Not a Review of Kane & Lynch (2007)

Kane and Lynch are totally bad-ass dudes. You know this from the very start because their names are “Kane” and “Lynch”. Mr. Kane is a criminal with big scars on his face who has run afoul of other criminals. They’re holding his wife and daughter hostage and are forcing him to do more terrible things. You’d think a guy who kills cops for breakfast would have considered the possibility that his beatific and passive female family wouldn’t be super safe, but the kidnapping comes as a surprise. “I thought they wouldn’t find you!” he says to them.

I feel like it’s much too easy to saddle some angry video game antihero with a daughter that he has to protect. It patly justifies why he’s shooting or otherwise killing everyone in front of him: it’s for his daughter! They use this device in a lot of other games. The Japanese developers of Nier even changed the story of their game for America. Instead of Mr. Nier fighting to save his sister (Yonah), the American version has Mr. Nier fighting to save his daughter (Yonah). I’m picturing the meeting where this was decided: “Well, here in Japan we all love our sisters the most”– everyone at the table looks around and nods in agreement– “but in America, they love their daughters the most.”

Anyway, you start the game as Mr. Kane, in one of those orange California State Prison jumpsuits that can withstand many more bullets than the bulletproof vests the guards are wearing. Kane & Lynch was developed by IO Interactive in Copenhagen, Denmark. This may explain why hardened criminals who’ve just been busted out of maximum security jail shout things like “get a move on!” to each other during intense firefights. It is also possible that the dialogue was written by a former World War II sergeant.

The masterminds of the criminal underworld then assign Mr. Lynch, a psychologically unstable man who experiences blackout episodes, to keep a watchful eye on Mr. Kane.

“Why are you being so mean,” someone says. “Obviously the story is pulpy on purpose.” Maybe. I submit for consideration the sequence where the evil bad guys commandeer one of those giant dump trucks at a construction site and try to use it to run over Kane’s fourteen year old daughter, and you, playing as Kane, have to shoot the dump truck to stop it before it gets to her. (This is after a big gun battle. They even shoot at you from the dump truck as they’re driving towards the daughter.) And it’s played totally straight, like I’m supposed to find it harrowing. If I don’t shoot it enough, the giant dump truck runs over the daughter, and I have to try again, and I miss again, and I witness many repetitions of the giant dump truck running her over (slowly– Austin Powers style) before I get the aim right and proceed to the next level. A video game has to allow for the possibility of loss, of getting it wrong, in order to be a game at all. But after the third or fourth or fifth try at a sequence like this, even the most artfully summoned emotional power (which this is not) can degrade into silliness.

Kane & Lynch is definitely not one of those titles that comes up when people talk about if games can be art or respected like other media. It’s the kind of game that people who are worried about violent and morally bankrupt video games imagine most video games to be. On top of that, it is a poor game and not very fun to play. The characters are difficult to control and they are constantly swearing in bizarre ways (“you’re on your fucking own!”), making its core experience one of alienation and toxic frustration.

The only reason I played it all the way through recently is because someone once told me he thought the anger and annoyance that this game evokes in you, the player, was a respectable achievement because that’s, like, the whole point of the story– that these men are angry and annoyed and ultimately impotent in the face of the world even though they kill a lot of people.

Comments

[Kevin Gadd]

I was playing through Kane and Lynch 2 recently because someone I respect said good things about it on Twitter, and it was doing a great job of making me angry and annoyed. Just when my rage at the game reached its limit, it crashed my computer.

I think this series may be a new high mark in interactive drama.

[ferricide]

this not-a-review just helped me coin a term i was looking for, which seems kind of necessary to discuss games right now: "accidental nuance", in which games somehow become more meaningful in a way that does not seem deliberate.

e.g. in this case, "the anger and annoyance that this game evokes in you, the player, was a respectable achievement because that’s, like, the whole point of the story– that these men are angry and annoyed and ultimately impotent in the face of the world even though they kill a lot of people."

deliberate? seems unlikely. one of the only genuinely interesting-sounding things about the game? yep.

[obdurate hater of rhythm games]

Borderlands:

I enter the world to the strains of a strange song. I find myself surrounded by characters whom I was told would be the intriguing participants in an impressive plot. I soon find them to be hillbilly stereotypes, and come to realize all are based on the same joke. I try to move about the world, but every few steps, I am pestered by an irritating robot. I have to take many steps, too, as the world is filled with boring, empty space. I enjoy the weapon sytem, until I learn that the game respawns me with no consequences after every death, making the game ridiculously easy, and the fancy weapons pointless. Finally, I come to a new character, who is somewhat interesting--too bad the game is almost finished. I am confused, as I have yet to see the brilliant plot every review promised. I come to what cannot begin to resemble an ending.

