Holism: Hitman, that Tango of High Violence and Low Comedy

Thanks to AShadowLink for edits. In addition, while I will generally try to be coy with spoilers to let you experience more of these games on your own, I do have examples of possible murders you can commit. I also have some clips of specific kinds from particular levels.

Hitman, IO Interactive’s long running stealth thriller series, is enjoying quite the success. Hitman 3, its perhaps confusingly titled eighth game, came out in January and concluded the series’ “World of Assassination” trilogy. After struggling with poor new IPs and the misguided direction of Hitman: Absolution, the 2016 reboot of Hitman helped the Danish studio reassert itself. They even managed to separate from Square Enix, the studio that owned them for thirteen years (though Warner Bros. published Hitman 2 and a rerelease of Hitman (2016), and Square Enix published Hitman 3 in certain territories). The three helped bring back a design that, for blockbuster games, had been somewhat dormant. Most big budget releases had been eschewing nonlinear gameplay and smaller sandboxes; they favored huge open worlds that were, paradoxically, very controlled and directed. The open ended, experimental trilogy utterly defied this, and it was rewarded with wealth and acclaim.

I’d never played a Hitman game until last month, but recommendations by fellow journalist and dear friend Lovely Bones – and a giant, convenient online sale – got me to cross the rubicon. I played Hitman (2016) in mid-January and found myself enraptured enough to play through the entire reboot trilogy before hitting the middle of February. And while that means I don’t have the personal experience playing the heights of older entries like Hitman: Blood Money, I’ve certainly found a deep appreciation for what at least these games do. They’re incredibly imaginative and exciting; even the game engine is so fun it could probably support dozens of different series and genres. But, to be clear, this comes only from my experience with the new games.

As the appreciably blunt title suggests, Hitman is about murdering. You pilot Agent 47, the world’s greatest assassin, through increasingly complex contract killings. Your targets are seemingly untouchable; they’re masters of industry, politics, and crime. The only way to get to them is to sneak or cheat or bluff your way into their palatial estates or businesses, blending in with crowds as you scope out each defense. You find weapons, set up death traps, stage fatal accidents, all while trying to stay as inconspicuous as possible. And you knock a lot of people out and quickly steal their clothes, as Agent 47 is a master of disguise – despite being a bald, muscular, hulking white man with Superman’s jawline and a barcode inexplicably tattooed on the back of his head.

He also has this comically inhuman poise about him. Emotionless enough to frighten, just emotional enough to not seem like a murderous tree. 47’s wonderful.

It’s a cheap joke, one that’s been made since the first game came out in 2000. It’s also a fair joke, because Hitman the dark political thriller is patently absurd. While it’s excellent at crafting tense situations that let you become a master assassin, a lot of the time is spent clumsily finagling your way into villainous lairs and dragging bodies around. Agent 47’s limited (by video game standards) mobility adds a sense of realism and limitation, but he’s also able to hide from guards behind bizarrely small cover. All of this is wrapped, like feta in a piece of spanakopita, within this convoluted narrative about proxy wars between interchangeable clandestine groups and 47’s backstory as a super soldier clone. It’s all very “video gamey.”

And that’s good for two reasons. First, because the slow move from clumsy thug to engine of death is immensely satisfying to experience – especially if, like me, you get to experience that in a hyper-concentrated burst. And that could not happen without the game letting you screw up constantly, fix your own mistakes (or just load an old save, though it restricts saving more on higher difficulties), but still succeed. The games do not require perfection; they merely give you the gentlest of nudges and plenty of support to get you there.

But it’s also important, because it is just one integral part of Hitman being incredibly, incredibly funny. The sheer number of murders I’ve committed in these is insane, but that insanity is dwarfed by their sheer wackiness. I blew an evil Bollywood producer off a building with a giant fan, like a Looney Tunes gag. I crushed a bad guy with a moose, like the end of Road House, the greatest American movie ever made. You can kill someone with a starfish. The game considers it a “throwing star.” These are horrible ways to die, but they’re also broad bits of absurdity that help mitigate the horribleness.

It doesn’t hurt that you have some utterly loathsome targets. Much like Bayonetta or Columbo, whichever example you find least weird, this series wouldn’t really be satisfying if you were just killing people who were normal, or nice, or morally conflicted. So they pit you against the biggest assholes on the planet. No target of 47 is a small business owner; they run the world’s largest oil companies and fight environmental legislation with dark money. An ex-spy gone rogue is a super sadist, or a monster who tried turning children into killers. If they’re a lawyer, they’re on the payroll of the yakuza or an abusive, murderous rock star… who you also have to kill. One of those attorneys constantly berates you as you escort him to his hotel room, and while that’s certainly not justification for my shooting him in an office, failing to knock out his bodyguard, and running away, it did help put me in the mood.

