Without putting too much weight behind it, The Darkness II’s narrative hinges on unrelenting slaughter, insatiable animus driven by a thirst for blood and a taste for flesh, where nameless mafiosos beg for sympathy in the face of humanity’s deepest fear personified. Following our protagonist, a husk holding back a being of unimaginable cruelty, we are sat front-and-center to a carnival of carnage, an audience-participation showcase of gunshot wounds and lacerations, disembowelment and bisections, an infinite abyss of bodies broken in horrific and macabre ways, a slaughterhouse founded on the non-descript goal of revenge. Jackie Estacado, the human vessel of The Darkness, carves through the underbelly of New York City on a vicious killing spree, but his butchery is, in the end, pointless; with nothing to lose and nothing to truly live for, he blindly massacres untold masses, a futile death wish with no end in sight.

Reading the obvious text of the game, the story is about Jackie’s struggle to control the eponymous Darkness, which proves inescapable and indomitable. With the Darkness holding the cards, the ethereal force drags its host onward with the promise of a final meeting with Jenny, Jackie’s fiancée, buried deep in the recesses of Hell following her murder in the previous game. But as much as The Darkness is a tale of love overcoming things beyond comprehension, of doing anything for the one you love, I can’t pretend that’s what I take away from the story. For all its bloodshed, its unbridled chaos, the Darkness itself isn’t the embodiment of humanity’s fears, nor is it an indestructible force of nature. The Darkness is grief; It’s the bitter dread of regret, the biting agony behind every mistake you made, and it’s the lashing out that follows bottling up everything inside for far too long.

Jackie, fully consumed by his own darkness, is numb to the pain he causes, to the misery around him. With the light of his life snuffed out before him, his agony, his loneliness and fear, bottle up, a powder keg waiting for a spark to set it off . The catharsis of letting the Darkness loose serves no purpose, however; despite his rage, uncapped and free flowing, Jackie finds himself alone in a Hell of his own making, his purpose for living concluding that he, as he stands, isn’t something that can safely exist in a reasonable world. Jackie isn’t to blame for the loss of Jenny, but his utter refusal to consider the possibility that her death wasn’t directly his fault leads to yet more regret, more anger, more bitterness at a world he wants no part in. The Darkness isn’t power, it isn’t the ability to tear down everything in your way, and it isn’t something to envy: It’s a slow suicide.

The Darkness II lives and breathes extremity, the sort of gorehound appeal that ran uninhibited through its comic book predecessor, but despite its grotesque grandeur, built on intense gunfights and the thrill of the kill, the extravagance of the Darkness’s malice is skin-deep; digging deeper, the nightmare isn’t the abomination you pretend to control, it’s the knowledge that you can’t fix the mistakes you’ve made, and you can’t escape the person you’ve become.