"Yes, putting things simply, we are developing a game about killing people. But what's more important is the fact that we are honest in our approach. Our game doesn't pretend to be anything else than what it is and we don't add to it any fake philosophy.
"In fact, when you think deeper about it, there are many other games out there, where you can do exactly the same things that the antagonist will do in our project. The only difference is that in Hatred gameplay will focus on those things. I also do believe that we're pretty straight forward about this on our official website. Plus hey, you've got to remember that Postal was first and still is the king of the genre. "
1. He explicitly denies any philosophical bent
2. I'm reading honesty as what I just described. The game's being upfront and no-holds-barred about what it's doing and more importantly what
you're doing by playing it. We're all about "realism" in video games which means we want a bar that goes down when you don't eat and we want bullet drop and windage and we want our guns to jam, but we don't want to spend six months washing tanks in Call of Duty, we don't want to spend 90% of GTA in jail after we got caught driving a stolen car, and when we play violent video games we don't want to hear the thousands of people we brutally murder screaming and begging (this is hardly something you would only see when killing civilians. Soldiers cry too.)
I'm reminded of Haze, which wasn't very good but attempted a similar thing. It started out as a generic FPS in the jungle. There was no blood, bodies disappear when you kill them, it's all fun and games. It turns out everybody's on combat drugs that abstract out the reality of what they're doing so they won't question their (very questionable) orders.