I have found the game to be way too dark on my system and can't find an option to play around with brightness. I tried setting gamma in autoexec.cfg but it made no difference. Does anyone know of a way to increase brightness without adjusting my monitor?

Use the settings panel of your GPU.

some graphic cards don't have 3d gamma settings in GPU settings panel (NVIDIA GeForce)
you can use "Gamma Control v2" from here instead:
http://desktopnerds.com/downloads.php
"CTRL + ALT + +" to turn up the gamma.
"CTRL + ALT + -" to turn it down.
"CTRL + ALT + *" to make default gamma.

Should have mentioned that aside from doing it from your monitor or GPU control panel, Blood 2 doesn't have a proper brightness control on its own.

I ended up using Nvidia control panel to brighten it up a bit. I can't believe I didn't think of that first, sometimes I overlook the obvious in search of a more complex solution. Thanks for the help.

I use Gamma Panel on my home machine (an NVidia), but it doesn't seem to work on my work ATI machine. The Catalyst Control Center does though: Color-> Set colour Correction for: Full Screen 3D

I have an NVIDIA GPU and use official NVIDIA drivers and in the NVIDIA Control Panel under the display settings there is an option to use NVIDIA settings for colour, which includes a slider for gamma, amongst many other things.

I mean that Nvidia doesn't have separate gamma settings for 3d in Control Panel, if you change gamma it changes everything including desktop - its uncomfortable (going to settings before and after every play) so I prefer using this program on my Nvidia because it is more comfy, and I can change settings during play :)