The Joys of Being Agent 47

We could all use a murder vacation.

Your life is a series of unique experiences that occurred around a very specific task, experiences both bright and dark, wonderful and strange, and clad in every colour the human eye can detect. You are strong, almost comically capable and more secure in your own skin than some are inside their million dollar armoured saferoom. This task is an act that takes place at a high level, giving you a perspective above most others; you are slightly aloof, but also polite and pleasant to people as you encounter them as you go about your day, it’s just that their troubles seem to minute compared to the weight of your task. But also, that your task is a weight you gladly take on, because all the same, you enjoy the challenges it brings.

Your task is professional assassination. More to the point, it’s the assassination of at least two individuals who are so high a profile to as to be supposedly unreachable. The professional part is where you’re enough of a nice person to, in an optimal case, make sure nobody decent is bothered by your act. Be kind to your environment: dispose of all garotted Martin Shkrelli stand-ins in any conveniently placed cleaning closets. Thanks, The Management.

"Fortuitous that it should be a RED carpet..." "Sir, why are you wearing black gloves?" "Do not ask QUESTIONS the ANSWERS of which you are NOT PREPARED FOR."

This is what the collective New Hitman games (named Hitman 1 and 2 with a trademark symbol for stylization, hereby just known as ‘Hitman’) are all about. And here’s the kicker: it all feels so exceptionally good that this game feels, in the right frame of mind, like being on vacation. A vacation which features “riveting not-Elon Musk in the skull with a pistol wielded by his own kill-drone” as one of the stops.

The idea that drives the level design of Hitman is so smart that it actually feels frustrating that there’s not a lot of other games that use it. That’s that, rather than trying to portray a living world, like other games that tend to fall dramatically short of an admittedly lofty goal, the levels instead are layers of scripted routines running over, under, through and around each other. Here is the scumbag fashion mogul that’s funneling his models into a private spy agency, as he wanders around his line’s latest show, berating his perceived lessers like the speedbump he is. And in the rooms above the show is the spymaster herself, wandering between the bar and her champagne bucket being high society-petty, while waiting for her latest recruit to arrive, a very naive and pretty man named ‘Helmut Kruger.’ Any intrusion into these routines has the potential to create action, negative or positive. Why not go activate the routine for Helmut to finish up his latest photoshoot, get a call from the spymaster and decide to go meet her, in order to draw her into a more actionable position? Why not tail Helmut, who you bear a striking resemblance to, in order to meet the spymaster herself, and spike her drink with the same suicide pill she issues you with, the moment she has her back turned.

That’s a good option, by the way. There’s an armoire in that room, and you can quickly shove her into it before people come looking for her.  

"These people are phony, but also, a good duck blind."

This is one of the many paths to a target you can take in the Lethal Tony and Tina’s Wedding that is Hitman. If there was a Tony and Tina’s Wedding level inside of Hitman, which would actually be really entertaining, there would assuredly be a challenge to non-lethally takedown the actor portraying Tony, become Tony, and then murder a target, as Tony. The target would assuredly be some Rich that would be bellyaching about not wanting to be there and being a dick to all the plants sat with the audience members. The targets are always, first and foremost, people who think they’re better than all this. That’s the secret of how Hitman makes you want to kill them.

The point is, Hitman isn’t some attempt to create a living and breathing world, it’s an attempt to create a tableau of events surrounding some bigger event, that will begin to move as you become privy to them. Crowds of people gather and mill about in an impressive display of simplified group AI that allows a never-not-impressive amount of people, just incidental people, on screen. People that will react to threats accordingly, with basic behavior, but otherwise gather and converse contentedly, which as of Hitman 2 becomes a new way to hide- sink into the crowd, become anonymous from the sheer mass. And then among them, smarter AI characters, like the guards of various security levels and armament that protect the levels and keep you from just shooting a hole to your target, or the NPCs that wear viable disguises for you, and thus exist to mill about according to their role, keeping a watchful eye over their own tasks, but also existing to be bopped or blood-choked into submission for the valuable resource they’re wearing.

"Face the CHALLENGE of a SUPERIOR CLOWN, weakling."

In having this clear intent and process for their game, IO Interactive have not created a lifelike experience, but they have created An Experience. Because as you come to learn and understand how Hitman works, you find this isn’t at all a humanlike AI, but rather something that has a priority of things they react to, with associated responses- people grump at you for bumping into them, have issue when guns are visible and an immediate flight instinct when they’re pointed, and they find the sounds of coins hitting the ground completely fascinating. You learn these things, and also other ways of making people look away- a bomb exploding suddenly in the direction to look is a good, if extreme way, of achieving this -and from that you learn the way to turn Tony and Tina’s Wedding into a Rube Goldberg Death Machine. And then, not-Julian Assange is obliterated by the weight of a falling ceramic moose. The circle of life is beautiful.

