In Psycho Patrol R, the latest game from the developer of Cruelty Squad, a man in the lobby of my building is having a mental breakdown because he's trying to get his pass and he wants to visit Australia. Eventually he will snap, shooting and killing me several times before I solve the problem by shooting him in the head. Outside of the office, a farmer has become radicalized because the government won’t respect his right to dump poison in the ground. He is also shooting me, while doing a Swedish Chef version of the Howard Beale speech from Network. This problem is solved when I step on him with a mech.
Psycho Patrol R, currently in early access, is the followup to the abrasive, brilliant shooter Cruelty Squad by Consumer Softproducts (aka developer Ville Kallio), a shooter that launched many insufferable YouTube essays and countless very good speedruns. While Cruelty Squad was primarily a shooter, Psycho Patrol R bills itself as a “mecha FPS hybrid policing and punishment simulator.” You play a liberal kissass in a paramilitary wing of a nightmarish dystopian version of the EU, the Federation of Pan-Europa in the dystopian retrofuture of 2000 AD.
The Psycho Patrol are the not-so-velvet fist of liberalism, a task force founded by your beautiful, brilliant boss Lorenzo Visconti, whose prime directive is to find and violently suppress misinformation, dubbed “psychohazards.” Initially you are tasked with finding out the source of misinformation about sodium lauryl sulfate, a common ingredient in shampoo.
The Psycho Patrol is built on the principles of (real) Austrian doctor and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Anyone who has read Reich knows that he is onto something when it comes to the irrational nature of fascism being tied to sexual dysfunction – it is hard to question this when much of the Right is often formed from racist, homophobic and transphobic closet cases sublimating that impotence into hatred. He was also a beautiful, once-in-a-generation crank who believed in the power of a sexualized life force known as Orgone Energy, which he believed could be collected and harnessed, often in a big metal-lined box. This detail dovetails nicely into the lore and gameplay of Psycho Patrol R, as your character levels up their stats via Reichian self-criticism from the workplace psychologist. Your V-Stalker and certain energy weapons are powered by Orgone, and you can summon a friendly helper ghost dubbed a “bion,” which manifests as the EU logo with a big goofy cartoon smiley face.
Psycho Patrol R is a game that expects more intellectually of the player than Cruelty Squad did. Like Beyond Citadel, the game wears its influences on its sleeve, and a helpful zine with an extensive reading list of its inspirations has been provided, such as Masamune Shirow's lesser celebrated Dominion and Patlabor The Mobile Police: On Television. While both games are brutal, Psycho Patrol R falls much more in the immersive sim category, often playing out like a funhouse version of Deus Ex but with additional mech combat. When I posted about the game on social media, a response I got from multiple people was that they didn’t understand what the game actually was, because the latitude of what you can do and how you can solve problems is pretty broad.
One of your first quests is to try to remember your computer password. This can be done multiple ways: hacking your computer to reverse engineer the password, bribing the tyrannical IT guy until he tells you your password, or by a third, simpler way that takes a single keystroke. This is a game that requires that you read what’s on the screen and expects you to do critical and sometimes obtuse thinking. It often demands that you use older PC gaming muscles that may have atrophied.
You will die frequently and violently in Psycho Patrol R. Sometimes this is your own damn fault for sneaking somewhere you shouldn’t, although often it’s because a random stranger just wants to shoot you in the head. Dying is part of the job, although when you die you drop whatever money you have on your person. Initially these sudden deaths feel unfair, as is the case of the Bridge of the Sovereign, a merciless early game skillcheck. The bridge is just outside of town and features several V-Stalkers that will kill your starter machine instantly. If you take the mechs head-on you will likely be demolished. You can easily solve this by either finding better guns and armor in an adjacent combat zone, buying upgrades or by getting out of your mech, taking the gun off of it, and shooting the V-Stalkers while on foot.
