she a bad bish uwu

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.

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.

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.

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.