"As for military or state violence, I feel like that’s the purest crystallization of a type of legalized murderlust. It’s so completely farcical in the way the stated purposes (defense, security, etc.) differ from the actual outcomes. It’s a libidinal death cult with a serious bureaucratic veneer. The scene that it sets for our everyday life interests me. It’s like an ever-present background radiation of evil." - Ville Kallio in an interview you can read Here

I wrote a sort of strange poem about this game Here you can read. This was during that period of time when a lot of people were doing reviews as poems and I thought they were mostly lyrical and quite bad because it was all based on rhyming or strict meters, which is totally fine. I've created a controversy around myself of being judgemental of other peoples writing, but if you're going to practice and even do it poorly, you might as well do it here. Especially with comments off so people don't bug you. The reason I was only ever annoyed with it to begin with was anger management issues as a result of binge drinking and also overusing the site too much at the time, both things I've gotten a lot better about. Recently about a week ago I finally came to terms to myself as somebody who has in a very real sense been battling alcohol addiction for a long time, admitted to myself and to my real life community I actually struggle with alcoholism, and slowly taking steps towards self betterment and eventual sobriety there. So I want to somberly apologize for the hostile and standoffish precedent I created around me in relationship to that here, even though we are a while out from the last time I stepped on anybodies toes here.

This may be a strange note to start a review of Cruelty Squad (2021) on, but its a necessary one for a few reasons. The first is that to give off the impression I'm a detached observer merely 'peering into' the text from above, as some figure of authority goes against one of the main things the text is actually 'about'. Several times the established person running an organization of authority in cruelty squad blurb at you, in funny memetic ways that illustrate to you that they do not actually have their shit together, and are using their social authority to disguise that fact.

"I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for in an organisational sense."

"I'm the most powerful person in this room. I control this situation. Everyone's dancing to my tune..."

"I have thousands of followers. They say im blacksuppositoried and debased."

Some of us that are in charge of something think exactly like this. Anybody who has run their own discord or had a 'social media presence' definitely has this 'toying' psychology baked in deep. Occasionally this 'decisionality' is thrust onto you, for instance by making a semi successful game, the creator of Cruelty Squad, Ville Kallio, has opened a portal for themselves they cant close. They are now the 'center' of something, and probably had some of these same issues in the physical art community of being a 'worship statue'. They even admitted to this in the interview I quoted at the beginning.

"Sacrificing your friends to develop your CEO mindset so you can finally ascend to primordial-financial godhood. I feel like these things have sort of leaked into my own life, as I had to start a business due to the success of the game. I was reading Goethe’s Faust and it made me feel like I’ve accidentally made some sort of infernal pact at some point during development, which resulted in all of this. "

Problem is, if you identify with this feeling too much, you start thinking of yourself as a 'moderator of thought' and begin to think in ways the prior quotes from the game show. We have to ask ourselves, how is this way of thinking any different from the weird misogynist Pick Up Artistry thinking that these people don't 'deserve' your glory and should actually bow down to you? How easily can we divorce the world of middle management from larger systems of violence? Rather than using this power as a pure commercial toolset, Ville in the discord server for the game made it incredibly clear that transphobia will not be tolerated. You have to frontload yourself like that or you do completely self isolate and go CEO mindset. I could theoretically ditch all my friends tomorrow into a toxic sludge pit, alienate myself and start working on my Grindset and get a bunch of people to worship my every word. Make one of those stupid fucking paid to use discords. Pimp my patreon out constantly. Treat my connections with people in terms of a career path and not just people I like. Sometimes people say I'm one of the best writers on here and it freaks me the fuck out. It freaks me out that I self gloating something to that effect a few times to. The internet normalized all of these more primal urges to Control the world of violence around you. It's fucked. I mean for instance if you use the internet long enough you stop referring to other people as people, you start calling them 'randoms'. It's ok to be mad at commenters and guess their IQ levels when they even slightly annoy you or get on your nerves. It's ok to get so angry with people for doing something you don't like and letting your friends hang them out to dry for it publicly. It's ok to antagonize people with kindness just because they were mean to you once. Look I got the damn comments off in here. That's not because I'm afraid of you, its because I'm afraid of myself dude. I've done all of this stuff before and seen others do it on here. It's embarrassing.