Constantly dying punches a hole in your wallet, and a primary way around this is to frequently invest whatever excess money you have in the stock market, itself a holdover from Cruelty Squad. This generates passive income, which you will need, because you must pay for your ammunition out of pocket. If you constantly shoot everything that moves with a chaingun you can quickly drive yourself deep into debt. Utilizing force is often less an ethical concern so much as it is a cost/benefit analysis. See, running the government like a business can be fun!
If it was not already evident, Psycho Patrol R is one of the funniest games I’ve played in years. The world is a goofy nightmare and every interaction is filled with dry, deeply funny dialogue. When asked about his hobbies, a steroid-bound gym rat named Bramby Maximum will respond “I use the steroud [sic].” A grotesque failson of an independently wealthy man will gush to you about how many anime figurines he will buy when his father finally dies. A random NPC will entertain you with his theory of the value of people's lives being not only unequal but quantifiable, and that a CEO’s dog’s life could be theoretically worth more than that of a person’s. There’s a version of Twitter where you can see people slowly disintegrate and DM them abuse. Animals like dogs and horses have become exceedingly rare or extinct, so every animal in the game is just a person who has been grotesquely shaped into an animal (in a fashion similar to Kazuo Umezo’s Fourteen). Characters names on their own are shockingly funny, like “Jordan Grindmax, ” “Brad Gortex,” “Thierry Subaru Deontology,” “Sonboy Megapractical,” and “Fecal Sovereign,” the last one being a direct reference to an obtuse easter egg in the now-obsolete Nintendo emulator Nesticle.
Psycho Patrol R has a long road to completion. Some exits to unbuilt zones in the game are clearly marked off while others are not. A few times I walked down a hall and fell off the map, but thankfully cyanide capsules have been patched into the game in case you get stuck. Despite its early access status, I am impressed by how much is already present, and I managed to clock about 27 hours in the game as is before wrapping the current main story mission. The world initially feels gargantuanly empty, but then you’ll hit a manhole cover or a secret door and find a complex, sprawling hidden world. The grotesque PlayStation 1 style of the game heightens this sparsity but deeply rewards exploring every inch. Psycho Patrol R feels like a nod to Osamu Sato’s LSD: Dream Emulator, not just in its nightmarish dreamscape sprites and clanging, willfully atonal soundtrack but also in the capriciousness of the world’s construction. Psycho Patrol R is the diary of the nightmares of Europe.
Though the reaction to the game has been overwhelmingly positive, I have seen complaints online about its difficulty, which I understand theoretically but disagree with. All games in early access need balancing, but Psycho Patrol R feels like a logical endpoint. If Ville Kallio had made a softer, easier game following Cruelty Squad I would have been deeply disappointed. And while the game can feel initially disorienting by design, there’s a fairly decent quick start guide in the menu that tells you most of what you need to know. Much of this feels less like a developer making something hard out of sadism and more like the growing pains of a game being difficult in a manner foreign to an existing fanbase. The game is also immensely breakable, and once you get the lay of the land, you can get to the current “end” of it in about four minutes, if that’s how you want to play. I’ve been enjoying watching players on YouTube develop new methods for turning Psycho Patrol R inside out, although I would recommend that you initially try it without help.
I cannot know what Psycho Patrol R will become and what it is attempting to say just yet; it is an incomplete work and I’m not even sure the developer can fully anticipate where it will end. But the world it constructs feels both apropos and dryly funny in the most Finland-coded way possible. It has the potential to be one of those rare games that approaches literature. To play Psycho Patrol is to feel that rot-gut sensation about the world generally and Europe specifically.
Pan-Europa is full of mentally ill stochastic violence mediated by overt counter violence from the state, where humans are animalized into dogs and some men seek liberation in the sewers. The internet is poison and the only path to stability is your investment portfolio and a capricious market. There is no liberation or hope, no answer to the swelling tide of fascism save militant managerial liberalism. There is only your boss, who you worship like a god, and the promise of a modest promotion down the line after doing your job objectively poorly and being ripped apart by gunfire, flesh rats, and shrapnel roughly 87 times.
