Full of blood and a suspicious combat cocktail. The purest arbiter against depression is action, and boy, the only action I wanna take is going to fucking work. Work makes me happy: it’s where I see my friends. I am so happy when I go to work. There’s no rush like clocking in and knowing the next eight hours or twenty minutes of my life belong to one of my friends. I trust my boss.

Today my job is driving to a discreet neighborhood and indulging in a little murder-tourism. Be careful, some of the people around here employ a lot of security.

Luckily, everyone I kill will just wake up screaming tomorrow. They’ll go to work too and have a good time.

I’m having a good time doing my job.

Cruelty Squad is an Immersive Simulator. Like the fetish models that string themselves up on hooks and wire, you’re rigged up and being lowered into a vat of human sewage. Look at any screenshot and imagine what it smells like, if you’re looking for a fun game to play by yourself that isn’t Cruelty Squad.

One could, if they wanted, describe Cruelty Squad with a term like biopunk. There’s just as many of the trappings of neon infusion and post-market hell as there in any book written by a guy freaked out about the existence of Japanese people in the 80’s. The places here are laminated tile and reflective black glass. Bizarre churches exist next to pizza places. A current of Real Life runs through all of these locations.

Sometimes repulsive, but often garishly colorful. Textures often twist into a kaleidoscope of neon unease. An orchestrated stock market gambles obscurely in your menu. Foundations of the world are built on all of our favorite late stage capitalism. Offices and neighborhoods and seaside resort towns: we are not a part of it. It all belongs to someone or something else. All of the standard fascinations with cosmic horror are present; we are all uneasy because the market is not meant for us.

I stumbled on a post some late night that got deep in the crevices of my brain. The popularity of Cosmic Horror comes from anxiety. Not the personal, deeply held kind that shape individuals, but the massive kind that sits like a fog on top of America and elsewhere. Credit card companies enforce byzantine rules that control lives. Stockbrokers play a new game of roulette with powerful computers that make decisions for them, calling the shots out to a horde of bots and trading forums. Even more ubiquitous in America than Cruelty Squad’s kaleidoscopic horror of neighborhood pizza places and corporate takeover is the Gas Station. Sadly missing from the makeup of this nightmare, but maybe all too more horrifying for it!

If the levels of Cruelty Squad repeatedly are written about as “having their own logic” then here is the most available shorthand in real life: the cruel Frankenstein’s monster of gas station + fast food enterprise.

More common on the interstate, this is a true American breed. Gas up the metal body and the physical one. It’s 9:30 AM and there’s seven more hours of driving. The most friendly stop will always be the one with a 15 foot neon sign. A rare treat: that specific road-borne craving for Arby’s or Subway. A culinary roll of the dice.

Cruelty Squad doesn’t care about the human body, and neither does the person who decided I should be able to buy Monster™ Brand Energy Drink and partake in “a spicy Greek.” In its own way, the locus of punishment from Cruelty Squad has a specific and hideous analogue in the real world. It is no less neon-coated here then it is there.

Fluorescent light bounces off of overly-mopped tile floors. When they don’t have the chance to accrue that city-specific grime all of the best places in the world have, they have a mirror sheen. An exhausted teenager or near-retirement age towny takes your order. In some of the most remote places in the American landscape, these are the only workplaces available.

Like my favorite slice of American fast food, Arby’s, this world is meat and cheese. Pig intestines and sewage. The walls have the laminated, too-reflective sheen of fake deli meat. One could say that all Americans eat is corn slurry and that person might be right. God, aren’t we good at dressing it up though?

Arby’s is a fast food restaurant that can be found in almost any American city, though I guess this safe-haven where the rituals of meat are kept alive is mostly native to the southwest. The American deli is that forever link to the immigrants that make up the backbone of most of America, twisted cruelly into a place that embodies the tradition of the deli.

Last time I got something at Arby’s It had the name “the spicy Greek” and resembled a Gyro. I should have gone with the beef n’ cheddar but hey, isn’t it nice we can get a little slice of ethnic food wherever we want now? I bet it really makes people feel like they’ve never left home!

