Cruelty Squad is quite quietly influential. It obviously isn’t the first game to opt for visuals that look are debatably an affront to every sense you have and a few you don’t, but its surprise level of popularity has bled into the design sensibilities of other indie devs in the years following. Games like Splatter and Dungeons of Blood and Dream certainly feel like they fit into a post-Cruelty Squad world with their ocularly maximalist approach to visuals, and now Grindset T.V. will be joining them in the ranks, an “open world speedrunning first person platformer for the freaks.”
The narrative outline for Grindset T.V. is a conceptually existentially horrifying one: “God is dead, and heaven’s gone corporate. You’re a gig worker hivemind delivering packages for Heaven in an opaque, hostile world.” How this manifests is a game where you first-person grind along beams of bright light Sonic style, hopping to and fro between neon soaked, ad-filled cityscapes picking up conveniently placed pills for that extra dose of stamina, flinging your infinitely stretching, bloody bandage covered arms at beings you find difficult to put into words in order to (I think?) deliver those packages. It’s a lot! You could probably tell that from the logline, though.
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Despite everything you see on screen hinting at a world that has no interest in letting you rest, the game is apparently designed with two types of people in mind. There’s the speedrunners, the leaderboard chasers, chasing the ghosts of others who are just that little bit better at the game. And then there’s those more interested in this post-future world where “religious zealotry and capitalist exploitation have merged,” who can just explore the game’s “densely interconnected open world,” and fulfill all manner of NPC quests or discover secrets.
Who knows how it plays in practice, it looks like the kind of game you’d expect to find next “overstimulating” in the dictionary, but sometimes that’s the vibe I’m after. No release date on this one just yet, though it is available to wishlist on Steam.