There's this frustrating issue in videogame discourse in which, in order to try and self justify our time to ourselves, we talk about games as 'cultural objects' rather than effective experiences that change our way of viewing things. Most of this is the result of the 'video essay' style catching off like commercial wildfire, and thus imparting some sense of commercial value to the idea that you can 'speak around' videogames as literary texts. I believe the other big result of that is that we all sort of learned from having to undo the 'videogames as vehicles to violence' argument for a long time (and sometimes still do) that, crucially the connection between play and real life behaviors is thin. Gamers went through this moment where they had to learn about cultivation theory as much as they could to ward this stuff off but the problem is that by doing that we sort of nullified ourselves from getting into any sort of public political wanting. This desire to absolutely affirm that a game cant cause real life violence caused us to neuter our own discourse before it could really grow. We are just passive soyjacks playing with blocks in the cornor. We fucking infantalized ourselves through self domestication.

So that's part of the problem. The other part then is to try and get away from this we dont talk about this art form as 'things we learned' partially because learning from art is cringe, learn from academic Journals you room temp IQ having freak. When we do interpret a game text, we will interpret both the front and the back to the point it spoils the magic for others. For instance every video I've seen on Cruelty Squad that takes the work seriously can't help themselves but 'compare' the endings and try to analyze a discreet meaning from them. The game is set up like an ARG where the further you slip in the weirder you learn the world is (for instance a creation myth people believe in that own homes is literally about owning a home). It makes sense, because we were all taught to do this as a book report in school and shit, but it doesn't always translate cleanly to games. Videogames are a continuous act function you experience and push through. It's not like a movie where you merely just 'watch'. There's a reason why one of the most enjoyed novels in game enthusiast (watch out with that term buddy, Gamergate will start knocking on your door) peoples favourite book is House of Leaves, its because its a book you physically travel through, have you fight with to keep reading. You have to hold it sideways, sometimes you have to warp a few pages backwards for a bit. Videogames as narratives, even continuous ones and simple, are more like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and you so don't see people asking you to analyze those right.

So it ends up putting Cruelty Squad in this awkward and frusterating temporal space, where on the one hand you really want to dig into the niche leftism that Cruelty Squad is existing. Where it pokes fun at stuff like veganism being connected to purity culture issues for instance. But you can't do that without everyone being on the 'same page' about it first and so now you have to back up and address that problem first. The lore of Cruelty Squad being so dense that you want to see somebody break into the mechanics of the story and figure out who the 'real villian' of the mystery is. But since we cant really get into all that without looking psychotic and freaky we just gleefully poke at each other to make the first move. Yet, art isn't about a 'really good conversation' or solving the damn mystery for everyone though. Art is an experience that usually wants to tell you stuff and make you reshape your world a little. I didn't get the other endings of cruelty squad because I'm not that obsessed with the game in that way. The internet can slowly teach you that people like me are normies and shouldn't open their mouths until they 'really beat it'. I know about the fucking Nick Land and Bataille references ok, I read a bit of these people but we dont need to pose as philosophers or completionists to talk about art and the world.

Cruelty Squads level Androgen Assault made me rethink the way I consider the police and the fascism associated with it. None of the police talk to you, they instantly fight you, but you learn throughout that level that the place is a horrifying cult with people testing on each other and the prisoners to Absurd limits. This is blunt and flagrant, your briefing even says that Magnus, head of the narcotics department, is testing on people and making shit difficult for everyone. It's a hard and uncomfortable level. The hallways are way too long. Everyone is running in slow motion. It made me rethink about the police as basically a grooming organization for people lost in their early life. They slowly teach people to repress everything, be violent, and fuck peoples lives up. That doesn't happen overnight, and its only upheld by baking people in the culture of fear and adult bullying. I hate these macho pricks, but they aren't some 'visceral' decision, they are a chemical nightmare scenario. The building for a precinct in the town I live has a few different things.

1. A viewable office from the street: So I saw what the inside of one of these guys offices looks like and its very drab and depressing

2. A plaque on the side dedicated to a confederate doctor

3. A giant fucking face construction on the side of the building, very similar to The headquarters of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party (1934)

I thought about that stuff as I was working with a fucking horrible hangover today. I saw a bald pig on my way home from work near the bus starting some scene. I know now that this is a lifestyle the mother fucker was tricked into, and I learned it from a game, non verbally. I still hate the dude and would resist him but he was 'constructed', he doesn't have some sort of primal genetic code that made him join the Cop Cult. He's not some sort of low T brainlet normie NPC like the internet tries to convince me of. Just as much as women aren't fucking 'femoids' or any of this greasy internet dungeon speak. A lot of the internet sort of teaches you to dehumanize people like this, and not see where the violence is coming from. It's something you have to sort of unlearn one day at a time. Cruelty Squad is willing to meet you there. Today I this all hit me and I realized I don't want to moderate my fucking friends and stepped down from running a discord as a big attention seeking thing. I can't run around with a chip on my shoulder like that. There's a lot of great levels in Cruelty Squad that reillustrate facts like this, home ownership, office culture, reconstructing a scene of violence and blithe anxiety in a new way. That's art. Thats life. That's why I reccomend this fucking game.

