this game is a beautiful example of what you can do with a surreal art style while still making the gameplay work.

the engine of this game is SO refined, every headshot feels perfect, the movement feels amazing, the enemies aren't too intelligent, too dumb or too unfair, and the level design complements the surreal visual style and movement of the game to a tee
the art style of cruelty squad is just right, it's the perfect blend of nostalgia-bait old style graphics with surreal colours to lure you in, while still managing to look modern enough to stand out amongst the new wave of PS2 wannabes
this isn't even mentioning the music, which despite sounding so grotesque, just works so well with how the game presents itself. every song is so well produced, and you can tell how much effort went into making it sound like it had no effort put in.
what a perfectly executed game, i hope ville's future work lives up to the baseline cruelty squad has set

20 minutes till dawn, or 20mtd for short, is one of the earlier examples of the whole "survivorlike" genre, or whatever you want to call it (garliclike, bullet heaven, vampirelike) and it doesn't really stray away from the core values of it
it's a simple premise, survive 20 minutes, get some upgrades, and just restart if you die.
this comes with some pros, and some notable cons.
pros - it's replayable, and it doesn't require much effort to get into
cons - the upgrade paths are barebones, there aren't many of them, and half of them are worthless. the same goes with characters, and weapons. you'll notice this also happens with a lot of later games that take inspiration from 20mtd specifically too, it seems to just be a developmental issue more than anything
i can at least give the game merit for its artstyle, and not being challenging enough to warrant a tedious 100%
oh also the girls are hot too

following the same gameplay loop as devil daggers, hyper demon releases as a direct improvement of sorts
while it still has the same enemy patterns throughout, the enemies this time are much more varied, and the gameplay is a lot more in depth, with gems now actually mattering rather than being for distant upgrades that barely matter
you'll also notice that the game's visuals are much better, giving you full 360 vision through chromatic aberrations of nearby enemies, and having just a generally improved style of modeling
i think overall, hyper demon is a massive step up from devil daggers- and while not being perfect quite yet, it's a very refined take on what it started back in 2016

likely the start of the modern boomshoot revival, devil daggers is an arcade arena shooter focused on difficulty, combo play and movement
it does all of this.. fine, the difficulty is proper enough so that you'll be forced to put in a good amount of hours to get a good run, let alone get the achievement; but the game definitely shows its flaws once you put in these hours
the first thing you'll notice is that it doesn't really do anything to distinguish runs, it has nothing that changes, enemies spawn in the same areas, you have nothing to make the game new and fresh between runs. this is fine with less playtime as it's very obviously designed to be a small game inspired by arcades, but it really shows this inspiration after about 10-15 hours.
i can't particularly criticize the movement, as this game is so early within the whole "boomer shooter / movement shooter" revival genre that's been oh-so popular the past 4 or 5 years that i can't really give it shit for anything
i will say though, this game creates a good baseline for getting into the genre, and if you're willing to put in some effort, it has a great payoff with the steam achivement