Beauty in Misery — Analysis of Ugly Games
Ugly & grotesque design can often transcend games to become greater than the sum of their parts.
It’s no secret that games nowadays try to be cutting edge when it comes to their design. Graphics particularly are what makes people turn their heads, and when high profile game developers have to choose between a high framerate or a high resolution, they choose the latter. It’s a very old example, but this was the mindset at Insomiac Games in 2009.
Furthermore, when it comes to other presentation aspects, most notably story and voice acting, the lines are written in such a way to be important, and told with just the right tone. Hell, sometimes Hollywood gets involved with one of their writers. It’s formulated to a science.
But sometimes you don’t get this stuff, sometimes you get a game that just wants to be miserable. Ugly instead of beautiful, vulgar instead of decorous, wretched instead of admirable. These are the type of games that I absolutely adore, which is why I wanna take a step back, and talk about some games I think pull off being really fucked up really well.
Note, this is not a review of these games, but rather discussing how these games use various means to create an oppressive, ugly world to snare upon the player. We’ll also critically analyse two games today. As much as I like my rule of thirds, we’d be here all day.
Cruelty Squad
The world of Cruelty Squad is free of beauty, and filled with wretchedness, with no redeeming qualities in sight. Cruelty Squad is a first person shooter where you play as a Hitman, selling your services on a sort of Uber like platform. You are given missions to kill targets, often with no regards for others, for increasingly pretty reasons. These include to nosedive the stock price of a particular company, to just for the hell of it.
One may say that Cruelty Squad, particularly in the graphical department, is just a shitpost that seems like no thought was put into it. Every design principle is utterly mutilated, the menus have no clear structure, UI elements seem to be placed at complete random, dialogue is nonsensical and depraved, the controls are so alien and unintuitive, and character models look like Papier-mâché. Everything is just so fucked up.
But that’s the point. As random as it may seem, all the design principles were broken intentionally with a clear purpose. It creates a world for the player that is nonsensical, overwhelming, and just plain cruel. Its success lies in taking established principles, and running the opposite direction.
I think nothing illustrates the depravity of Cruelty Squad more than its gore and difficulty. People die quickly in Cruelty Squad, often leaving a bloody mess behind. When the player dies, their brain starts a countdown that leads to their entire body exploding in a shower of blood and guts. This often happens without warning. You’re encouraged to take corners slow, and drop anyone you see as soon as possible.
One way the player can increase their odds of survival is eating (yes, eating) the corpses of those who have fallen. You can even sell the organs of your enemies for some money in the in-game stock exchange where prices rise and fall. Hell, when you die too many times, the game contextualises you basically being a mound of flesh at that point.
Characters also speak with no regard for one another, people dying is just another day at the office. Even guards don’t care about collateral damage when trying to kill you. A few missions even have you kill CEOs to manipulate stock prices that you can interact with. These last points could suggest that the game is a metaphor for modern day Capitalism.
The game does provide you a non-lethal option to dispatch enemies, but it actively discourages you from using it. The description for a “Non-lethal Pistol” even begins with “As the cost of human life is low…”, pretty much just laughing at the concept of non-violence. If you want to proceed quickly and efficiently in this game, you have to contribute to the bloodshed.
Eventually you just stop seeing anything living in this game as being worth your consideration. You start getting into the rhythm of gunning down enemies into excessively gory moulds, and start to have fun with it. You are rewarded when creatively dispatching your enemies, eventually ranking you on your efforts.
It is at this point you realise the soundscape of the game. The music, sound effects, and even dialogue are all a jumbled mess, with very little in the way of cohesion. Characters talk muddily, guns sound like they just shoot air, and the music works in juxtaposition with the game’s context. It does nothing but assault your senses.
Every mechanic in Cruelty Squad is there to be provoke a sense of disgust, and utter depravity. There is nothing remotely positive, or pretty within the game. There are no characters really to speak of, no messages to be made, and no coherent purpose for doing the things that you do. You play to kill shit, and have fun doing so. No matter how you look at it, it is an ugly, ugly game. That is why it is so brilliant.