Everyday is actually a battle, but until I die I will actually wake up and fight that battle till I'm snuffed out for good.

Policy

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In case you're just wondering if this game is good and worth checking out, the answer is yes, this is one of the most enjoyable platformers for how short it is, and its free. If thats enough to convince you feel free to download it here. For everyone else, and for my own mind, let me try to dig into the meat of this thing.

Yo! Noid 2 presents itself as a play on the Lost Videogame Media horror trope, this particular case being an old PS1 game. The plot going on here is a tad bit more esoteric than one might originally expect. The game opens with a kitchty abandoned carton pizza mascot who enters and smashes a pizza to bits, the title screen is repeated by an emotionless choir of voices saying his name. Then after fiddling with the start button the game begins with a voiceless FOV scene introducing the smiling bastard, explaining that Yo! Noid lost his yo yo and has to retrieve it. Then, you are dropped into a 3D recreation of the first level in the which is a remake of the first game. A harbor with billboards cascading off into the distance planted in the water and a homogeneity of town houses lining a shoreline long away from you. Thus you platform over lost Domino's cargo and retrieve your yoyo, to then be dropped into the world proper.

Your real task in Yo! Noid 2 is obscured throughout the early point of the game by the sudden introductory level, to such an extent you have to be paying a bit of attention past the blase puns of the protagonist to recognize the divine horror waiting inside.

You are dropped into a vacuum called Noid Void, this is the main hub of the game. As you look around, you'll see sharp brambled blue roads, strange shapeless monuments, and a shattering of glass littering the sky. Several pizza toppings passively inform you of the wasteland the shattered Noid Void has become. They note that the pizza has been 'taken away', a divine sanctuary for the lost topping. Then you search around and find entrances to each of the 3 levels and retrieve the pie back and unravel the mystery of the core of the world.

Right, perhaps it's useful to provide some context to the circumstances. Yo! Noid is an unpopular TV commercial mascot circulating all throughout the 90s, with the idea supposedly being that he represents the tribulations of getting a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less. There's a decent video on the background of this fucker. I'll do my best to summarize the most relevant bits here, he was abandoned due to a confluence of this type of advertising not being so effective anymore, a hostage situation led by somebody of the same name thinking Noid was made to 'make fun' of him, and most telling of all a series of litigations against Domino's for the reckless driving issues caused by their 30 minutes or free guarantee policy. The mascot and the policy was both quietly shelved as a result. He had 2 tie in games, 1 where hes a jerk, and 1 extremely hard game (the one Yo! Noid 2 riffs off of). He was a product of catchy child TV advertising and theres a few comparison points to other commercials of the era.

We will come back to the implications of this history in a bit, but let me start with the most shallow praise: In many ways, riffing off an abandoned corporate mascot and their sparse 90s commercials and tie-in games, is an incredibly smart concept for a small game. The game was made for a small indie game jam in 1 month, hosted by some website called Waypoint, with the gimmick being that 'Your game title should be a title from Waypoint Radio'. According to an interview the developers had the main inspiration point being that these old retro marketing games, like Pepsiman and Yo! Noid were ahead of their time in terms of realizing that most people do want to actually interact with the brands they see on TV. Therefore, 'hes dabbing because hes SO ahead of his time!' 1 The game revels in this sort of comedic irony born out of both unstable self importance and our often anachronistic relationship with the presumed disposable artifacts of the past.

