The Sublime Absurdity of Cruelty Squad
Cruelty Squad has become a viral success in large part for its bizarre aesthetics and memetic potential. But there’s much, much more going on under its rotting neon surface than simple jpegs and irony: it’s the anxieties of decaying capitalism distilled into a video game.
Cruelty Squad has the potential to become a landmark title in video games moving forward. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the cultural forecast as we embark further into the 2020s, a flawless recreation of how it feels to trudge through a shitty job, think about the world, and doomscroll. It’s grotesque, it’s horrifying, it’s inscrutable; it’s also funny, perceptive, and sincere. Yes, sincere. Although some people have seen the game as an ironic meme factory, something akin to the deliberately meaningless content of places such as Reddit’s /r/surrealmemes, there’s a clear set of beliefs the game expresses about our world, it’s just that they’re filtered through a bizarre, psychotic filter befitting it.
What Does Joke Mean, Anyway?
Much of the confusion over the game’s sincerity, I imagine, comes from a failure to distinguish between a work having jokes and a work being a joke. Cruelty Squad is chock-full of jokes. It’s a hilarious game. You have cryptocurrency bros, Funko Pop enthusiasts, and arrogant tech CEOs running amok. There’s a stock market where you…