Before the inevitable termination, and a sometimes explosive spectacle, as a stand-in for one of Current Events’ Most Awful People is ruthlessly slam dunked into a grave, you get to experience the local colour. It is, in fact, very colourful. It’s extremely safe to say that if there was any want for IO Interactive to make a gray and brown “realistic” game, it’s long since passed along with that godawful trend in visual design. Sapienza is awash with warm tones, Miami is alive with vibrancy, the Colombian jungle is an emerald green maze, Marrakesh features an entire marketplace to explore, including a rug shop where the high-pile stacks make an excellent place to hide from nosy guards. None of the places you go are actually real, but care is taken to making sure they actually do feel real, right down to there being proper restroom facilities. Because stalls are good places to stash bodies. In this sense, you get that feeling that is a place that is just for you, to explore, to disappear into, and eventually complete your task with whatever degree of mayhem you see fit. Maybe you don’t want to blow up the pathologist working on a fatal disease that can be programmed to target specific human genes with a pirate cannon, because you don’t want to ruin the harmony of Italy by the seaside. That’s fine; kill her with the halon purge in the viral laboratory instead, only assholes will be bothered by that. It can be cannon o’clock some other day.

"I AM ON VACATION."

That it can be some other day is why this game feels like such a vacation. First, it gives you place to go, in fact, a few places to go. Then it states to you that however you might complete this mission the first time, it is by far not the only way to do it. There are so many other ways to do it to a ludicrous degree. Not-Shkrelli may have had an important meeting with the ground beneath a cliff after doing lunch with a bowl of poisoned tagliatelle, but have you considered posing as his psychiatrist and then smothering him? How about sniping him, through the lens of his personal observatory telescope, from the belltower of a church, while posing as a Catholic priest, because among God’s miracles his his ability to remember His Old Testament Self.

How would you even do a thing like that?

Literally, it’s what you do in the game: figuring out you can Do A Thing, and then learning the steps towards doing it, rewarding you with a feeling that makes your mind at play feel impressed with itself. You implode the head of comically and comprehensively awful coffin-bait, while dressed in anything from an immaculately tailored suit, to a flamingo mascot costume, to Corky the Clown, whose appearance is taciturn, but makes immaculate balloon animals. And you take pride in how it all comes together. Yes, as it turns out, there does exist a stealth game where being discovered isn’t a failure state that you reload from, but instead a chance to adapt, alter your plan, and have more fun from the mayhem that emerges when a Florida Man gets caught with a gun at the concession stand, at a speculative technology car race he didn’t even have a ticket to.

"The true enemy reveals himself..."

You do this all from the position of being Agent 47, who in a lot of respects is the Rolls Royce of human beings. 47 is a man that is capable of walking a fashion show runway with confidence and verve, a man who has the ability to get his angle on a murderous indie rock darling by putting in an impressive audition as his new drummer, a man whose victims often point out that his cooking is magnificent right before it fatally poisons them. Agent 47 knows how to stand as a bodyguard or a club bouncer, that you do so with your hands folded to your front at waist level, and your shoulders back, so that people can see that you are in control but you aren’t a threat. Agent 47 knows how to throw a cueball with an overhand pitch so that it knocks a man unconscious, first time, every time. People talk about games being a power fantasy, but Hitman is an adroitness fantasy, because 47 might not be superpowered, but he is skilled at doing most things to a degree that is both deftly played for comedy- Hitman’s tonal shift as a series towards dark comedy has been only a win -and as well gives the player that good feeling in their brain of “goddamn, I am immaculate.” 

Of course Agent 47 plays the drums. He knew one day it would come in handy, so he studied and digested enough British Invasion as to be able to lay down a beat that conjures paisley.

"A hard rain has fallen, and washed away a Florida Man this day."

So you put all these elements together, and that’s what it feels like: a game where you get to go to a place that by design, is exactly as exciting or interesting as you could hope to find a place, as a person who, despite being a murderer by trade, is actually also polite and pleasant as a default to people he isn’t there to kill, who is also himself a really intriguing individual. You get to wear nice suits as him and everything. That’s why this game is like a vacation. You’re there to do, in a place made to entertain you, with bright sights and attractions to draw your attention. Then on top of that, you get to slot someone that needed a hard stop to their bullshit, and you come away feeling like you’ve done a good day’s work. For a good cause even! Which to me is one of the great successes of the New Hitman: it makes the time you put in it feel, if not productive, respected. From that, you get a feeling that you’re being cared for by the game, that it wants you to have a good time. And kill people while doing it.

"I have smelled the roses. Now, the claret."

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[Today: This! Tomorrow: River and the Road! See you then!]