Cruelty Squad got awarded by The National Arts Councils of the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike)

The National Council for Audiovisual Art has awarded the State Prize for Media Art 2023 to visual artist Ville Kallio.

Ville Kallio was awarded in recognition of his meritorious work in the field of media and games as art. Kallio’s solo video game Cruelty Squad (2021) is artistically, content-wise and technically an ambitious and successful work in which his distinctive style emerges, both visually and narratively.

Cruelty Squad envisions a hyper-capitalist dystopian future in which everything is commercialised. At first impression, the work is a visually harrowing, hectic and skill-demanding video game. The more players immerse themselves in the game, the more they will find a lot of sharp social criticism within it, as it raises deep questions about human dignity and justice. Cruelty Squad is an internationally successful, artistically uncompromising and original work whose creator deserves to be noted for his artistic achievements also in Finland.

Ville Kallio (b. 1990) is a visual artist from Helsinki who works in many fields, including drawing, painting, video and sculptures, and in recent years especially with video games. His works have been shown internationally, including at the Feels Like Memeplex exhibition in Plymouth in 2023 and the Pet Cemetery exhibition in Athens in 2019.