The repulsiveness of Cruelty Squad is the soul of the game. Without it, the game would be nothing more than an OK shooter. The goal of the game was to create a world that is so unbelievably horrifying, and have the player participate in it. Ugly doesn’t even come close to describing Cruelty Squad. Cruelty Squad is a game so enveloped in its depravity, that it encourages you to play along to see what it’ll do next. This is why Cruelty Squad succeeds in being a compelling piece of art, and why it should be applauded for its interpretation of a video game.
Cruelty Squad is depravity personified, and that’s why it’s so extraordinary.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
Now for something a bit more grounded. Kane & Lynch 2 is a game that has always had a mixed reception, with a few pockets of die hard fans, and a bigger pocket of people who absolutely despise it. Which is a real shame, since Kane & Lynch 2 is actually a pretty fascinating piece of art.
K&L2 has you play as Lynch, a psychotic criminal who has settled down with his girlfriend in Shanghai, China. This is until his ex-partner Kane comes from the US for a job, unleashing a chain of events that have you shooting your way through the gritty Shanghai underworld.
Much like its predecessor, K&L2 is ugly, primarily in the writing. If you were to play a drinking game counting the number of f-bombs dropped, you’d most likely be dead. Both characters are rotten to the core. They are selfish, angry, and only know violence as a response. You can’t really empathise with them, they’re just psychopaths. You can feel it the most when they talk to one another, constantly exchanging vulgarities.
You can’t talk about K&L2 without mentioning the visual style. The game is shown through a physical, handheld camera. This means the developers were able to create interesting effects on how to perceive the world. The developers wanted to make the Shanghai underworld as hideous as possible. When the player runs, the camera shakes violently, when you look at a light, it overwhelms the camera to create visual distortions. When you get shot, the camera gets covered in blood splatter, and when you die, the camera tumbles to the ground. Visual artefacts even litter the screen at points.
There are also a lot of situational effects added. A lot of the colours are very desaturated, and the lighting is always dull and soft. When you fire the Light Machine Gun weapon, the camera’s speakers get blown out. Sometimes the action gets so intense on screen, that the game will pixelate, due to the lack of adequate bit-rate. When you get a headshot with a particularly deadly weapon, the character’s face will be pixelized, so you can only imagine the amount of damage you’ve done.
Much like Cruelty Squad before, it’s easy to be killed. Headshots are fatal, and taking down an enemy can often be inconsistent. The guns are mostly inaccurate, sometimes downright impossible to hit enemies with, not helped by the fact that each weapon kicks like a mule. Couple this with the fact that enemies are in great numbers and often surround you quickly, you have a recipe for a pretty oppressive gameplay loop, one filled to the brim with violence.
Because of the nature of the gameplay, you are constantly in gunfights for the game’s short 4 hour length. It doesn’t change format throughout those 4 hours, it’s nothing but intense, difficult gunfights. One may see this as a negative, but one could also argue that it contributes to just how miserable the entire experience is. The player’s only response to conflict is violence, and when they’re finished, they’ll feel just as weary as the titular anti-heroes. Your character even sometimes talks to himself during gunfights, slowly losing control.
This was the intention. In regards to the presentation of the game, K&L2 was made as an “Anti-Game”, made to create a lonely, oppressive atmosphere. This is what art director Rasmus Poulsen was going for when designing the look of the game. Regardless of your feelings on whether the game is compelling or not, the common sentiment shared by people who both liked and disliked the game often point to its nihilistic tone. One of the most common complaints was just how miserable the game is, with nothing to light it up. This is pretty much what the developers were aiming for. Whether it was a good goal or not is up to interpretation.
The number one aspect of K&L2 that really ties it all together to me, in regards to creating a horrible, blood-soaked, oppressive hellscape is the soundtrack. K&L2 has probably, one of the most atmospheric soundtracks I have heard in a video game. I sincerely request that you give it a listen, particularly the “Restaurant” and “Final Standoff” sections. It’s pretty much a horror game at times.