Diablo:

I button mash, again and again, growing bored as hell within hours. I try to find some excitement, or point to the game, but my struggles are in vain. I learn that a third game is planned, and am confused, as neither of the previous two had any variety.

Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time trilogy, and the 2008 version:

Exciting aerial acrobatics, wonder and magic, only to hit the brick wall of button mashing. I come to the point where, if not for the button mashing, I can defeat every boss with ease. Why must I perform this most tedious, frustrating, least skillful of parlor tricks in order to advance the disjointed jumble of a plot?

95% of Western games these days:

I am a soldier with no defining characteristics surrounded by identical men in World War II. Some loud, angry asshole screams cliched action movie dialogue at random. I must see the world in first person, carry no more than two weapons, and fight other identical men. I am not excited.

4% of Western games these days:

Take the above, and replace World War II with another bland, brown, generic setting.

Necrovision, and the Super Mario Galaxy series:

Cannot write, must play more!

[Kirk]

HAA

The spot-on-itude of this post almost compensates for the ghastly "Real ain't pretty" K&L2 posters that cover SF. Instead of mumblingly denouncing them to my perplexed female friends, next time we drive by one I'm sending them here.

[vanlandw]

As one who blogs about games I found this "not a review" inspiring. I love reading about how truly maddening game logic is sometimes also in regards to the player that plays them.

Fantastic thank you good work here.

[Dagda]

I thought the western release of Nier was the creator's original vision, and that they made the protagonist younger in the japanese version because pretty-boy protagonists are assumed to be more popular over there than grizzled old men.

[Josh Strike]

I haven't sampled this atrocity, but I thought your last plaintive paragraph was rather telling.

In any other kind of storytelling - movies, fiction, song lyrics - the goal is never to simply make the audience feel what the character feels. That would require the audience to do no work. That's the major difference between Brave New World style "feelies" and what we call movies. The whole reward for the audience in being party to hearing or seeing a story is to make the connections that the character hasn't yet made. This goes double for first-person narratives, which are always a fail if the author is only trying to get sympathy and has no savvy to guide the reader in trying to puzzle out the big-picture outside the character, through whatever combination of direction, misdirection, foreshadowing or narrative asides.

Moreover, frustration itself is not a feeling one should ever be enjoined to sympathize with in a character simply by virtue of the medium. That's just a huge cop-out. I mean, if narrative incongruity were the qualification for sympathy with angst-ridden and frustrated characters, then Tarantino's films (or Woody Allen's, for that matter) could universally be improved by inserting an alarming 30-second pause every three minutes, filled with white noise and the sound of nails screaming against a blackboard.

Shooter games can be shooter games without a story, if they have good action. But imposing a story on them to turn them into "feelies" is just stupid. I think the fallacy that leads to shallow video games is a misunderstanding of the purpose of story itself. Story is not supposed to make the audience one with the character. You don't need to knock your listener's teeth out when you tell a story about how your root canal went wrong. The proper way to do it is to set it up with something like, "so, I didn't realize he went to dental school in Costa Rica..."

[obdurate hater of rhythm games]

Emotional response, however, can be used to enhance the ideas being expressed by the game. Consider the game Passage: It has no story, no dialogue, barely any graphics, yet it creates an effective emotional response that forces the player to contemplate the themes. These themes are quite brilliant, too: Nihilistic philosophy, and relativism expressed with the subtlety, minimalism, and complexity that define high-level classic literature.

Half Quake--I have not played it, but based on this series of videos (http://www.viddler.com/explore/YLS_Crew/videos/24/)--succeeds in expressing a great deal of messages while frustrating the player. Frustration is part of the game: The player is forced to consider whether his fustration is equivalent to the frustration of those who condemn video games; and whether he has the same contemptible instincts, merely targeted at other sources. Half Quake centers on the question of whether our emotional reactions to games reflect repressed instincts that cause other men to do terrible things, and whether our condemnation of others is hypocritical. I am oversimplifying--there are plenty of other metaphors throughout the game--but I think the game, though not as brilliant as Passage, is quite successful.

[Mark "Mr Ak" Johnson]

Hmmm. I haven't played K'n'L 1, but I kinda liked K'n'L 2. It's still fairly broken on a gameplay level, and the level design is often unimaginative, and the graphics are ordinary, and the dialogue uninteresting. But it's got one major selling point - you lose. It's bleak, depressing and ugly.

And from what I've read in Wikipedia, it's narrative isn't as stupid as that in number one.