Day Nine

• Game: IO Interactive/Square Enix's Hitman (Revisit)
• Release Month: March.
• Quick Look: Here. But that barely scratches the surface of Hitman content on the site.
• Started: November (Revisit: 09/12.)

Second of the revisits is Hitman, which I only started playing last month. I'm still rocking the initial Paris map, but the game is built in such a way that it can make a single assassination mission stretch out for many hours, should you be the type to want to explore every angle. In addition to knocking off Novikov and plotting a black Dahlia murder, there are more targets to surreptitiously slay in the game's Escalation mode, which is what I decided to check out for this revisit.

The Escalation missions are an Exercise in creative expression, albeit the sort of creative expression that tends to involve explosions and fire extinguishers to the dome. You are given a random target on the map, told to assassinate them in a specific way (usually, at least, though some Escalation missions are more chill) and then must complete the same scenario again with an additional complication or target. These extra factors are what really force the synapses into action, as you can quickly figure out a means to kill a person to the stipulations presented, but maybe not so much if a large number of people can suddenly see through your disguise or you're stuck with a time limit. What happens is that you find a quick and easy solution, restart the Escalation with a condition that essentially makes the original solution untenable, and then adjust your strategy accordingly. There's also how often the Escalation will introduce a second target, which also arrives with caveats.

The "story" assassination is really only the beginning. It's why the game presents Opportunities - a progressive guide to how to complete the game's showier hits - and various other challenges and feats to earn which effectively teach you the map and everything it has to offer. The Escalation missions are where the kid gloves come off and the black leather (or yellow rubber, depending on how messy we're talking) murder gloves come on: there are no directions, no hints, nothing besides the name of the target and the method of their demise. I tend to liken the game to "LEGO with murder" - sometimes you get a step-by-step walkthrough to follow, but other times it's all freeform imagination. (Though that said, how neat would a LEGO Hitman game be? I mean, in a jokey "nobody really dies become their heads pop back on" sort of way, not a "put them in a giant microwave and watch their plastic bodies melt". That'd be grim as hell.)

I picked a random Escalation mission for this revisit: The Seeger Beguilement. As far as I can tell, the names of the Escalation missions don't mean anything: they might as well have come from a Sherlock Holmes title randomizer. Certainly no-one named Seeger was involved in the hits here, unless these are obscure scientific laws of which I am incognizant. It's possible. I don't know a lot about science, unless it's the science of (video game not real life) murder.

The Seeger Beguilement begins with offing a photographer. He's surrounded by party guests for a good portion of time, though he eventually takes his model to a secluded area of the gardens for more glamor photos. There's a nearby plug socket lying in a puddle that you can interfere with: not only does this kill the photographer in a fashion that absolves you of blame, but it means you don't have to hurt or draw the attention of the model he's with. It also satisfies the one condition the game insists upon: that he die by an "accident". It's hard to say what constitutes an accident, since that death was absolutely deliberate, but it's really anything that appears to be an accident to any onlookers. A random electrocution from faulty wiring handily applies.

Then we get the Escalations. The second condition is that the model remains unhurt; I'd already stumbled on an assassination method that spares her, so this was a freebie. The third and most punishing condition was that every VIP and most of the patrolling guards - those that aren't stuck guarding doorways, but some of those too - will instantly see through your disguise to the handsome bald murderer beyond, even if you're walking around in the default suit. "Patrolling guards" turns out to include a lot of people, including wait staff and AV guys, and so starting in a disguise around those people turned out to be a bad way to get the ball rolling. For the first two levels of the Escalation, I'd started as a tech guy in the rafters of the fashion show because I knew there was a screwdriver nearby for the aforementioned power bar tampering. This meant that I had to find an alternative screwdriver - one is very near to the power bar in question, fortunately - and avoid any patrols and any VIPs between the crime site and the exit. VIPs in this case means almost any named character, including Novikov's contact at the party near where I was performing the incompetent electrician work and the journalist woman planning to rat out Novikov later that night who was in the nearby hallway. Also, the quickest way down from the tech area involves running past Novikov as he strides down the double staircase for his showy entrance, and while that was an amusing way to spoil his night before it'd be instant murder at this level as he would've immediately made me to a room full of security guards.

The fourth level introduces another fun wrinkle: hacking the laptop in the chateau's basement. The laptop, I should point out, that is in the security room surrounded by guards. Only one guard in there can see through any disguise I might have, but none of them take kindly to me standing there hacking a laptop for twenty seconds. However, there are ways to create distractions to force a few of the guards out to investigate, but that potentially jeopardizes the other hit if everyone goes on high alert. This is where the timing of the mission's initial murder - which takes about five real-time minutes to complete as the photographer and his model slowly move from the entrance of the manor to the back where the patio party is (followed by the light show if you get my drift) - gives you ample time to pursue the other goals in this Escalation map and be poised outside an exit just as soon as our unfortunate shutterbug is done being a jitterbug.

The fifth level is where the mission decides it's done being fair, giving you another photographer to cap without hurting or warning the person he's recording. In this case, it's the hapless blogger stuck outside trying to get an interview with Novikov that leads to one of the map's more entertaining assassinations. I thought about tracking this guy after he wanders off once it's become clear that the blogger has no chance to see Viktor, but then I decided that I didn't want to wait around and figure out how to slot his murder in before or after the murder of the other guy, and so resorted to the old exploding fire extinguisher trick. There's a number of uses of Vinny and Jeff's beloved shiny red friend, made more convenient by how almost nobody cares if you're seen wandering around with a fire extinguisher in-hand, and how plentiful they are. Rather than prevent a serious accident, however, I used it to trigger one by placing it near to the interview spot and igniting it from a distance with my silenced pistol. I could easily fit that in after setting up the electrical trap, and then all that was required was finding a way to the basement to hack the laptop, wait for the camera guy to have his little overexposure problem, and then book it through the catacombs whistling "Skulls Out For Summer". Not an easy Escalation mission, but then none of them are and I wouldn't change it for the world.

In conclusion, Hitman's still exceptional, even if the general cadence of the contemplative stealth murder game is still occasionally a bit too slow-paced for my liking. It's like a fine wine; sometimes you gotta stick it in a barrel for five years before you get what you want out of it, but the wait is often worth it. Especially if you can then loosen the mooring on that cask so that it drops on a businessman with ties to the criminal underworld as he passes underneath. The level of complexity and options made available by just the Paris map alone can give you hours spent poking at every moving part to see how everything ticks, and how those parts might then be used to shuffle some poor sap off their mortal coil. While I miss being able to save due to the inscrutably draconian rules of the Escalation missions - adding ridiculous bonus conditions for the second, third, fourth and fifth tiers is what I what consider "fair difficulty", while arbitrarily stripping the player of a time-saving game feature is less so - I still think they make for some of the game's stronger content from a puzzle-solving perspective, even if they don't afford the kind of bloody spectacle that the headline targets "enjoy".

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