I almost can't count the many times I've tried and failed to get into HITMAN since the first episode was released in March 2016. One of reasons as to why I haven't been able to get past the tutorial sections is my unhealthy perfectionist approach to stealth games. That specific trial-and-error approach fit the sublime puzzle boxes of the severely underrated Hitman Absolution like an assassin's glove, but is entirely at odds with HITMAN's well-documented and much-appreciated tendency towards chaos. In the new game, a single misstep typically cascades into a murderous slapstick and launches a thousand GIF-based Internet memes before poor Agent 47 is finally taken down by a security guard. And while it's obviously not impossible to memorize the levels, it's a much more time-consuming endeavour now that the virtual sandboxes are so much larger (partly as a result of the absurd criticism that Absolution's beautifully crafted levels were "too small").

And in case it wasn't already obvious, another mental hurdle which prevented me from getting into HITMAN for so long is that I'm still really grumpy about how unfairly everyone dismissed the previous Hitman game. I was raving about Absolution's intricate challenge designs and unparallelled world building for a good long time, but it was only with the release of this weird new episodic reboot that the world finally started to pay attention to how the developers were improving and expanding the gameplay formula after Blood Money (the previous fan favorite in the series).

This video shows my first fumbling attempt to explore Paris on the Xbox One X version of the game (I bought the PC version well over a year ago, but having the spectacular environments displayed on my new 4K TV seemed like a better way to experience the game).