The Protagonist / "Empty Fuck" / "Freak Shit" / MT Foxtrot / Jeremy Coomer / "John Cruelty"
The unnamed protagonist of Cruelty Squad. Formerly a soldier of the "SEC Death Unit," the game opens with him being offered a job with the titular gig assassin agency.
- Ambiguously Brown: He seems to be dark-skinned based on his character model, but the game's low-resolution graphics makes it hard to tell.
- Ambiguously Human: The degree of mutations he incurs throughout the game gradually devolves to an extent it’s not clear if he’s human on a genetic level any more.
- Anime Hair: He has what looks like a bright purple flattop.
- Anti-Villain: A Punch-Clock Villain and Tragic Villain. While he’s a brutal murderer, he only does it because he needs the money and he’s too depressed and traumatized to do anything else.
- Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: Implied in the two of the endings, he ends up ascending to godhood and unmakes the universe. The Golden Ending even has him outright destroy it, which restores the natural balance of life and death.
- Ax-Crazy: A downplayed example. While he doesn't enjoy gunning down scores of people, he never expresses any guilt over it either, simply viewing it with complete indifference.
- The Blank: Comments and an NPC in the first level imply that Power In Misery mode literally removes his face due to the mutations it inflicts.
- Butt-Monkey: Empty's life is full of misfortune and hardship. Even though he goes on dangerous combat missions as part of his dayjob, he's not paid very well for his work and his employers view him as expendable at best. His apartment even gets invaded by federal agents at one point because the company he works for made a filing error, after which he returns to work as if nothing happened.
- Cop Killer: A number of missions have him mowing down legions of police officers with the same stoicism and ruthlessness he shows all his other opponents.
- Deconstructed Character Archetype:
- Mainly of the Silent Experienced Protagonist with equippable powers and upgrades to make him an unstoppable killer. Where one would be expecting the perfect avatar for their power fantasy, the protagonist is instead a broken shell of a being that is simply far too apathetic to verbally communicate. Resigned in his depressing life experiences, he uses combat experience gained from his time at a death squadron he was just laid off from to be a contracted killer treated the same way a pizza guy delivers food. Any moments of emotions he may feel are in the form of off-screen "freakouts" he's being conditioned to hide and lessen.
- There's also Deconstruction of the Corporate Samurai, as a reliable and deadly button man under the employ of a megacorporation is not something worth striving to be: He's expected to follow through with his dodgy company's high demands and standards even if he isn't sufficiently equipped to face the brutality of each level. Since it's only through their Offscreen Villain Dark Matter that they can respawn and try again, they're at Cruelty Squad's mercy and should be careful if they die one too many times for "hogging" the recombinator. He's such a doormat that after HQ accidentally sends a hit on him due to negligent dialing, they expect him to simply shrug it off and go back to work the next day like they do. And he's so entrenched in his apathy that this is exactly what he does.
- Empty Shell: As his fan nicknames would suggest, he's so beaten down by the dismal state of his life that he responds to every situation he encounters with apathetic silence.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: An apathetic loser assassin who ends up ascending to Godhood and unmakes the universe.
- Guest Fighter: Shows up as a pilot in Brigador under the codename MT Foxtrot (a play on the nickname Empty Fuck).
- Hidden Depths: He's a broken down shell of a man, but he turns out to be a pretty good fisherman.
- Loser Protagonist: The game itself describes him as a depressed loser with nothing going on in his life outside of the wetwork he does for marginal pay.
- Lovecraftian Superpower: A lot of his modifications come across this way.
- Megaton Punch: Most FPS melee attacks are an instant kill. Empty Fuck, however, takes it above and beyond with his kick attack. Punched Across the Room doesn't even begin to describe it.
- Mysterious Past: The game doesn't reveal a lot about his past outside of the fact that he's deeply depressed by his bad life experiences.
- One-Man Army: For all his failings, he's very, very good at his job. Or not.
- He's capable of fending off an attack from Cruelty Squad itself and manages to kill several members of the task force.
- Punch-Clock Villain: There’s no indication he takes any pleasure in what he does for a living. But then there’s no indication he takes any pleasure in anything.
