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.”
