While the mere sight of Cruelty Squad may make you sick, the game passes the most important immersive sim test with bright, nauseating colors. In one play, I quietly assassinated a bouncy castle made of flesh using a classic vent route; in the next, I switched to a rocket launcher and tried a more direct approach, using my internal organs as a grappling hook. I stacked enough barrels to climb the entire building and took out several targets with perfectly timed snipers from all over the map.

Cruelty Squad would be Deus Ex if it were made today, a natural product of an angry people exhausted by wealth inequality, police militarization, and stubborn structures that keep humanity rolling toward total soul annihilation. Yee-haw.

But Cruelty Squad wants to have some fun before the inevitable end. This stealth-action game encourages the pure, lizard-brain pleasure of feeling like you've outsmarted your designer through wild experimentation, even if you're doing exactly what the designer expected. Like in "Hitman," you can experience the catharsis of taking down the absolute worst human being alive. It's an audiovisual marvel, a virtual world collapsing before your eyes. It's a vision of a future where people are considered subsidiaries of corporations and the arms market ebbs and flows depending on the type of gun licensed for use in popular cartoons.

You are a hired assassin in the bad future, committing murders on behalf of the Brutal Squad, "a corrupt subsidiary tasked with framing for the host conglomerate." The structure is similar to "Hitman". Once you have the guns and tools, you explore huge levels, avoiding and killing guards, finding efficient routes and vantage points, and killing cleanly and quickly.

Successful kills and rescues will give you money for modifications, from basics like body armor to powered-up legs for higher jumps. Also, any guns found in the level will be added to your arsenal and can be brought into any mission. It's a very rewarding track, where you can replay previous levels to discover new things while pursuing a more aggressive or stealthy play style.

It's fun to keep on your toes while mastering the strange layout of each level, learning enemy placement, directions, and navigation. It's also fun to die over and over to find the perfect sniper's nest or stealth infiltration route (or demon summoning circle). It's just as much fun to do it over and over again with new weapons and tools, like the DNA scramble pistol that turns enemies into static gut explosions or the tape player embedded in your arm for some reason, as it was the first time around.

Dying takes you back to the beginning of the mission, but the Cruelty Squad never loses momentum. By harvesting organs from corpses or catching fish and selling them on the virtual stock market, you can keep the cash flowing and get new body mods. Some guns have damage that varies with the amount of money you have. Subtle Comment" Not at all, but I respect the outrage of the cruelty squad's open mockery of all late capitalism. Let's vent together.

Cruelty Squad's spaces are so easy to lose track of time, each with a clear premise and seemingly endless secrets to dig up. I played through the level on the outskirts of a deranged wood block five times before I found a pitch-black catacombs filled with gruesome things beneath the city. The Cancer City Megamall consists of a massive atrium and an outdoor plaza patrolled by towering cyborg cops, literally a maze of vents that function like blood vessels, ignoring their usefulness only to riff on classic immersive sim clichés.

There is a gunfight in a strong apartment building, where you are actively hunted from the start. I found several hidden levels, each wilder than the last and tripping into seemingly impossible spaces inhabited by nightmares; Cruelty Squad's level design is wide-ranging, sometimes even becoming a complete horror game.

My eyes hurt as I scan the truly bizarre spaces of "Cruelty Squad," sharply shifting polygons plastered with low-resolution textures and tense, smiling faces. The art is a grotesque wonder, not a gimmick for the Steam store thumbnail, but a cohesive vision of an intensely stressed, sick, rotting, irredeemable world.

NPC faces shift beneath the polygons, the sky pulses with reds and purples, and the soundtrack underscores the horror with sparse sounds and hums like a Game Boy blending into the burning blackboard of a dollar store parking lot. "Cruelty Squad" is one of the most sinister and upsetting games I have ever played. One of the most sinister and unsettling games I've ever played, I'm absolutely in love with this total dedication to such an alien tone.

Other than a few weapons with surprising hooks, most of Cruelty Squad's 20+ weapons are fairly modest. Handling is realistically oriented, with recoil and spray patterns, and accuracy is compromised if you look around corners, keep shooting, or aim from the hip. My favorite is the New Safety M62 revolver, which has a beautiful delay and subtle tilt animation to simulate a slow pull of the trigger. And the Balotelli Hyper Nova shotgun has a solid, impacting recoil that is as effective as sending out a slug full of gravel at medium range. It's sickeningly satisfying.

I like the contrast between the playful setting and the more grounded gunplay. Pressing shift zooms. Interact is mapped to the R key. Most oddly, to reload, you have to right-click and hold the mouse back. But over time, it feels wonderful, like you're shifting gears in a killer guy's car.

While I don't want to gesture reload in every FPS game, it does add to Cruelty Squad's unique pace and tension. Especially when you have to hastily bring the mouse back to reload and reaim before the guard turns around and realizes his dead buddies are behind him. Keeping the cursor straight requires composure, a unique challenge in a game that hits like Winamp's music visualizer.

This initial maneuver shock is intentional, both as a sign that the game should not be played like other shooters, but also to compensate for the extremely simple enemy behavior. The enemy is dumb and acts like police bait cast by the Cruelty Squad. They just shoot on sight, clumsily scattering and repositioning themselves, and relentlessly pursuing you. It reminds me of the old "Rainbow Six" or "Hotline Miami," where reflexes and precision, backed by good recon, are more important than improvised FPS dancing.

In Cruelty Squad, top-notch enemy AI is not important, as a single enemy can kill you in one or two seconds of concentrated fire. What matters is sneaking into the middle of a hornet's nest and escaping alive.

Occasionally, experimental enemies will appear, some of them terrifying, hijacking your FOV and launching a wave of morbid illusions as they close in on you. Nevertheless, once you know the layout of the level, defeating the bad guys is a bit too simple.

Still, it's okay: Cruelty Squad transcends such minor issues with its wild level design and the breadth of tools it gives you to explore it. And what makes this game truly special is that it maintains the perfect tension between fun and disgusting throughout. This is PC game horror at its finest.

When I took down the mayor of Megamall's Cancer City for the fourth time, the machine-gun-equipped police cyborgs went berserk. They were not programmed to protect citizens, and they tore through the crowd that had gathered for the speech as they pursued me. As I left, I thought about the wasted organs that were not trading on the stock market.

But I don't think anyone in the cruelty squad is thinking kindly. This world is sick and rotting, rotting flesh falling from its bones. All that remains is the fragile skeleton of PC Gamer's favorite pastime: computer games. And, by golly, it's a good one.