Short Thoughts: Cruelty Squad is the Best Looking Ugly Game

Cruelty Squad is a thoroughly bizarre title, with its obscure story, character progression, and even controls… just look at how you have to reload if you want to understand this game's strange design choices. But none stand out more than its utterly brain-bending visuals. While this is by no means a completely original thought, Cruelty Squad does often get dismissed as the “haha LSD visuals” sort of game, completely ignoring the fact that its visual identity is completely intentional and genuinely impressive.

It’s easy to make bad-looking visuals in a game, from badly tiling textures to bad scaling and colouring. There are so many options within the realm of game design to make something that looks bad, but Cruelty Squad manages to take many of the game's core themes and concepts and weave them into the visual identity in a very subtle manner. Much of the game revolves around the concept of overwhelming capitalism across all forms, along with the complete and utter lack of worth within the human body — which is heavily shown and forced with access to a literal stock market for organs being a prime money-making opportunity. In some areas, many of the textures and locations are absolutely saturated with horribly bright and contrasting colours in a way which doesn’t feel badly made; it’s designed to make you feel unhappy, to see how wrong and disturbed this world truly is. In the Paradise mission, there are some indoor walls textured entirely with horribly compressed images of Funko Pop’s, tiled back to back, which not only look awful but tie into the game’s core identity of a horribly corporate world, where even trivial amenities are nothing more than a building block to earn the companies more money.

While I could very possibly be looking way too deep into many of the design philosophies, and much of the world, I am incredibly certain that the gross design of the world is purely intentional and, in my eyes, genuinely far more impressive than typical graphical fidelity.