Feeding your dog an entire can of soda normally results in a very sick dog. In Cruel, however, filling your pooch with off-brand Dr Pepper gives you roguelike-style upgrades. In my first run of this frantic run-and-gun shooter, I netted a bonus that gave me extra ammo when deflecting bullets with a melee weapon. To this I responded “Hold on, you can deflect bullets?”
Kicking down the door to the next level, I swiped my axe at the first cultist to take a shot at me, and the projectile pinged off the metal axehead. “Oh wow, you can deflect bullets,” I said, before blasting the cultist’s head off with my revolver.
While it’s a fair description of your actions in the game, Cruelis running with the wrong adjective in its title. It should really be called Cool, because that’s what it is, and effortlessly so. It’s a grungy, riotously-paced shooter that has shades of Monolith’s classic gunfest Blood, as well as more recent titles like Anger Foot, where you tear through the dilapidated hallways of an apartment block that’s actively trying to kill you.
A round of Cruel starts in wickedly stylish fashion, with your character tossing their revolver into a chalk pentagram on a table, as a disembodied voice asks “Who do you want to kill?”. You’re prompted to type a response to this, and I won’t lie, a few different names ran through my head before I settled on responding “You.” “Wow, really,” the disembodied voice replied. “Well, that’s disturbing, but who am I to judge?”
Following this encounter, you’re thrown into a glowing elevator which takes you to the first floor of the apartment building, where you’ll typically be greeted by a pistol-toting cultist. Cruel will seem familiar to seasoned FPS fans for about thirty seconds, until you glance over your shoulder to discover the hallway behind you is on fire. Consequently, each level becomes a race against the flames, with you booting down doors and dealing with whatever’s inside as efficiently as you can to reach the next stage.
Cruel moves astonishingly quickly, and by that I’m not just referring to how fast your character skates around. The game feels relentless from minute one, with highly kinetic, physical gunplay underscored by a pulsing, bassy soundtrack. The basic pistol is satisfying enough to support the game in and of itself, while later weapons include double-barrelled shotguns, submachine guns, and chainsaws. I particularly like how damage is visualised by bullet-holes on the screen, accompanied by a shattering sound that makes you wince each time it triggers.
Cruel also tells you nothing about how it works, forcing you to learn on the fly. New ideas and tactics are discovered at a remarkable pace. Reloading your weapon before entering a new room is an essential survival tactic, for example, while it’s better to deal with the ash-like ghosts by hitting them with a melee weapon rather than wasting a bullet. You can also punt enemies out of windows, headshot them for an insta-kill, and throw your melee weapons at them.
Finally, Cruel also features a neat risk/reward mechanic that folds into the game’s rogue-like structure. The soda cans you guzzle to regain health can also be fed to a dog at the end of each level to gain permanent upgrades, like larger magazines and fire that burns slower. There’s even a third way you can use these fizzy drinks, stockpiling them to unleash a devastating soda attack.
Mechanically, Cruel packs an awful lot into a deceptively small package, costing just £8.50 in the UK on Steam, and less than ten dollars in the US. For this it gives you ten levels to blast through, which might not sound like much given you can complete them in a matter of minutes. But since Cruel has a roguelike structure, the challenge ramps up pretty quickly, so it’ll take you a while to master. Speaking of which, it’s past five o’clock on a Friday, and Fido’s jonesing for some sugar.