The FPS/mecha hybrid from the creator of Cruelty Squad, which was an immersive sim designed to make you feel sick, will be out next year

In-development screenshot of game Psycho Patrol R. It is a low-poly, low-fidelity graphical style with deliberately clashing colors and interface elements.

(Image credit: Consumer Softproducts)

Remember Cruelty Squad? The dystopian assassin game whose visuals and especially sounds gave you an instant headache and made you want to throw up? Well, if you're a glutton for that kind of punishment, Cruelty Squad's creator Consumer Softproducts will have more of it for you in 2025.

In Psycho Patrol R you'll get to play an officer of "a special unit tasked with counter-psychohazard operations and neural meltdown prevention using cutting edge criminological frameworks." Which means you're a cop with a mechsuit you can put on when you'd like to escalate matters, but can also just walk around talking to NPCs on foot. It's an open-ended choose-your-own path kind of thing.

Also, you'll be able to customize your mech. Given that Cruelty Squad let you use your own guts as a grappling hook, I'm guessing those upgrades will be pretty twisted. Other features include weapons that vary "from small arms to 120mm cannons and DNA sniffers", "Unique NPCs to meet and interact with", and the possibility you might succeed and "Solve the mystery of the Orgone."

Psycho Patrol R is coming out in early access, but will launch with "one full main quest line, lots of side quests, more than ten different areas to explore, and numerous items and weapons." More quests, weapons, levels and so on will be added and polished over the course of the year or so it spends in early access, beginning with its launch on March 31. You can find out more about Psycho Patrol R on its Steam page.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.