 Day 26, Cruelty Squad, suggested by Anarko Alex and seconded by 15 people. This violated both parts of rule number three and did so in the middle of the work week, which I did not appreciate, but here we are. According to its creator, Cruelty Squad is a sadistic game born almost entirely out of spite. Villacalio is a Finnish multimedia artist whose previous work has names like Hyper Prison Industrial and Venmo Combat, the latter of which features an aesthetic that feels real heckin familiar to someone who just spent six hours banging his head against virtual walls with faces on them. Calio's work is aggressive and abrasive, not something you enjoy so much as this really react to. Transplanted from comics and galleries into an interactive virtual space, his vision is concentrated into sharp geometry, clashing textures, and short looping earworms that I never want to hear again, an audiovisual basalt befitting the name. You play an assassin doing gig work for the titular company, and your hits will help shape the geopolitical landscape for the highest bidder. The only thing tying all of this death together is that someone paid for it. And you need a job. You live in a society after all, and hey, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. You get your assignment, choose weapons and biological augmentations, head into the field where you will do your best to kill your targets, as well as anyone else who gets in your way. Carnage is profit, whether soldier or civilian. Consume a corpse to regain a single hit point, but collect their organs and you can sell that shit on the black market, always available at the press of a button, and complete with a price line always going up or down and ensuring you never really feel good about your timing. And it's not just body parts that you can trade. There is an entire in-game stock market with companies whose valuations will fluctuate either randomly or in reaction to the game's events. Pay enough attention to who you're going after and think about how that might hurt or help someone's bottom line, and you can get rich as fuck as you watch the line go up or down. Or you can bet wrong and lose it all, and that's the game, right? That's what Wall Street Betts is all about, but here it's fake, so you can get the thrill of retail investment without the threat of literally destroying your life. The fact that this system is always available no matter where you are or what you're doing is hilarious. The whole thing was inspired by Callio's brief foray into crypto, where he just got used to watching lines fluctuate wildly, so when he decided to make a game about a hypercapitalist hellscape, how could he not put that in there? Speaking of which, Web 3 is fucking stupid. I know I mentioned it like two days ago, but you should really watch Dan Olson's video on NFTs and also read former Signal CEO Moxie Marlin-Spike's article about how many of Web 3's promises have already failed. How do you make a system that promises decentralization but can't be accessed directly from a mobile device that effectively requires the use of the platforms that it was supposed to make obsolete? That's so dumb I can't even. Point is, investing stresses me out, and I completely avoided that whole part of the game. There's a lot of stuff that I didn't get to because when it came down to it, I didn't have enough time, and also I'm just not very good at the game. For a while there, I thought it wasn't going to happen at all. It took me no lie, an hour to beat the first level, 60 minutes of utter failure, and the entire time I just kept thinking, can I not? You see, Cruelty Squad is the sort of game I want to be cool enough to enjoy, but just am not. I've never made it past the second boss of a FromSoft game, and I've never seen more than 20 consecutive minutes of a roguelike that wasn't Hades. Holline Miami, whose structure Cruelty Squad feels indebted to, is cool, and I liked the first few levels, but then they got too hard, and I gave up. I don't like losing progress, and I don't like getting right up to the end, making a wrong turn, getting a face full of lead, and getting thrown back to the start. Sure, I'll know to look out next time, but fuck do I not want to do all that setup again. Cruelty Squad is terrible to review in the context of this project. Every other game that I've discussed this month has had no fail states. Even at their most frustrating, I lost a little bit of time, but never any progress. Cruelty Squad stole my progress frequently and gleefully. It actively and intentionally wasted my time, because it hates me, because it hates all of us. And yet, I continued to play. Even when I had passed the self-imposed time limit given to retain my sanity, I could have stopped and you wouldn't have known the difference. Everything I have said could have been written after that first level, and yet I felt compelled to see the ending. Or an ending. I know that there are plenty of secrets to unlock and additional objectives to complete and etc. to get the true ending, but I watched that shit on YouTube and it was every bit as unsatisfying as the one that I saw. This game isn't about making you feel good, but when everything finally comes together and you pull off that wild maneuver and get the perfect run, you do feel great. Like you accomplished something, but you didn't, 7.7 out of 10. Thanks so much for watching, and thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, hammering Marco, Kat Saracada, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I am the sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindyce, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great, if not, oh well, if you want to see more, there's a couple more days to suggest things. I think there's like two more days. Three more days? Two more days. Almost done. Thank God.