That’s an interesting positive opinion you have of Kane & Lynch 2. Which video essay did you get it from?

Yeah, sorry, everyone. Kane & Lynch 2 is fucking phenomenal. I was ping-ponging between the hope that this would be as great as all of the Very Serious Gamethinkers have been putting it up as in the retrospective, and the alternative that this was a complete dumpster fire that's only been gassed up in the past few years thanks to the efforts of some people as influential as they are pretentious. Hell, that second one might still be true. Maybe I’m the pretentious dickhead and the call is coming from inside the house. What I can’t begin to deny, however, is that I loved nearly every moment of this game. It does everything that it set out to do, and is almost everything that I wanted it to be. I don’t have any idea how IO managed to trick Square Enix into funding this, and then somehow tricked them further into releasing it. What I do know is that nobody is ever going to be allowed to release something this intentionally sloppy at this scale ever again. We’re all too consolidated now. Too global, too safe. Anyone else trying to fool a Japanese studio into giving them millions to make some shit inspired by snuff films is going to be caught the second that they get the in-house translator to actually read your proposal.

Kane & Lynch 2 is alive, and it’s fucking mad. It doesn’t want to be. It knows what you want from it, and it hates you for that. Lynch ducks behind a chest-high wall or a stone pillar, and you think that it would protect him from incoming bullets, because you think that you speak the same language as Kane & Lynch 2. You think Kane & Lynch 2 wants you to play it the way that you play its contemporaries — what you believe to be its peers. Lynch gets shot while he hides in cover. Fuck you. Enemies will pepper away at your health from a distance, slowly, slowly chipping you down. If you’re not getting headshots, you’ll be doing much of the same. You expect to dig in and prepare for the slow grind, popping out whenever you can and quietly regenerating your health when under heavy fire. A guy you didn’t see then flanks you and kills you in something approximating sub-reaction time because enemy damage scales drastically based on their proximity to you. Fuck you. Gunshots and screams peak the audio track, evoking the period-accurate loudness wars and lo-fi recording equipment, leaving you in an overstimulated daze. Flashes of white and red and black and grey. So grey. Gunshots. Screams. You died. Do it again. More screams, more gunshots, more flashes. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Why are you so upset? Isn't this what you wanted? You wanted two guys with guns to go and rampage through some far-off country, never thinking twice about the bodies they're putting in the ground. You wanted stories about gritty, bad people making hard choices and killing anyone who gets in their way. You wanted these guys to be motivated solely by the excuse that they're providing for the women in their lives regardless of whether or not those women appreciate it. You wanted this. You asked for this. Now you've got it, and you're upset because you didn't understand what you were inviting into your home.

How else could this have gone?

Kane & Lynch 2 is a deeply ugly game, in every sense of the word. It has learned to hate. It hates itself, it hates you. Trying to pick out anything specific from this colorless milieu is like bobbing for bricks in a pool of wet concrete. To look at Kane & Lynch 2 is an act that requires backbone. This shit will put some hair on your chest. Don't get it twisted, though; there is purpose here. Much like its distant cousin Cruelty Squad, all of this hideousness wasn’t put in place by accident. We live in a world that’s beautiful, and to make it this utterly devoid of life, of color — yes, it was a trend at the time, but to suggest that as the only reason is to give up before you’ve considered any of the implications. If everyone was following a leader, then that leader had to have had a reason to do it first. On the surface, a lot of games looked like Kane & Lynch 2, but few games move like Kane & Lynch 2. Few games have characters as awful as Kane & Lynch 2. Few games are as unrepentantly miserable as Kane & Lynch 2.

I'm writing this right now through a splitting headache and a churning stomach brought on by an impacted wisdom tooth that I never got out, and I think that's the ideal physical state to be in while thinking about this game. I took a break after I wrote that last sentence and came back a day or two later with what’s probably a staph infection in my nose that’s probably going to need antibiotics. The cool thing about these write-ups is that there’s no sense of temporality outside of the exact context that I provide for you. I can lie, I can omit shit, I can skip over hours or days or however long I feel like skipping past and you’re forced to come along for the ride as a passive consumer. Kane & Lynch 2 will almost always give you a time, almost always a place, some sense of urgency — we need to meet for the deal tomorrow morning — but everything blurs together. In the hail of bullets and the identical-looking streets, you wind up lost. You can seek out all of the little landmarks or anchor points that you’d like, but they’re going to disappear behind walls and buildings that block your view even when you’re outdoors. In the open, in a building, it doesn’t matter. The city is built like a cell without windows. Time passes, but it’s really only clear that it is because the game is telling you that time is passing.

I cast my gaze upon Lynch, and his shitty hairline, and his awful clothes, and his destroyed mental state, and his inability to do fucking anything right besides hurt others, and my body feels as though it is flooded by divine light. I love Lynch. He's awful. He is the Elephant's Foot given flesh — a soft, advancing mass, a poisonous existence, radiating death. Less an "oh, he's just like me!", and rather a more subdued and disturbed "oh Christ, I could have been him." There’s something very raw, very pathetic about Lynch. Unlike Max Payne in his third game — a game which ripped this the fuck off, I should add — there’s nothing noble about Lynch. He’s not a poet, he’s not particularly smart, he’s not endearing. He’s a sick animal. He spends most of the firefights ranting to himself under his breath, going off about how he’s going to kill all the bastards shooting at him, but then switches gears and quietly weeps. None of this is presented as “badass” the way that a lot of mentally disturbed twisted fucking psychopath protagonists usually are. It’s pathetic. Lynch is not holding himself together, because his life is shit and it’s entirely his fault. While we get much less of Kane in this one, his story is broadly the same; he can’t stop hurting people, and he doesn’t have the excuse that he just fucked up, because always comes back for one last job. He’s addicted to this shit. Kane and Lynch deserve each other, and they deserve the life they live. They’re miserable people doling out misery and getting misery in return. The only conclusion is one where they're killed; the game ends with them getting on a plane and flying away, nothing resolved, with that responsibility shunted onto whoever has to come in and clean up after them. There is no closure. They will continue as they have been.

The only real problem I have is in the later stages of the game when Kane and Lynch hijack and helicopter and do a turret section. This alone isn’t bad. It’s an escalation that I think is a bit too far, but it’s fine. They crash land in the building they’re shooting up, then rampage through it in search of the mob-boss-cum-politician who’s been siccing his goons on the two of them. As they go through the offices below his penthouse, other helicopters fly up and start shooting at them, and it falls to the player to shoot back at the helicopters until they explode. The game, up until this point, has remained fairly grounded, and getting into helicopter fights is encroaching on Gordon Freeman’s turf. They don’t even have rocket launchers; they can blow up these helicopters with handgun rounds. It’s not necessary. The game feels far, far better when it’s a grounded shooting gallery where you can die in a fraction of a second from a guy with a MAC-10, and not when Lynch is given a sudden boost in survivability to help him in ducking minigun fire. Doubling down further on these small, lethal skirmishes would have accomplished a lot more tonally than adding helicopter minibosses.

This is Blood on the Sand if it was on purpose.