This is aided by their particularly abusive or demented behavior. The game happily pipes in conversations by visitors or employees about how cruel or jerkish these people are, and the victims themselves are always ready to chime in with a cruel or demeaning remark. A pit crewman for a Miami war criminal race car driver, one with access to her souped up car, feels poorly treated. In Marrakesh, a general planning a coup has a friend tied up and ready for execution – one whose clothes probably fit you. A scientist in Chongqing spends his days abusing the homeless population for some horrible project; maybe you can direct whatever he’s doing at him? Their behavior gives you options to mete out karmic justice.

Other times, they’re comically over the top. The targets of (2016)’s notoriously mediocre Coloradan militia camp are just… nuts, from the Israeli interrogator who insists on wearing a 3D printed Michael Meyers mask at all times to the British analyst who keeps stomping across the compound in fits of loud anxiety. The Colombian druglord who trained his pet hippo to eat people? Well, the ironic death there seems obvious, but why not instead exploit his unbelievable egomania, one that’s turned his mansion into a museum of himself and just built an unsteady statue? And that can even go into the levels in which they hide themselves, like a towering Dubai skyscraper filled with convenient places to drop someone, or a cutting edge Japanese clinic that’s seemingly made out of corpse-sized cabinets.

…Or, in the case of this Hitman 2 DLC level, a picturesque island that’s also an experimental clinic where the super-rich change their faces.

I should note that Agent 47 isn’t really a “good guy,” since he’s totally willing to waste harmless civilians. The series tries to present him as morally grey and conflicted, and he’s certainly not on the level of his targets. But, like, in the famous Sapienza level of Hitman (2016), you’re trying to stop a deadly assassination virus – not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s going to cut into your business. And that helps. Not just because his methods are utterly sociopathic (to say nothing of how he can, again, use them on regular people), but because it lowers the emotional stakes. His targets are horrible, and he’s sometimes killing them out of a sense of morality, but he has no problem with sticking vomit inducing rat poison into every wine glass he sees. It makes the murders seem less jarring, but it also makes them less psychologically impactful, which is bad for high drama but good for something this light. And it turns him into the perfect, stoic straight man; rarely is the word “deadpan” so loaded with meaning.

The places he goes to work are gloriously over the top, on the level of a Bond villain lair (and here’s a required mention that IO is now, fittingly, working on a James Bond game). To say “it’s like the setting is its own character” is trite, but in a game where all the characters are goofy, the locations are the biggest goofs of all. There is never a chandelier you can’t shoot to drop on someone’s head, no three foot drop that won’t instantly kill a person, and no pantry that isn’t full of that rat poison, kitchen knives, and expired spaghetti sauce. Even when they’re overwhelming, there’s silliness. The standout level of the new game is a cat and mouse chase inside a thundering Berlin nightclub. It’s so intense and scary and crazy and… wait a sec, can I really just drop a coin to trick my target into stopping into this surprisingly empty hallway? Well, thanks!

The game is liberal with environmental threats you can use, but often, the easiest way to let them drop their guard is to talk to them directly or play up their eccentricities. The Colorado ringleader is probably the most overt – you can literally trigger his anxiety attacks – but it’s everywhere. One of Hitman 3’s single coolest missions is set in a Knives Out-style murder mystery, providing an entirely optional romp in which you solve a locked room puzzle for your target that reveals the lives of her comically dysfunctional family. In a secret North Atlantic castle, surrounded by the wealthiest of the wealthy, the best way to kill the two sisters running the show is to let them do what they want. They spend the entirety of the mission demeaning their guests and engaging in nasty games, and… well, if it makes them lower their guard…

So these are all really cool mechanically. It rewards paying attention (though the game very graciously provides hints and an achievement system to help you), and it creates situations where you feel like you’re exploiting more sincere weaknesses. In fact, the games have helped me come to terms with a design philosophy that’s always irked me. Games like Sonic the Hedgehog have rarely worked for me because I often feel that the things they demand are contradictory to how they can be played. They generally expect mastery from the start, and playing at a lower level of skill feels less satisfying and almost demeaning. But in Hitman I’ve found a way that clicked. And the solution is to make a game that’s fun – and hilarious – no matter how bad you are. The comedy is not merely a satisfying chunk of a good game; the comedy is central to experiencing it, learning it.