- Scary Black Man: He appears to be black and he's a contract killer who slays hundreds of people over the course of the game. It's somewhat downplayed since he’s a very sad figure in a lot of ways. There isn't really anything cool or intimidating about him, given that he goes through life apathetically following other people's orders and never speaking up for himself.
- Seen It All: He has extensive combat experience and he never seems to be surprised or shocked at any of the bizarre situations he stumbles on during his job. Then again, he may just be so completely emotionally and mentally broken that he just doesn't (or can't) care.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: It's implied he's troubled from his time with the SEC Death Unit.
- Sociopathic Soldier: Heavily implied to have been a variant of "The Broken Soldier", resigned to severe depression after working the day-today in a government death squad. Now he takes any combat experience he earned from that time into his new trade of corporate murder-for-hire.
- The Soulless: Implied if you die enough times to enable the Flesh Automaton difficulty, as it's said that the protagonist's "divine link" is severed and he is described as a flesh automaton controlled by neurotransmitters, giving the impression that whatever made him alive was just cut off from him.
- The Stoic: Played With. He basically never says anything, nor displays any emotional response to just about anything, but it doesn't come from a place of discipline or stoicism, but rather because he's extremely depressed and also on a "Special" cocktail of combat drugs. Some of it also comes from a mental conditioning app as required for his job, and his handler comments that he can't have "freakouts", implying that's an issue Empty has.
- Sunglasses at Night: He always has his shades on, even when he's showering.
- This Loser Is You: Despite being a killing machine, he's an unstable and miserable sad sack who is completely apathetic towards his life, works a job he doesn't like, and feels like he wasted his youth.
- Tragic Villain: Ultimately, Empty is a severely traumatized and depressed person who has consigned himself to his line of work because he believes there’s no where else he can go.
- The Unsmile: His default expression could be interpreted as a sort of mirthless non-smile.
- The Voiceless: He's presumably capable of speech given that other characters in the world converse with him but he's never shown speaking outside of grunting or making a distinct "Mmmm" sound when he eats food (or corpses) for health.
- Villain Protagonist: Over the course of the game he kills dozens of targets, many of them innocent, along with almost certainly getting hundreds of civilians killed in the cross-fire, doing so for money from his deranged evil MegaCorp employers.
- Why Am I Ticking?: If his health drops below 0, instead of dying right away, a chip embedded into his brain activates a self-destruction mechanism which explodes his body after a few seconds.
- Working-Class Hero: Well, more like Working Class Villain Protagonist. His employment in Cruelty Squad is coded to be a lot like being a gig economy assassin: paid measly wages for each kill, having limited human interaction for his job, and his employment being apparently very easy to obtain.
The Handler
"Hey, it's me. Did I wake you up from your depression nap?"
The protagonist's employer. He's the one who offers the protagonist a job with the Cruelty Squad. They have some sort of prior working relationship that isn't elaborated on.
- Ambiguously Human: It’s unclear if he’s just a badly deformed/mutated human or something entirely different.
- Ax-Crazy: Towards the end game he starts directing you to murder the elites of the world outside of anything contracted for you just because he thinks it would be funny. It escalates to him higher-ups of your own organization and reaches its worst point when he encourages you to face "the ULTIMATE PUNISHMENT".
- Face–Heel Turn: He unexpectedly and without warning turns on you, sending a group of Cruelty Squad members to kill you in one mission. In the next mission he briefly apologizes, stating that it was due to an error at HQ.
- Fat Bastard: He is a morbidly obese pig-man and a generally unpleasant person.
- For the Evulz: When he starts having Empty gunning for the higher-ups in the final acts of the game, he seems to mostly be doing it for a laugh.
- Humanoid Abomination: It's never explained why he looks like a horrible pig monster rather than a normal human being.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Well, as gold as a heart can be in this universe. While he’s initially aloof and installs weird bodily mutations into you, he gradually shows that he does actually like you in later levels.
- Mission Control: His main function in-game is to provide you with information about the people you're going to assassinate.
- Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: His messages get very deranged at certain points throughout the game, especially near the end.
- Mysterious Past: What relationship he had with Empty Fuck in the past isn't clear, but what's obvious is that there is a relationship. He's introduced by mockingly asking if he's woken up Empty from his depression nap and calling him a "fucked up detached loser", while also giving him a needed job offer that he thinks Empty can enjoy: Vitriolic Best Buds, or just vitriolic?
