Everything about this game is so insultingly dumb I want nothing more for it to be some masterful level of satire and parody. Unfortunately I can't really see any angle that this would work. Unless I'm missing something or unless the developers are going for the long con, there is nothing presented in this trailer or on the website that says "self aware satire".
Consider what the website says about the game:
The question you may ask is: why do they do this? These days, when a lot of games are heading to be polite, colorful, politically correct and trying to be some kind of higher art, rather than just an entertainment ? we wanted to create something against trends. Something different, something that could give the player a pure, gaming pleasure. Here comes our game, which takes no prisoners and makes no excuses. We say ?yes, it is a game about killing people? and the only reason of the antagonist doing that sick stuff is his deep-rooted hatred. Player has to ask himself what can push any human being to mass-murder
The only way I can see this statement and the trailer turning out to be some critique of gaming patterns a la Spec Ops is if they are straight up lying to us. It might be the case, and I'll be the first one to say "whelp, I was wrong" if it is, but it just makes so much more sense to assume this is just a shit idea for a game, these guys (who are making their first game, for what it's worth) are playing it straight, and it really is just about killing people with no higher message. The edgy tone and any controversy is being played up as much it can to get people to buy it (because it probably won't stand up on it's own).
Tone and theme and context definitely play into how the content of a piece of media is accepted and my head spins when I read people not getting this. Saying "Hatred is like every other twin stick shooter out there right now" is completely off because, while the general idea (shoot *enemy* using these *mechanics*) might be similar, the context and tone is completely different. Fighting hordes of hostile aliens is completely different to hunting unarmed and innocent people. Think about why American Psycho is a good film, despite it's violence, and Saw VI isn't. Violence isn't inherently *wrong* or *low-brow* or *lazy*, it's what's done with the violence, and what's happening around the violence that makes it work or not work.
The comparisons to GTA are interesting to me because I disliked pretty much everything about Trevor in GTA V for a lot of the same reasons I dislike the idea of this game. Veering off topic for a second, Trevor felt like a reaction Rockstar made in response to the "GTA IV wasn't as whacky as the other ones" cries from the community. I feel like they didn't want to go back to that level of needless violence, so they threw in a zany side character that can do all the rampages and killing the fans of older GTA games like. Hatred looks like pretty much the same reaction, except without Rockstars writing and storytelling ability. But the biggest difference between this game and GTA is that GTA (outside of the rampages *...sigh..*) doesn't need you to kill sex workers and take their money or fire rockets into traffic for no reason. Sure, they allow you to do it because (probably because it's a leftover from the old top down games, right?) they want you to have the freedom to live as a criminal in their world, but it's entirely possible to go through the game without doing it.
And that's the difference here, isn't it? And this is the point of conflict. Some games allow unarmed civilians to get killed within the context of the universe, but Hatred and the context of Hatred *is* killing unarmed civilians.
TL;DR, it's a game that will get released despite all the bad press it gets, and it'll sell kind of well *because* of all that bad press, and it'll probably a mediocre game once the novelty wears off. The controversy this game generate will give it more attention than it deserves.