See, in Hitman, the people you target are, naturally, always pacing around and doing stuff, giving you certain opportunities to find them alone in a room or under a convenient thing you can push out a window. The reboot trilogy expanded this concept into “stories,” paths you can freely elect to take (or abandon) on your road to killing your target. Those grisly murders I mentioned? Those were the punchlines to these stories. These are often the most wild avenues for your work, plots that have you go undercover as talented musicians (the plural in this case meaning “this happens multiple times”), fixing a high stakes car race, or stab a comatose man approximately ten thousand times with a robot. And the game gives you a lot of room to find them, typically by listening in on revealing conversations. Many of them are near where you start, others demand more thorough investigations, but you can choose to get a waypoint for ones you haven’t found.

You don’t have to do this at all; there were multiple times where I didn’t (or followed up until a point and then… ad-libbed things). They’re also not the only notably crazy ways to kill a target, as each level has even more secret methods. But they’re really great at doing several things. They give you a tour for each location, teach you about basic and in-depth mechanics, and provide a method to experience fun, slight adventures. The stories let you know more about these worlds Agent 47 is infiltrating, and provide a somewhat easier – if longer and more roundabout – way to approach your missions. They’re helpful!

And sometimes, even just a fun title is enough to entice.

So if they count as an “easy mode” (which I don’t really think is fair, but just go with me), then they’re an easy mode that actually lets you do things you might not see on higher difficulties. They’re tutorials, they’re world-building, they’re exciting, and they’re funny. If you just want to experience the world that way and not push yourself beyond that, that’s okay! The games are fine with your doing that, and they are entirely satisfying with just that experience. They do try to push you to get better, but gently and softly.

Back to the humor, though. This whole milieu essentially establishes a performance. You have to act alongside your target on a stage. You can follow scene directions or come up with something on the fly – you probably will even if you take the directions. The combination of longer setups and quick improv allows a lot of silly possibilities. There are even running jokes, often in the form of items you can find – so many apricots and blueberry muffins – or types of disguises you can steal. In fact, Blood Money even features an assassination at an opera house (albeit during a production of Tosca, not a comedy).

All of this probably sounds deeply grim, and it would have been very easy for the games to fall into that trap. It’s certainly psychotic in its own way. And it’s far from the only game to make humor out of violence. But it works by employing a very specific type of violence, and I’d like to go outside the world of games to provide two contrasts.

While I was marching through the World of Assassination, I watched two films featuring extreme violence: Bacurau and Psycho Goreman. The former, a Brazilian picture from 2019, is about a community plagued by outside violence, exploitation, and the specter of colonialism. Part of its fun is experiencing it without knowing what you’re getting into, so I won’t disclose specifics, but it’s a film that’s emotional and terrifying and really powerful, and a lot of that comes from violence that was… kinda too intense for me. The film needs to be what it is, and I wouldn’t want it to not be that, but a lot of the violence was upsetting. Gruesome, even, and it had to be to make its point. So that works for what Bacurau goes for, but it can’t work for something like Hitman, with its chiller attitude and emphasis on replayability. It’s just too serious and intense.

So in theory, enter 2020’s Goreman, a brilliantly loutish cavalcade of comically absurd violence. Its story of a genocidal alien god being enslaved by a sociopathic child is really funny, and many of its biggest laughs come from the comically over the top brutality. People don’t get “hurt;” their bodies are ripped or mutated into black velvet Hellraiser art pieces. Limbs get pulled off like dead twigs. And its special effects are fantastic at being just real enough for the carnage to pop, but also being fake enough to not sicken. And that’s what it needed for its story about reprehensible people who learn not how to be “good” but just slightly nicer to the people they already know. That works for Psycho Goreman, and ostensibly, Hitman – another story about bad people trying to be mildly better – should fit in that mold. Right?

But there’s the rub. It can’t, because while Hitman is violent, it’s not gory. I killed the final boss of Hitman 3 with a grenade, and his body just flew up to the ceiling. The blood made a nice, safe pool. There aren’t really giblets of blood or sliced off limbs, the standard props of wacky violent games like Mortal Kombat or DOOM. The world of Agent 47 sort of fills a separate space: just as extreme as those, but not in the same way. I think it’d look pretty horrifying and psychotic if it was, with these pristine mansions turned into abattoirs. A bloody, gory Hitman would be… far over the edge, too overbearing. So it needs to be more low key than that. Classier, you could argue.