The main melancholia that comes across throughout the memetic nature of the game then, is an overwhelming sense of abandonment. This is colored even further knowing the game jam itself floundered, actively not calling attention to itself (only getting 4 entries) and according to the interview, they don't even think the people even played it: 'I dont think even to this day the people who run the website have even played our game, they mention it but i dont think theyve ever played it'. The reason to bring this up is this is where the core of the social commentary bites. At one point in one of the earliest stages of the game, you find an 'abandoned miner' at the core of the planet who laments that people probably dont even know he's down there. This is a setup for a joke, he can just leave via the grappling hook, but the fact of the matter is almost all of the characters you talk to are in a state of pure distress about their feelings of abandonment. One rather obvious point to be made about this in a literal sense is that they are the 'unused' toppings on pizza. This is a difficult point to fairly leverage, but when you beat each of the stages, you get large pepperoni pizzas toppling the center, with more characters coming along to reify the pizzas as a sort of religious moment. But the rub is, you don't meet any pepperoni, or in fact any meat characters at all. You meet mushrooms, olives, pineapples, the 'ignored' toppings. You meet a dipping sauce, but the art style rendering the top of it is not from the dominos of our time its from the dominos of the 90s. There's a curious hauntology at work here, as mentioned, the Noid Void hubworld is a bizarre esher like looney toon hellworld, but some guy with a mad trapped imagination, made it up for literally 1 commercial. I'm reminded of the utterly chaotic and ambitious blueprints for pepsi branding, it was shelved before even making it.

We like to assume these dumb mascot and old commercials are 'not art', they are disposable and not worth our memory. And yet at the same time the authors of the game remember this bastard and probably a lot of other commercials from the 90s, even despite some of our best efforts, the garbage art of yore can stick with us and play in our minds. This ability to dismiss consciously as critics and then be nonetheless by these corporate tunes and slogans is one of the main things this game likes to mess with you on.

Today, dominos pizza cardboard coverings are absolutely littered in text and blurbs franticly justifying its own existence as a sales pitch in fevered psychosis, but the cardboard boxes of old just had a domino on them, here's a comparison. This is made even more blatantly funny when you realize that getting all the collectibles on a level make the old box types literally make them golden, the least considered part of pizza is the trash, which is turned to gold. You get no other reward for your troubles, that's it. It's fun to do if you want to, but this lack of reward feels taunting in a way that's glib but not entirely at your expense, if anything it feels like an inside joke based on how trash is treated.

On top of that there's a curious subtheme of labor insecurity hidden in there as well. The examples are endless: the warehouse has a tomato bragging about being from old money, another tomato shirks their job, or the implications of the mining accident, or even the constant dominos cargo boxes littered everywhere. In a roundabout way, they are bringing attention to the slowdown of the world, those workers and their art of the past quietly disposed of, something these corporations urge you not to think about how this was able to happen in the first place. Therefore, people don't want to clean up, they don't want to keep going. This humor and melancholy tension runs the course of the game, with admittedly the humor cropping higher up so not to bum the whole thing out, yet it gives a strange parodic undertone so rare within the medium, the parody leads to a quiet satire biting through, and makes for one of the most impressive final bosses I've ever experienced, which I feel is more worth experiencing than speaking about here.

The other irony embodied by the compulsive puns and general ennui towards the suffering of the inhabitants by our protagonist is as a reflection of a sort of cultural question: Have we moved away from this? The puns all have a strong and discerning wit to them, but this attitude has been around for pretty much half the game protagonists we can count nowadays and several comic book movies (Guardian of the Galaxy comes to mind, or pretty much anything James Gunn has been a part of). You can trade out the smiling face of a middle aged man in a red rabbit suit with a hip young nostalgia gazing youth, but the expectations come off equally hollow, no matter who pilots. Everyone around the protagonist is a joke to riff off of.

With the intellectual bit of it aside, what is there to enjoy in terms of the gameplay? Put simply, the most satisfying and tight precision platforming in almost any 3D game ever. To keep it simple, using a grappling mechanic solves a huge number of issues precision platforming games in a 3D space have difficulty with, that being the inability to know when you should time a jump when coming off a ledge. This is because in 2D space, ideally the camera lets you see how close to a ledge you are, whereas cameras in 3D space are obviously placed behind you by default, and turning the camera to see from the side is not usually too useful in these games since you tend not to be able to zoom out. In this case the issue is dealt with kindly by making it so you don't have to worry as much about being right at the edge for the grappling sections, along with a friction to the wall run that gives you plenty of time to try and time your jumps. On top of all that, the death system really makes it fun and noncommittal, if you mess up a jump it will literally spawn you as close to the last place you fell from where its safe to do so, there's no death system, the only punishment for dying is having to listen to Yo! Noid's horrific twisted scream, before being respawned again nearby anyway. This lienancy helps make the suprisingly high difficulty as non tedious up until the dungeon (which the Pineapple informs you to try last). As for the dab itself, its analog dabbing and you can do it at any time. What's important to understand about this besides just being a dated meme, is that it serves an invisible purpose for those of the figdety nature. You see in a lot of games, people like me often have the impulse of just jumping out of boredom, but this is a way to have a button be pressed without messing up your run, the catharsis of having a button you can press that does nothing functionally is hard to describe to people who dont have this tick. Yet after experiencing it in this game I cant help but wonder why they dont have a fidget noise making button in all games like this.

