Choices are cheap. A constant torrent of trailers, press releases, and demos for games boast about the hundreds of items we can equip in them and the thousands of different ways we can configure our characters. Some games are so pleased with the sheer volume of activities they offer us, they don't even think to stop and explain why we'd want to participate in those activities. While we're all enthusiastic for heaping spoonfuls of our favourite games, nobody ranks games by how many options they offer, and no game pokes its head above the crowd by telling us how many choices it has, even if certain marketing materials suggest otherwise.
2016's Hitman is a game that lets you weave a staggering number of paths towards its assassination targets, and this is often cited as the source of its popularity, but based on the above, I don't think it's the number of choices alone in Hitman that keeps players coming back to it. I think it's that within Hitman's large possibility space, all of your decisions have gravity, all of the settings have an immediately recognisable persona, and every session ends with you feeling like you've gotten away with something scandalous. There are many games with levels you can endlessly repeat, but Hitman gives you convincing reasons to return to its levels. There's not another game that walks and talks like this one, and that's intriguing. What is the arcane clockwork which makes Hitman this captivating? Fans point to its intricate map design, clear communication with the player, and extravagant kills, and these are all valid explanations, but I don't think they're at the root of what makes Hitman moreish. Instead, we must understand these traits as byproducts of the underlying mindset which makes this title work. Simply, Hitman is possible because the game has you steal character abilities from the environment.
In video games, it's typical that players accumulate powers and equipment for their avatars over the course of the runtime. You earn new weapons, gadgets, supernatural abilities, stats, or fighting techniques once, usually as the result of hitting a progression notch, and you can then use them in any level after that. Entries in the action-adventure genre like InFamous or The Legend of Zelda might be the first games that jump to mind when we think of these kinds of character upgrades, but they apply for a lot of different phyla of games. For example, campaign modes in traditional shooters have you earning more spectacular guns the further in you are, and many racing games have you continually upgrading your car. Even in games where we don't pocket better abilities as we go, we usually start with all the actions that we need to complete any play scenarios available to us. In most fighting games, you don't have to unlock moves for your fighter, and in most platformers, you start with your jump, and that will get you through the whole game. As a general rule, games don't drop us into play scenarios without the abilities we will need to complete them, and this might seem like such a given that you wouldn't think there is an alternative, but Hitman shows us another way.
When you play Hitman's levels, you start with the bare minimum of spy gear: usually a garrote wire, a silenced pistol, and a couple of custom selections. Yet, you can't complete most challenges using the default kit, and only the best-versed agents can pick off their targets with these alone. IO place your potential victims on the other side of exclusive areas, off-limits to anyone except guards, professionals, and the friends of targets, and you have to react to that by doing something more than running in and opening fire.
One way to react is to get a disguise that will give you clearance for the area you want to enter, and you'll have to take that disguise from an NPC. It's not uncommon to escalate your status and proximity to your target costume-by-costume, stealing one set of clothing to get into an area where you can steal another to get into the next area, and on, and on, until you can get to the person you've been hired to rub out. The other way to respond is to try and coax your prey out of hiding with distractions and misinformation like setting off the fireworks in Paris or ordering an evacuation of the consulate in Marrakesh. To activate this bait, you need physical items from the levels. In these examples, the fireworks remote and a bodyguard's phone respectively. In many instances, retrieving these items works the same way obtaining clothing does, and you may also require a disguise to get close to these devices without someone sounding the alarm.
When you finally reach the shady tycoons and political polluters you've been hired to kill, you can sometimes do it with your starting items or your bare hands, but there's often more finesse and bravado in using a method of murder taken from the level itself. Just try the wood chipper in Colorado or the poisonous fish in Hokkaido. Then there are disguises which aid your assassinations like the masseur outfit which lets you snap Claus Strandberg's neck, as well as opportunities, challenges, and contracts that require you use specified assassination methods or clothing. You can smuggle better items into maps as you level, but there's a limit to their practicality, and getting your hands on some of those still requires legwork because you need to pick them up from drop boxes. You get the point: A good portion of the tools and abilities you need to see missions through come from your surroundings, not from the powers and items you start the level with. What's more, your inventory is not persistent, meaning that even if you pick up a keycard or a disguise on a map once, you'll still need to grab it again on any return visits. This puts Hitman at odds with other games.
You do play games in which you need items that you can only pick up in the field like the ammunition in an FPS or the loot in an RPG, but you mostly obtain these as a side-effect of actions you'd be taking anyway: Killing enemies for XP or self-protection as you move through environments to fixed endpoints. There are few games like Hitman where at least half of play is the audience strategically picking the items from the environment that will be useful or vital for their immediate goal and then executing a concerted plan to obtain or interact with each one. It's also unconventional to be able to use objects to alter what or where your goals are. Keep in mind that from a design standpoint, neither giving the player abilities at the start of a level nor having them pilfer them from their surroundings is the "right way" for a designer to distribute them. Both have their advantages.
Innate abilities and utility belts of equipment often help characterise a protagonist. You can see it in Lara Croft's prowess at scaling cliffs and ruins in Tomb Raider or Batman's high-tech gadgets in the Arkham series. Most games also send you into levels well-equipped because, in the majority of cases, it would be a chore to wrestle a car or grapple or half-decent weapon off of someone else every time you needed one. Not to mention, it would slow the pacing of these games to a crawl. Much of the time, you just want to get to the action and designers want to make an interactive experience less about how you obtain powers and more about what you do with powers once you have them. So they just give them to you. This way, more of the game is spent driving or shooting or jumping because you always have that steering wheel at your fingertips or that spring in your step. Hitman makes for more subdued action entertainment because you also spend a lot of time without the guard positioning or the disguise or the poison you need to topple that next NPC. Hitman is that slower-paced game that has you spending most of the time getting the goods rather than unleashing them.