I think this is tied to one final element that, to be frank, I’ve never considered when thinking about violence in entertainment. And that is that Hitman puts you in control. The movies I mentioned, DOOM, Bloodborne, any number of other things of that nature; the violence is directed at you. There’s not really a lot of time in DOOM that doesn’t involve you being menaced by giant, screaming viscera. But in Hitman, you are the instigator of the violence. There are points where the guards will start firing at you of their own volition (mainly when you’re caught trespassing a high security area), but otherwise you choose when the “bad stuff” happens.

I mentioned how satisfying it feels to be this phantom that wields the mild order and chaos of each setting. The satisfaction comes through this fantastic gameplay, and each bit of stumbling and sneaking feels good. But there’s also something oddly – perhaps disquietingly – safe in how that presents the violence. You may not know how a story mission will end up or what tools you’ll find, but it’s your call when you kick someone off a cliff, poison their food, or drop a light fixture on their head.

That the Exploding Golf Ball exists is just a detail. Its location: a mystery. To put it to use is the act, the performance, and the fun.

There’s arguably something kind of disturbing in that – not at all in any “moral panic” sense, to be clear – but I think it’s fine when Hitman does it. Partially, that’s because for all its emphasis on “realistic” acts or motions, it’s comically unrealistic at every turn. The easiest way to get close to a target in the first main level of the 2016 reboot is to knock out and disguise yourself as a world famous supermodel who looks exactly like you, but with slightly more face paint. And your target, an ex-spy who’s known this man for years, buys it! So it’s hard to really look at the goings on and find it realistic or too close to home.

But I think the contemplative nature of it is also good for the fun, and good for people who want to experience this world. That’s where the safeness comes in. It allows people less comfortable with violence or less coordinated with stealth to experience the adventure. At the same time, though, It allows people at a higher level of skill to develop complex, well thought out strategies. The series in some ways evokes “reverse horror” games like Carrion or Arkham Asylum, with a protagonist who can be dominating, cunning, but still in danger. And in this case, the safety is part and parcel of Agent 47’s status as an apex predator. It’s one more tool for him.

As is right, this is central to the gameplay. Every level in Hitman juggles all sorts of people and timetables and spaces, and it’s really difficult to keep all of it together. It can even cause the stories of different targets in one level to overlap, dangling the possibility of actually killing two birds with one stone without you ever knowing. And while you can go through the directed stories or memorize people’s routes, things happen. You could just fail to avoid a guard’s sweep, or maybe bump into the wrong person (in keeping with the atmosphere of farce and physical comedy, Agent 47 has a tendency to accidentally bump into and annoy people a lot). But you’re always in control of at least yourself if no one else, which makes reacting feel more normal and allows the prospect of surviving. You can save scum (as I did), and that’s okay. And you can just roll with the punches, and that’s okay, too. The games are generally open and honest, even while it hides weapons and opportunities and precious information.

Though… this compilation should probably be saved for after you play more of Hitman 2. There’s a lot of good ones there.

I guess what I’ve been trying to get with this ramble is that Hitman trades in a lot of compelling ideas about how to make, and how to play, games. It creates a space that encourages experimentation while also providing the option for directed storytelling. It has a view of success and failure that’s supportive, and it sees both as ways to learn and have fun. And that alone is worthwhile, but every bit of it is tied inexorably to its view of the violence and comedy that is at the center of its design. I don’t think you could have a “grim” version of these games that worked, and I don’t mean the largely disliked and forgotten Hitman: Absolution – which was grim, but also much more linear than the series’ standard. It’d be dour and cruel, and the still incredible satisfaction of becoming better and smarter would be left with nothing around it. The humor gives it support.

But the comedy doesn’t just “legitimize” the violence or make it comfortable; it uses it to wonderful ends. Hitman is funny, a tragic rarity in the games industry, and it’s funny in three ways. It has controlled narratives with satisfying payoffs, the allowance for the player to be random and spontaneous, and an atmosphere that lends itself to humor. That humor is one of the threads that ties together style, tone, and gameplay – things that, for Hitman, could not exist independently. It’s comedy for the purpose of being funny. It’s comedy for the purpose of contextualizing (and lessening the impact of) violence. And it’s comedy that keeps everything working on the same level. That’s as great a punchline as any wacky kill.