enjoyed my time with this series of shallow slapstick playgrounds well enough but not well enough to really bother scrawling anything exploratory about the game itself!!! What i do want 2 say is that I continue to be really confused by the jarring contrast between something like Hitman's reception and the incurious disdain people have for Quantic Dream joints, because the choose your own adventure-style structural rigidity and corny netflix-ified cinematic aspirations of both teams are really not all that different!!!!! Look I 100% get taking political/mechanical/directorial umbrage with David Cage's work but also cant help but marge simpson groan at the way so many people thoughtlessly celebrate equally fraught games (in general, not even specifically talking about Hitman here) with no sense of awareness, using something like Detroit as an ideological whipping boy to absolve themselves of perceived complicity despite its admittedly infantile notions about racial/revolutionary politics being like, literally the violent cultural boilerplate and not some uniquely grotesque cringe failure! This is also a politically sloppy series full of questionable racial/gender depictions and a lot more faux-prestige cinemawanking "interactive movie" elements, CYOA routing, and schticky preordained scenarios than many admit so like... why is something like Detroit so uniquely fucking abhorrent from an interactivity perspective!!! Not to even go to bat for a noxious cornball doofus like David Cage but it irritates moi that Hitman and many other titles have sooo many exalting reveries about the brilliant structure of play whereas almost no structural assessments of Detroit exist without an intense haze of hyperbolic projection and unnecessary personal distancing. There's a lot in common going on here and tbh I think the way some of these similar mechanics and structures manifest in QD projects is way more successful and elegant than the "select chosen route and follow the oversignaled breadcrumb trail between story nodes to the divergent kill, then replay" shit here!!!!!!! Cringe about press x to jason and other prefab moments of hackish film-blocking as contextual gesture in HR all you want but IMO the failed illusion of opportunity and spontaneity in Hitman is a way more offensive sin! at least "interactive movie CYOA" games know full well what they are and don't build these elaborate and hollow palaces of obfuscation that only serve to disappoint once the presumption of opportunity sours. god why am i writing about david cage on this site at all let alone on a totally unrelated page about Hitman i'm going to lock myself in a slaughterhouse freezer forever bye
3 Comments
yeah this is a response to the first game which I just made my way through, I've read/seen a bit about the other games but haven't personally experienced the rest of the trilogy (or any of the prior installments) yet! That's cool to hear and I'm interested to see how things develop when I get to them! I also want to say that while I'm a hyperbolic lil brat here I dont think the railroading or firmness of the discrete routing itself was the problem for me, in fact my enjoyment of the game really increased once I reframed my expectations of this as a stealth action game and totally discarded the idea of mechanical finesse being a big focus. I came into Hitman to sate my post-Dishonored brain but totally had to re-evaluate it as something that has way more in common with a branching visual novel or choose your own adventure "interactive movie" game in order to really meet it at a place where the fun could be found. I was moreso irked by the way the game felt like it was hiding from its own structural core and putting on this unconvincing action game mask; I really didnt like the way it flatly telegraphed its flowchart nodes like a Assassins Creed map objective instead of in a more interesting/honest way. I love flowcharts and diverging choice shit/do not need dexterity-based challenge to be a focus by any means and wish the game frontloaded those aspects more instead of trying to promote this sort of halfway there idea of mechanical execution (which never felt that challenging or exciting to me). I had some frustrations but thought Hitman was interesting and enjoyed my time with it! I think these gameplay structures can be 100% valid and exciting and just find it odd that, to me at least, it really has a direct sort of kinship of design with several other scraggly interesting games and nobody seemingly wants to admit that because said games are seen as this unanimously derided untouchable poison
i strongly suggest just jumping back to blood money. hitman 2016 is a nice return to form (sorta) after a spree of downright terrible games but it doesn't have nearly as much openness or sandboxiness as blood money (and probably its other predecessors too)
like, in blood money there's a stage where you can complete an assassination by stealing a clown disguise, and if that's not top quality entertainment i don't know what is
also a huge peeve i have with 2016 is that agent "johnny sins" 47 is pretty much bulletproof and it's effortless to clean house on an entire map by killing literally every npc with few repercussions beyond an arbitrary score. blood money sees that you are gunned down very quickly if you try to do stupid shit. makes your options feel a lot more valid considering not everything you try will work.
anyway, i'd say david cage has a pretty big stigma against him as is even without his totally tone deaf writing and borderline alien understanding of societal issues considering how his games are basically glorified quicktime events. something like hitman's gonna be way more accessible even if its choices are a lot more shallow than advertised - cause you can at least 'play' it
like, in blood money there's a stage where you can complete an assassination by stealing a clown disguise, and if that's not top quality entertainment i don't know what is
also a huge peeve i have with 2016 is that agent "johnny sins" 47 is pretty much bulletproof and it's effortless to clean house on an entire map by killing literally every npc with few repercussions beyond an arbitrary score. blood money sees that you are gunned down very quickly if you try to do stupid shit. makes your options feel a lot more valid considering not everything you try will work.
anyway, i'd say david cage has a pretty big stigma against him as is even without his totally tone deaf writing and borderline alien understanding of societal issues considering how his games are basically glorified quicktime events. something like hitman's gonna be way more accessible even if its choices are a lot more shallow than advertised - cause you can at least 'play' it
LunaEndlessWitch
3 years ago
Hitman 2016 (and really every hitman before it as well in different extents) I definitely found extremely railroady, constantly telling you about mission stories and ways of following the story and generally your interactivity beyond the base stories was very limited. But I think this is a poor assessment of the series in total! In that, Hitman 2 and especially 3 go above and beyond to make divergence and spontaneity to the game that goes well beyond the mission stories. In part it's why I was even able to enjoy Hitman 2, where I wasn't able to of 2016. I'm unsure how much of this assessment is of Hitman 2016 alone, the series in total, or the nu-trilogy though so I might just be disagreeing with nothing if it just applies to 2016.