I got Hitman (2016) for Christmas years ago and then never played it. I think I assumed my-then computer wouldn’t run it, which is probably true, but I never tried because, I don’t know, I thought it wouldn’t be my sort of thing? It is very fun though. I once read someone describe Untitled Goose Game as being Hitman-esque and I completely get what they meant. Thematically it’s a game about killing people, but it’s really more of a puzzle-adventure game. It’s one of those games where, assuming the player knows the way to beat a level, they could beeline it very quickly, because there’s not a ton between them and the goal, really. The game part of the game is all about exploring and gathering intelligence until you find the happy path to the level’s solution. The acts of “killing” and “sneaking” are fairly trivial.
The environments are my favorite part of Hitman. It drops you into these beautiful sandboxes and leaves you to your own devices, at which point you can just sort of hang out. On some level, it scratched my itch for tourism. Like, right now it’s mid-January, 3 degrees out yesterday, two years deep into varying degrees of pandemic-fueled isolation, and here I am playing “Seth Everman Relaxing Italian Vacation Simulator”. It’s nice. I think if you gave Hitman to a kid they would just like find a waiter outfit and spend their time RP-ing being a waiter and just serve coffee and shine tables and stuff because it does let you take it slow and just exist in the space. The developers clearly put a TON of thought into these levels because each one is hugely fleshed out. For context, there’s only six total levels, but each has over ONE HUNDRED associated challenges (in-game achievements that track all the stunts and feats you can accomplish). There’s a huge amount of variety in the ways you can do the assassinations and this contributes hugely to immersion and the plausibility of the game world. And they manage to make the spaces feel bigger than they probably are and connected to an outer world, they’re really able to sell the illusion that you’re not just in a finite video game level.
What hurts this plausibility a bit are NPC interactions. Sometimes you’ll overhear this really organic sounding dialogue to gather clues, which is very cool, but then Hitman also has the sort of open-world-Bethesda-disease of bizarre interactions when you bump into people. Or like, guards being like “hey, stop that” when they see you doing something fishy, and then immediately calm down when you exit sneak mode and leave their field of view. At one point I’d botched a level and decided to run around and see how many random tourists I could incapacitate before security took me down. I was able to sprint around the square gut-punching people unconscious for a hysterically long time. See the video below for a professional reenactment:
I find the level of jank charming. There’s also a degree to which Hitman includes humor on purpose and doesn’t take itself too too seriously, which I really enjoy. It helps sell the goofiness of some of the stuff it lets you do. Overall, I’m really glad I finally got around to this one.
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