Cruel is a frantic shooter where you push cultists out of the windows of a cursed apartment building that wants you dead.
If you feed your dog an entire can of soda, he will usually get very sick. However, in Cruel, infusing your dog with someone else’s brand of Dr Pepper gives you roguelike-style upgrades. In my first run of this crazy shooter, I received a bonus that gave me extra ammo when deflecting bullets with a melee weapon. To this I replied: “Wait, can you deflect bullets?”
After breaking down the door to the next level, I swung my ax at the first cultist who fired at me, causing the projectile to bounce off the metal tip of the axe. “Wow, you can deflect bullets,” I said before shooting the cultist with my revolver.
While it’s a fair description of what you’ll do in the game, Cruelis works with the wrong adjective in its title. He really should be called “Cool” because that’s what he is, and it’s effortless. It’s a gritty, unruly shooter that has shades of Monolith’s classic gunplay Blood, as well as later games like Anger Foot, where you fight your way through the crumbling hallways of an apartment building that’s actively trying to kill you.
The Cruelty round begins in incredibly stylish fashion, with your character throwing his gun at a chalked pentagram on the table as a disembodied voice asks, “Who do you want to kill?” You’ll be prompted to type a response to this, and I won’t lie, a few different names were running through my head before I decided to answer “You.” “Wow, really,” the disembodied voice responded. “Well, it’s alarming, but who am I to judge?”
After this encounter, you are thrown into a glowing elevator, which takes you to the first floor of an apartment building, where you are usually greeted by a cultist with a gun. It’ll feel brutal for seasoned first-person shooter fans for about thirty seconds until you look over your shoulder to find the hallway behind you on fire. Consequently, each level becomes a race against the flames as you load up the doors and deal with everything inside as efficiently as possible to reach the next stage.
Cruel moves amazingly fast, and I don’t just mean how fast your character rolls. The game feels relentless from minute one, with highly dynamic physics-based gunplay highlighted by a pulsating, bass-heavy soundtrack. The base pistol is good enough to support the game on its own, and later weapons include double-barreled shotguns, submachine guns, and chainsaws. I especially like how damage is visualized as bullet holes on the screen, accompanied by a destruction sound that makes you wince every time it goes off.
Cruel also doesn’t tell you anything about how it works, forcing you to learn on the fly. New ideas and tactics are being discovered at an astonishing rate. For example, reloading your weapon before entering a new room is an important survival tactic, although it is better to deal with ash-like ghosts by hitting them with a melee weapon rather than wasting a bullet. You can also throw enemies out of windows, shoot them in the head for an instant kill, and throw melee weapons at them.
Finally, Cruel also has clever risk/reward mechanics that fit into the game’s roguelike-like structure. The soda cans you devour to restore health can also be fed to the dog at the end of each level to receive permanent upgrades such as larger magazines and fire that burns slower. There’s even a third way to use these carbonated drinks: stack them up to unleash a devastating carbonated attack.
Technically, Cruel packs a lot into a deceptively small package that costs just £8.50 in the UK on Steam and under ten dollars in the US. To do this, you are given ten levels to complete, which may not seem like much considering that you can complete them in a matter of minutes. But since Cruel has a roguelike structure, the difficulty ramps up quite quickly, so it’ll take you a while to get the hang of it. By the way, it’s already past five o’clock on Friday and Fido is dreaming of sugar.