Beyond that, the audio visual design is stellar. There's so many small effects that I could sit here all day listing them off. The music is all amazing casio piano midi's which sell a funky experience and keep you from losing your cool. The dungeon song in particular has stuck with me for years, but whats even more impressive is that it transitions the music layers based on how high you are, when you start in the area you only hear drums, and you only hear the whole song near the middle of the area if I recall correctly. The sound effects of running are quiet enough not to get on your nerves, theres a small friction and squeak of the shoe and your off running the other direction. The textures for most of the stuff you run and jump on is satisfying, with some spectacle thrown in for good measure to keep things interesting, like a rocket. Each of the 3 levels is also completely distinct, one is a doom-fueled dungeon key puzzler (one of the best designed dungeons ever made, but feel free to look stuff up if you get stuck here). One is an exploratory spectacle harkening back to Mario Galaxy with the may sub worlds you orbit travel and explore, and one is a slow linear platformer through an old warehouse. The real art is that it feeds you just enough of the world before stopping. Had this game gone any longer than its short 2-5 hour experience, I can see myself becoming incredibly exhausted and impatient with it. Instead the short time frame was just enough to tell the short story it wanted to without overstaying its welcome. That said, I hope the developers build a game like this with a slightly less annoying protagonist, because they have the foundation for a exceptional long form 3D platformer here.

Played this through Game Pass only to find out it's gotten a lot of attention in the last couple days! I've played enough to be satisfied with it and wanted to give my thoughts on the game as well as my perspective on the discourse.

Vampire Survivors is fun, but it's nearly immediately clear how little depth there is to it. One of the appeals of any roguelite is how it handles its items - how are they found, how do you upgrade them, how do they interact with each other - and VS really disappointed me in this regard. Once you have an understanding of each weapon and its evolution item, it feels pretty hard to make a build that doesn't work, lending a real feeling of samey-ness to every run. This might have been mitigated a bit during the early access period as I believe the weapon evolutions were not listed in-game prior to 1.0, but I'm not sure. Furthermore, the permanent upgrade tree is absurdly generous, giving you extremely powerful upgrades like extra damage, damage reduction, duplication, and even a revive for not very much currency. I haven't tried the curse upgrade yet (think Hades' difficulty modifiers) so this might help a little in that department but hard to say how much of a difference it could make. Few of the unlockable characters really feel necessary to use IMO thanks to a good portion of their individual attributes not leaving a large impact on the run. The more unique ones are fun but still ultimately lack much in the way of truly making the game feel different. TBOI Repentance's Tainted characters these are not. The presentation is obviously minimal, with the light flair of the funny names and bios for items and characters being the only standout bits. I had a good time mowing down hordes of silly monsters with my ridiculous screen-shaking birds and Bibles but there's not enough here to really keep me coming back in a way that something like TBOI or Hades might.

As to the discourse itself, there's been a lot of talk in recent days of VS being predatory with regard to how it's built from a design perspective as well as to how shallow the gameplay is, making it something of a "time waster". I strongly disagree with both of these claims. The dev has gone on record talking about how the game is designed like a slot machine (and he evidently has ties to gambling program devs?), rewarding players with big flashy stuff for little player input. Even in spite of his interview, I still don't think it makes a lick of difference. VS lacks literally any way of getting your money beyond the initial (extremely cheap!) purchase. The idea of it robbing you of your time as opposed to money is maybe worth thinking about in a "Huh, interesting…" sort of way, but there's really no tangible way to back it up. The conversation has been had before, so I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but this claim should really be leveled at something like League of Legends or FIFA, games that do genuinely want to rob you of your money openly - that's where the real criticism should be focused, not miscast at VS.

The whole notion of it "wasting your time" is silly when you consider that A) all games waste your time and B) people will already happily sink 4000+ hours into DotA or CS:GO, so it's hardly something unique to VS.

There's nuance as to what degree every game is wasting your time I suppose, with the more blatant being ever so slightly harder to defend, but once you get into the minutiae of that reasoning it feels like a very slippery slope to viewing every single piece of media with this lens. Not only is it needlessly pedantic, it also seems like a really bleak way to view the things you like. Like at what point do we just start crafting a Rotten Tomatoes + HowLongTo Beat Reddit karma average quotient to determine whether or not a game "will be worth the time"? To put it simply, if we're going to condemn one game for this, we might as well condemn every game for this.