Justice is bald and wields a tin of expired spaghetti sauce.
It’s been a bad few years. Floods, hurricanes, an increasingly soup-brained and geriatric ruling class. The summers are too hot, the winters are too hot.
An exciting but exhausting time to be alive, all in all. Hardly a surprise, then, that I’ve been retreating more than ever to my comfort game of choice: Hitman 3. Something about the endless loops of mastering its levels—attempt, learn, attempt again—pleases my brain, provides a desperate sense of normal routine at a time when all other routines are at risk. The world is a bad place, but Hitman is constrained, controllable, knowable, logical.
But also, look, don’t tell anyone this, and definitely don’t publish it on a website with an international audience of millions, but there is something alluring about the game’s fundamental fantasy at times like these. Not, uh, not the murder. No one treat this article as a signed confession. I mean the fantasy of intrusion and disruption into the worlds and schemes of our planet’s ruling class, and the very slapstick justice you can exact when you get there.
Death and the jet-set
Agent 47 is always an interloper: he blends in everywhere but fits in nowhere. The tailored suits, the luxurious house, the fancy cars—these are just chameleon colours to Hitman’s hero. They don’t match his taste; he has no taste. He’s a carefully machined weapon that you point at the bourgeoisie and let rip.
He’s a carefully machined weapon that you point at the bourgeoisie and let rip.
And boy, isn’t that an appealing scenario in a year (or a decade, maybe a century or two) where about 100 guys with nine-digit bank accounts seem more determined than ever to kill us all rather than give up a fraction of their loot? The true, secret charm of Hitman is being a murderous Ghost of Christmas Past for all the world’s worst and most shiny-toothed people.
IO understands the appeal of this implicitly; it’s a fantasy the studio has deliberately constructed. There’s a reason, after all, you jet-set from the sun-soaked Italian coast to an exclusive hospital/resort where the ultra-rich go to transcend the limits of the flesh, remoulding themselves into whatever and whoever they want with advanced plastic surgery (a pale and greedy imitation of 47’s more authentically proletarian skin-shifting, of course, which only requires changing clothes. Am I joking about this? I don’t know).
It’s Looney Tunes wish fulfillment for the underpowered. Clinical and slapstick all at once, but never especially gorey or bloody-minded. Even Hitman’s most over-the-top kills are liable to send your target ragdolling at speed across a hotel lobby rather than disassemble them into their constituent parts. It’s never unseemly and never too much, it’s the catharsis of breaking plates in a rage room rather than disturbing, violent daydreaming. Every level culminates in something like Tom getting his comeuppance for all his schemes against Jerry.
There’s barely a single destination across all three of the most recent games that doesn’t seize on this in some way. Even Mumbai, where over 60% of the real-world population are condemned to live in slums, uses that scene as a backdrop to highlight the perversity of your first target’s ostentatious wealth and the cynicism of your second, who uses the masses as camouflage. Marrakech literally has you take out the greedy, corrupt diplomat whose actions have sparked protests in the streets.
To some extent, Freelancer Mode—where I do most of my man-hitting these days—loses some of that class appeal. By swapping out the game’s main targets for randomly selected schmucks on the street, IO risked defanging the missions of that cartoon sense of the villain getting their just desserts.
This is, I have to assume, why the game’s writers came up with the fig-leaf justification that everyone you’re taking out is part of some kind of sinister and exploitative international criminal syndicate. Not quite as satisfying as the main narrative throughlines, but it’ll do.
Besides, a lot of these levels couldn’t be divorced from an eat-the-rich mentality (you have to wonder if Hitman 1 through 3’s development story, which saw IO buffeted between different corporate overlords, influenced that a little) if you tried. The Isle of Sgàil mission, for instance, pretty much has you crash the party from Eyes Wide Shut. Or at least, the party from Eyes Wide Shut if it had been about the rich conspiring to put the consequences of climate change squarely on the shoulders of the poor, rather than innovation in intercourse. On missions like those, it barely matters if your target’s a waiter. You’re striking a blow for class justice wherever your sword falls.
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