Of course, mainstream discussion on games as art was only in its nascent stage in 2010. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is very much a mass-market art game, employing its imitation of blown-out digital video to provide a strange new texture underutilized in video games. Instead, I’ll suggest that the unwarranted critical failure of Dog Days had more to do with a games culture ill-equipped with the language to talk about the game when it was released in 2010. That’s a controversy that has only entrenched mainstream games criticism and the discussion about “ethics” further into moronic mudslinging (a general discourse embarrassingly intensified with added misogyny in the past year and a half), and I’m uninterested in examining the matter further. If the game evoked such artistic influences and promoted themes as deep and varied as I’ve argued, then why did Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days suffer the mindless, negative groupthink it faced upon release (and often still does)? Kane & Lynch in general was plagued by a number of factors, including the shallow criticism that Dog Days was too short and had unpolished shooting mechanics, but most infamously, its predecessor was marred with the firing of writer Jeff Gerstmann for giving it a mixed review score.
The implied presence of an unseen camera operator following Kane and Lynch throughout the game adds a layer of remove from the atrocities committed onscreen, trailing a legacy of similarly minded video games like Manhunt and Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. These are images that exist in the same intellectual headspace as filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard who crafted similar painterly smears of pixelated light and color in late works Film Socialisme or Goodbye to Language. It’s also a game about images and our relation to it Dog Days presents an unparalleled aesthetic of snuff film-esque, low-grade home video footage as though captured on a cheap cell phone. Dog Days stands apart as one of the most concise statements of video game violence and evil, elaborating on the themes of predecessor Dead Men with greater success in a self-contained, standalone story. Their domestic bliss is cut short when they provoke a gang war and lawless manhunt after playing a role in the unforeseen killing of a corrupt politician’s daughter with ties to the local mob. The game follows the titular characters reuniting in Shanghai, China, after settling down and following a more mundane lifestyle. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days has a basic story, but I get the feeling that IO was more concerned with chiseling an urgent work of art than drawing clean narrative lines. Other times, the game favors the brash immediacy of bodily flesh and movement, touting impressionistic images that emphasize blurred textures over straightforward dramaturgy and visual clearness. In certain stretches of gameplay, Dog Days emits a heavy, atmospheric gloom during shootouts so that action feels poetically forlorn and languid, like a funereal pall hanging over the proceedings.
I’ve written at length about Dog Days before, having published a piece on the game’s rough and nihilistic surrealism for Unwinnable, but this game demands greater examination given the depths of its engagement with a slew of themes, artistic influences, and narrative risks. What Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days presents is an abstract catalogue of death and misery with Cormac McCarthy-esque levels of lyrical bleakness. IO Interactive’s 2010 game Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is, in many respects, an undervalued masterpiece drawing from this artistically expressive moment in cinematic history and was woefully shunned by a video game culture too reactionary and shortsighted to engage with it. Films like Miami Vice or Inland Empire experimented with what the technology could do, showcasing longer shadows, overexposed lighting, more vibrant colors, grainy nighttime footage, extreme focal lengths, and more fragmentary editing patterns achieved with computer programs. While low-grade and crude at the time, digital video became a worthwhile tool for artists like Michael Mann and David Lynch who adopted the crude format to make visually abstract, often confrontational, works.
Replaying Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, I find myself often reminded of the rich discourse in film culture following the rise of inexpensive digital video aesthetics in the early 2000s. The aesthetic strategies of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days in expressing a documentarian style and commenting on our relation to images.