital. It grows fat on promise of symbiosis, providing those tired from the hedonistic treadmill with something to empty their life-clocks and their wallets into, yet it is parasitic in nature. It sucks away. It cuts in cup-shapes. While you are in its grasp, a piece of you goes missing; when you break free, it feels as though the piece fails to come back properly. It is not as it was, and so you are not the same. You are lesser.

Horsehair worms infest crickets. As mind-altering parasites, they manipulate the brains of the crickets which they infest, and order them to go into water. Once there, the cricket will struggle to survive. Either it will drown, or it will manage to escape, but the end result is always the same: the horsehair worm erupts from the cricket's body into the water, where it will lay eggs. This process of infestation, and of drowning, and of laying eggs — these are all critical steps to the life cycle of the horsehair worm, and how it ensures that it may reproduce. I have discovered that this is not a process unique to the horsehair worm. I have been infested.

The night I finished Suicide Squad, I slipped into uneasy dreams. There, in the spaces between, I found myself in an enormous outdoor swimming pool. It was a Great Lake in size, but not in depth; the water stretched out further than I could see, yet it only reached to my chin. Thousands of people surrounded me. They bumped into one another, and splashed, and laughed. I watched as a man with a jetpack flew overhead. Smoke billowed from its engines as it sputtered and then roared, erupting into a fireball larger than any sun. Viscera rained upon us — millions of gallons of blood, endless chunks and tendons, an impossible amount contained within a single human body — and the sky blacked out. I waded through it in the darkness, pushing aside the gore as I moved. The people screamed. They wept. They called out for their loved ones to help them. I kept pushing forward, desperate only to get to the other side of the lake. To escape. I fear that I'll wake up again someday, to find that the pool of blood was reality, and this is a brief dream before I return to it. I hope that one day I will wake up, and find that this life has been nothing more than a nightmare, hazy and half-forgotten by the time I've put breakfast on the table. I don't know if I've stopped playing Suicide Squad. Maybe it's always been this way.

It is not required to suspect that the game is evil, nor to believe that the game is evil, nor to know that the game is evil; should you witness its ideal, its form — if you turn away from the shadows dancing on the wall to view what is casting them — it simply is evil. It is a damnable, sunless force, existing only to sap the time you have until you die. A medieval society would have burned this at the stake and viewed its existence as a punishment upon them, and they would have been right in every regard. Suicide Squad does not exist. Suicide Squad is 無.

Tara Strong needs to retire already, Jesus Christ.