The soundtrack was largely composed by Mona Mur, and you can listen to their talk here. Basically, when creating the soundtrack for a game with an oppressive atmosphere, a different approach had to be taken. Mur opted to create “Non-Music”, a soundscape that seems almost other worldly. Eventually it just becomes a part of the world, you hardly notice that you’re actually listening to any music. The music truly is one of the greatest assets of the game, and only serves to elevate the oppressive nature of the game.
There are some things that don’t really add to the atmosphere however. Some of the animations are pretty strange, and the AI can act pretty humorous at times. Sometimes you have legitimate glitches and they’re never positive. The controls can also feel overly loose. Most negative is perhaps the cover system, which usually fails to provide adequate cover. This could be used as a way to add to the oppressive atmosphere, but in the way its implemented it just feels like a glitch more than anything.
Kane & Lynch 2 is an experiment. An experiment on how games can be crafted to provide the most misery possible upon the player. The graphics, the effects, the gameplay, the writing, and the soundtrack are all designed in such a way to create an oppressive atmosphere, one that players feel weary, agitated, and sometimes even scared after a few sessions, as the player’s senses are engaged 110% of the time.
Kane & Lynch 2 is miserable. It’s not fun, it’s not inspiring, and it’s not gratifying. Those aspects is what makes the overall experience so fascinating. It’s a game that does not give a fuck about creating an awful experience for the player.
Those reasons are why I believe Kane & Lynch 2 to be so engrossing, it contributes by proposing new, more interesting ways to understand games as a interactive medium, and for that it should be respected. It has its issues, but it’s still a fascinating piece of work.
Begging the Ugly Question
With a design philosophy cantered around misery and disgust, one has to ask the question if the end result was actually worth making. It can seem at times that we’re just excusing poor gameplay choices for the sake of artistic expression. This can make it almost impossible to properly review media with the respect they deserve.
Like all things, the answer is “it depends”. Bringing it back to our two case studies, it just depends on what kind of feel the developers wanted to convey. Cruelty Squad wanted to create a world so unrecognisable and devoid of morals, achieving this by having the player partake in grotesque gunfights, and exploiting the dead for currency. Kane & Lynch 2 is similar in that it is more grounded than Cruelty Squad, but still hits similar notes. The game has you go through gunfight after gunfight with very little in the way of breaks, and they never get any easier.
Both games assault the players senses with surreal graphical styles, and a soundtrack that just drones in the back of their brain. Both games can be unwieldly to control, and punishment for mistakes are always excessive. Both games have no redeeming characters, or positive messages to propose.
Again, depending on your interpretation, one could chalk some of these to bad game design. There are definitely areas that could be improved to get a consistent feel for the game’s atmospheres. However, I believe it would be remiss to not at least analyse whether these design cues help create an interesting interpretation of the interactive medium.
I would just like to mention also, there is the concern for accessibility. While these design aspects assist in creating the intended atmosphere for the player, it does not take priority over the player’s ability to play the game. Being able to disable effects, and give the players tools to overcome any outside issues they may have is still paramount. Both games have their options, but not nearly enough.
There are a lot of other games with differing perspectives on how to create an ugly and miserable atmosphere, including:
- Manhunt
- Twisted Metal Black
- Max Payne
- Grand Theft Auto IV
- The Last of Us
- Killer7
- Most Horror Games
It’s always important to analyse these types of games, mostly because it gives us a better understanding on how the gaming medium can work for artistic expression. You don’t have to personally enjoy these interpretations, but can instead appreciate a different way of designing the player experience for games.
Isn’t that the beauty of art anyway?
Thanks for reading my article! I hope you had as much fun reading as I did writing it. What did you think of games that try hard to be miserable? Do you think it’s an interesting concept? I hope I was able to pique your interest in the idea, and it changed how you view certain games. Follow me on Twitter if you wanna read some stupid stuff I say, or connect with me on LinkedIn. Otherwise I’ll see you in my next article!
