President Beep posted:

just call it something really boring like “best thermal paste?”

quote:

Cyberpunk as a modern genre has an identity problem. The genre was originally meant to embody what technological advancement could look like if we don't pump the brakes, to show what rampant consumerism and capitalist grind culture could do to our human identity. For all intents and purposes, the "punk" side of cyberpunk was meant to imbue a sense that cyberpunk media is protest art. It's a bleak, but paradoxically beautiful mirror to hold up to our own society; unfortunately, that beauty often undermines its own message.

This is where that aforementioned problem begins. I've recently been consuming a lot of cyberpunk media: the titular Cyberpunk 2077, Neon Giant's The Ascent, and Star Wars Bad Batch, which dabbles in some cyberpunk ideas from time to time. These works transport you to detailed, lived-in, ridiculously beautiful tech wastelands. The lights, the spaceships, the seas of people, and the constant sense of dynamic adventure are all there in many cyberpunk works.

However, that feeling the sci-fi gloss often imparts can contradict with the real problems that the cyberpunk genre seeks to reveal. All the grit doesn't keep you from thinking, "I want to live there, or at least see it." A lot of cyberpunk fiction falls flat as a cautionary tale for this reason.

Booting up Cruelty Squad for the first time took courage. I mean, look at this thing. The menus, the border around the screen, the massive blob of a health bar, and the brown note soundscape do everything in their power to grate on your senses. Dialogue sounds like something out of an Animal Crossing creepypasta, everyone is obsessed with Chunkopops and Gorbino's Quest, I could go on and on. Cruelty Squad is a deeply, profoundly ugly game; that's a strength, not a weakness.

The world of Cruelty Squad is so far down the corporate hypercapitalist rabbit hole that it doesn't even matter anymore. The rich have figured out how to come back from death itself, so the value of human life has dropped far below 0. Everyone in Cruelty Squad's world is either obsessed with some product lifestyle, corporate fad, or doing enough drugs to be able to keep up with both. The player character is a member of the Cruelty Squad, a privately owned contract killer organization that does the bidding of larger conglomerates obsessed with their bottom line. This game's world is just oozing with venom for the corporate future we could be heading towards, and you can see that in every frame.

Cruelty Squad's transgressive design doesn't keep it from being a drat good immersive sim. Each level tasks you with killing a target or two and escaping, which is simple enough on paper. In practice, your preferred playstyle could send you on a unique route through the level due to the game's open-ended design. Shoot open doors, break vents in the ceiling, grapple hook through windows, or barge through the front door if you'd like; Cruelty Squad's commitment to player freedom is strong, so strong that you can completely glitch out of the map to beat levels if you want to.

There are heaps upon heaps of secret weapons, augments, and missions to find throughout the world, lending replay value to the game's campaign. Although the AI is ArmA 3 jank tier at all times, the enemies are dangerous and the time to kill is low. The secrets, the open level design, and the dangerous enemies all force you to really look at what you're playing, which is a great way to pull you into Cruelty Squad's twisted world.

Where other cyberpunk fiction is bleak, Cruelty Squad is rotten. The game imbues its ideas and messages about corporate greed and consumer culture into its world so deftly that you could be mistaken for thinking the mess of textures and assaulting soundscape of its world were thrown together haphazardly; make no mistake, the hideousness, the true grit of Cruelty Squad's world is absolutely intentional. This is a cyberpunk (although some might call it biopunk but that's splitting hairs) work that actually has something to say, and expects you to agree; I don't want to go to Cruelty Squad's world, and the game nods along with my assessment.

In its final hours, Cruelty Squad gets very abstract and existential. A huge portion of the community's discourse around this game involves Cruelty Squad's endings and what they imply about the game world and our own. This is one of those games I'd expect forums to light up about for years to come, debating its true meaning and finding value in the nonsense. Don't ask me to make sense of it because I barely could, but what I got instead was an experience both unique and truly cyberpunk.

Cruelty Squad's critique of our world is laser focused and wrapped in a package brimming with secrets, and that makes me a happy little flesh ape. It's absolutely worth the price tag, and it's worth pushing through the grime to see the message just underneath.

shoeberto posted:

I've only done the first two missions, but imsim is sort of a weird label for it, yeah. Level design and customization seem imsim-ish but the actual beat-by-beat combat feels almost like Rainbow 6 or a slowed down single player Counter-Strike.

bob dobbs is dead posted:

whats happening concretely? metagaming, lawyering, group not bein buddies, That Guy (cat piss man)ism, or what?

A Wheezy Steampunk posted:

i think the mac version of simcity 2000 has the best music but the playstation version is pretty good too. i was searching for mp3s of the playstation version and found this other pretty good version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8AGa17256k&t=201s

Ciaphas posted:

and a completely fixed world, yes. no procgen to be found

story's introduced by emergency radio transmissions to your lifepod and simply Going Deeper

A Wheezy Steampunk posted:

https://www.davidoreilly.com/mountain

Kazinsal posted:

Kuvo posted:

the main story ends after 10th escape

FAT32 SHAMER posted:

subnautica remains the only sp game i've ever played, repeatedly, to completion

CRIP EATIN BREAD posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQedbiQAkXM

Jonny 290 posted:

if the first three letters of your tweet are "tfw" you're a lazy piece of poo poo

SmokaDustbowl posted:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1449931675329175556

shoeberto posted:

there's just only so much time in your life to do that with multiple games.