I should mention that this Arby’s was jointly shared with a gas station. One of the ones that has a name like “OOMPHERS!” not quite an onomatopoeia and not quite a word. A Frankenstein’s monster jumbled together out of service parts.

Gas Stations are American exceptionalism through and through. The kind of place we keep shopping at because every one of them is near identical. Sometimes you luck out and they share space with a Del Taco. Often, an accrued crust of filth leads you to a corner store Subway where the backbone of labor toils away to pay rent. I can see smiles on their faces.

Cruelty Squad is about tactical insertion. Let me tactically insert myself into all of the softest parts of the level. Tiled floors from the burger place across the road and textures that seem like they’re grabbed from the crustiest apartments I ever really lived in.

There’s a neighborhood sequence in Cruelty Squad that is one half suburbia, one half Burger King Kid’s Quest. Writers with college degrees and bank accounts might say these places “don’t make sense” but who doesn’t forget the euphoric rush of a grime-covered slide while their parents space out in line after a twelve-hour cross-country drive at Burger King? Cruelty Squad is like going down that slide over and over again, each time finding new ways to make it more fun, while your parents stare dead eyed at a fluorescent-lit menu.

Maybe, maybe these palaces of misery and desire were designed to be places of terror and unimaginable punishment. Maybe they were made by a broke artist whose gallery showings roughly undercut similar themes to the world of Cruelty Squad. Ville Kallo has an art history of showings that repeat and dwell on some of the same textures as the game.

Maybe there was some deeper meaning meant to all of this, I don’t know.

Maybe the specific analogues to punishment and lack of care for the human body ALSO come from the types of places I can spend $5 dollars (specific price) for a collection of meats and cheeses with a horseradish dip. Right next door for $2 I can buy as much Monster Brand Energy as I have salvos of $2 to throw at some cashier. I love my body, and so does the market.

Like the crystalline castles and tiled floors of Cruelty Squad, a gas station is not designed with a higher function in mind but because someone hopes it will make us feel engaged. In an opposite way, the kaleidoscope of patterns and structures can inspire unease. An orchestrated stock market that gambles obscurely. The riding standards of cosmic horror lurk in the background. We are uneasy because the market is not meant for All of them have names like “OOMPHERS!” or “WOW!” that stretch the line between onomatopoeia and exclamation. A black hole on the memory where it doesn’t matter where you were unless a fistfight happened in the parking lot, or a shooting.

Arby’s reflects a rich cultural tradition of the American deli, turned on its side and dipped in horseradish. The particular Arby’s I’m thinkin’ of was in a patch of soil on the interstate from one desert town to the other. Big enough to be a restaurant on it’s own in size and capable of drive thru but still attached to one more restaurant and entire convenience store. That kind of squalid place not meant to be in for too long, people are trying to work there. Someone’s gonna spend their twenties in that Arby’s. Someone just like me, just like the fast food franchise I spent mine in.

Of course it can’t be a real deli. As a fast food simulacrum, a place where the meat is delivered once per day and there’s an almost generational obsession with knowing what the meat is really made out of, it works. I’ll stop in an Arby’s to have a good time. I know I can have a good time, I know there are curly fries waiting for me.

I want the beef and I can smell it. That rich, creamy horsey sauce and the layers of mouth watering room-temperature sliced beef. Delivered on a truck every morning in airtight plastic bag. The Arby’s corporation wants me to be happy. It has the meats™. wants me to have the meats™, too. Arby’s even knows I love videogames! They’re here for me. They know what I want.

Cruelty Squad knows I want to kill. That part of my brain practically begs to be woken up every morning. I’m ready to get out of bed, I’m ready to spend my money. If I can kill a few people and see something fun at the same time, why not? Life is a theme park, and the theme isn’t something you’re gonna want to hear. Lean around a corner, introduce yourself to a new friend. Launch yourself across a room with an extended intestine.

Cruelty Squad is not so dissimilar to sauntering into the nearest Arby’s franchise and ordering a piled high sandwich of beef trimmings. If anything else, I bet they smell the same. Have some fun, pile on everything you want. The world and the beef are your oysters. If you’re short on rent? Well I’ve got good news about your employment status.