So what are the advantages of that style of design? Firstly, it makes it feel like you earn every kill and every jot of advancement through a level, no matter how small. Imagine getting to the apex of a mission in Hitman and planting a bullet in some international banker's skull. There's more to the exercise than just lining up a reticle with their head: Maybe that victory was made possible by the disguise you stole to sneak up on them, your distraction of their bodyguard, and your plan for a quick exit after. Actions that can be made nonchalantly in another game like climbing to the top floor of a building or getting hold of a machine gun require cunning and observation in Hitman, so you feel like a master of espionage when you get them right.
Secondly, the sequences that play out invite your creative and tactical input as opposed to just being the grand machinations of the designer. Most games point out a target, pencil a path to them, and then give you powers to complete your challenge. Hitman briefs you on your targets, then gives you a bucket of disguises, kill methods, and routes through levels, and asks you what the solution to the level is. You need to come up with a plan to fulfil your contract because the game isn't going to give you one. Your vulnerability and the fact that you can only use one kill method per target also mean that you must select your mode of attack consciously. There is no winging levels; there is only plotting them out, and the more wrinkles you add to your plot, the more impressive your performance.
The choices in Hitman stand out not because they're shipped to you by the boatload but because when you take one, it can entirely reshape what a level entails. What's more, these choices all get the time to breathe instead of being smothered in a frenzy of other options. You don't even need to attack Hitman's missions from every angle for the breadth of choices to brighten your time with the game. Just knowing that there are a hundred other ways you could have completed a level, but that you put effort into your particular way, makes you feel ownership over your run.
Thirdly, placing abilities in the environments allows the exotic destinations to take centre stage. If giving protagonists innate powers characterises protagonists then having the powers come from settings characterises settings. When you spike the spaghetti sauce in an Italian kitchen or electrify a microphone in a recording studio, it lets these places flaunt their culture and functions. Is also comes with the bonus of making locales more realistic. Many games try to adapt levels to fit the powers of the player character, so you see modern military games full of red barrels, or you get contrivances like Metroid Prime's where the planets just happen to be full of coloured doors that correspond to the types of beam Samus collects. It feels artificial: the curtain falls and what should be the invisible hand of the designer becomes all too visible. But in Hitman, it is more that the actions you perform are the result of the level aesthetics, not that the level aesthetics change to match the actions you perform, and so levels feel more believable. Operating a surgical robot or overflowing a sink don't have anything to do with who Agent 47 is as a person, they're just things that happen because of where he finds himself. Just like you reading this right now wouldn't expect to walk into a random room and discover it arranged with you in mind.
Diverting mechanics to build out the environment instead of using them to build out the protagonist does leave us with a flavourless mush of a man holding the silenced pistol, but Agent 47 lacks personality anyway, so it's at least not wasteful of the systems in play. The mechanics do also play off of Agent 47 in that one of the most iconic skills that he brings to the table is that he is a chameleon. Drop him into any country in the world, and he will find a disguise within it that lets him glide through a crowd without raising a single eyebrow. In fact, this is another way that the settings are realised. You always need costumes that let you pass checkpoints, lure foes, or avoid the people hunting you, and that's the game pressuring you to fit the theme of the area, pushing you to dress as a scarecrow on a farm or a groundskeeper in a garden. Agent 47 acts as a canvas for the world, with the costumes letting you become a little part of your destinations. The game basing its first fully-fledged level around a fashion show serves as a knowing nod to this.
These mechanics humanise even the big bads. You want to eavesdrop on targets or people who work with them because it provides juicy tidbits on how you might cleanly eliminate them, and in the process of that eavesdropping, you learn about their proclivities, backroom deals, and how they treat their staff and peers. Each mission also has a sprinkling of murder methods that use dramatic irony, turning the targets' weaknesses, vices, or symbols of their decadence against them. For example, you can bring Silvio Caruso's golf game to an abrupt end with an exploding ball or you can slip poison into Viktor Novikov's favourite cocktail.
Lastly, having methods of trickery and assassination bound to map items means that players have a lot of control over the variation in play, even beyond them choosing their game plan for each run. If the player wants a different palette of powers, they can just flick over to a different location for their next play session. This customisation is aided by the fact that it doesn't take that long to play through Hitman once and unlock all the levels. There is also one effect of having the powers be environmentally-sourced which isn't a pro or a con, but none the less, plays an active role in how we view Hitman as a creative work. That is, you may see its level design as its crowning glory, and you're not wrong, but it's because the powers come from the levels themselves that that level design is such a consequential factor on the quality of the play. The empowerment curves and nature of your abilities are dependent on how the stages are planned out, so they have to be of the highest calibre.
Hitman brought me back to a place I didn't expect to end up in a stealth spy thriller. In tabletop RPGs, when you enter a room there is typically a scan of it, led by the GM, which has you thinking through all the relevant objects and NPCs within it. It lets you sink into the location and begin imagining how you're going to leverage the furniture of the area to achieve your goal. That moment is the way that Hitman feels. It's a game less about considering what's in your pocket and more about what's on the table in front of you. It's less about the clothes you wore into the city and more about the clothes the guard in front of you is wearing. And in this way, you are forced to be calculating, in touch with your surroundings, and to earn every tiny victory. That's what makes Hitman Hitman. Thanks for reading.
Log in to comment