Hitman: World of Assassination — The Puzzle Box Perfected

On 26 January 2023, IO Interactive stopped selling three Hitman games and started selling one. World of Assassination folds the 2016 reboot, 2018’s sequel and 2021’s finale into a single product with a single progression track, and it arrived alongside Freelancer, a roguelike mode that reorganises the whole thing.

The repackaging is an administrative event and I’d normally have nothing to say about it. It matters here because the boundaries it erased were the wrong ones from the start. Hitman’s three games were never three games. They were one machine that shipped in instalments — episodically at first, in 2016, which was a decision that annoyed everyone and made the point better than any of IOI’s marketing ever did. A Hitman level is designed to be replayed. Selling one per month was mad, and it accidentally forced players to do the correct thing, which is to sit in Paris for a fortnight until you know where the caterer’s coat is.

The map is a mechanism

Take Sapienza, the Italian coastal town from 2016 that most people will tell you is the best level IOI has built. It’s a village, a mansion, a clifftop, a church, a bioweapons lab under a graveyard. It runs three targets and a virus. It contains something like a hundred discrete interactive affordances and dozens of documented routes to each objective.

The first run through it is a mess. You wander, you get spotted, you shoot a gardener out of panic, you leave via a hole in the fence with two of three objectives done and a rating that tells you exactly how badly you performed. The second run is better. By the fifth you know that the therapist has an appointment, that the golf ball is where it is, that the plumbing under the church does something specific, and that the whole town runs on a loop you can now hear ticking.

That progression is the game. The systems exist to serve it and they’re built with real discipline. Disguises are the load-bearing one: they open doors and they carry a specific liability, because certain NPCs — enforcers, marked with a white dot — recognise the outfit you’re wearing as wrong. So a disguise is a key with a blast radius. Instinct is the concession, a see-through-walls vision mode you can turn off, and turning it off on Master difficulty is what the game is actually for. Mission Stories are the tutorial layer: guided opportunities that walk you through one authored route so you understand what a route looks like, after which you can build your own out of parts.

The thing IOI got right that its imitators miss is that the crowd is a system. Karnaca and Talos I are places with guards. Dubai and Mendoza are places with parties. Blending, tailing, waiting for a conversation to finish so a man walks to a balcony alone — these are verbs that only exist because the level is running a social simulation with a timetable, and the timetable is the puzzle.

The best three, and why

Dartmoor, from 2021, is the one I’d hand to a sceptic. It’s a Knives Out murder mystery: an English country house, a family, a death, and a private detective expected at the door. Take the detective’s suit and the game hands you an actual investigation with witnesses to interview, evidence to gather, and a conclusion to deliver in the drawing room. You can accuse anyone. The level is a Hitman map with a deduction game bolted into it, and it works because the map was already a social clockwork with a timetable — Golden Idol and Obra Dinn are doing deduction from a standing start, and Dartmoor gets it half-built for free.

Berlin inverts the formula. There’s a nightclub, and eleven ICA agents in it are hunting you, and the game declines to tell you which of the several hundred people they are. You pick any five. The targets are defined by a property rather than a name, which turns the level from a stalking exercise into a reading exercise: watch the crowd, find the person who moves like a professional, and act on your own conclusion. It’s the only level in the series where the game trusts you to identify the objective.

Sapienza remains the peak because it’s the densest. Whittleton Creek is the funniest. Colorado is the bad one — a militia farm with too many enforcers and too few civilians, which starves the social simulation and turns the level into a stealth-action map. It’s instructive: strip the crowd and the machine seizes.

Freelancer, and the save-scum question

Here’s the interesting thing about Hitman, and it’s the same thing that makes people slightly ashamed of how they play it. The real verb is the quicksave. You save before every risk, reload when the risk goes badly, and assemble a perfect run out of thirty imperfect attempts. It’s how everyone plays. IOI knows it’s how everyone plays and gives you a generous save allocation on every difficulty except the hardest.

I’ve argued before that save systems are ideology, and Hitman is exhibit A. The saves are what make the level knowable. A Hitman map is a combinatorial object with too many moving parts to model in your head, so you model it by trying things, and reloading is the cost of the experiment. Restricting the save wouldn’t make the game more tense; it would make it slower to learn, which is a different thing entirely.

Freelancer is IOI’s answer, and it’s a good one. It builds a campaign out of the existing maps: a safehouse, a set of syndicates, randomised targets, mandatory objectives, gear you buy and lose, and no saves. Die and the campaign’s progress goes with it. It’s the roguelike argument applied to a game whose levels are already memorised — which is the clever part. Freelancer doesn’t ask you to learn Miami. It assumes you know Miami and asks whether you can improvise in it with a suppressed pistol you can’t afford to lose.

The tension is real and it’s different. Ten minutes into a good Freelancer run you’ll find yourself declining a kill you’d take instantly in the campaign, because the campaign’s F5 is gone and the target is standing near two enforcers.

The complaint

The always-online requirement remains the thing IOI should be embarrassed about. Progression, unlocks, challenges, mastery — all of it lives on a server, and playing offline puts you in a hollowed-out version of the game where nothing you do counts. For a single-player product this is indefensible, and it’s been indefensible since 2016, and it’s still here.

The story is nonsense, which is fine. Nobody bought Hitman for Providence.

Where to play it

It’s on PC and current consoles as one purchase with everything in it, which was the entire point of the 26 January repackaging. Start with Paris and Sapienza. Play each map at least four times before moving on; a single run through a Hitman level is the equivalent of reading the first chapter of every book on a shelf.

The ancestor here is the immersive sim’s insistence that a level is a place with rules, routed through Blood Money in 2006, which had the accidents and the crowds and the sandbox and lacked the fidelity to run them at Sapienza’s scale.

Spoilers below

The trilogy’s plot is a thin thing stretched over a very good machine, and the last twenty minutes of it are better than they have any right to be.

47 and Lucas Grey were children in the same institution, engineered by the organisation the games eventually name as Providence. Grey remembers it. 47 doesn’t, because his memory was taken, and the seven-year arc is a long walk towards the man responsible: Arthur Edwards, the Constant, an administrator with a good suit and a serum that removes people from their own lives.

Mendoza is where the writing earns its keep. Diana Burnwood — the voice in 47’s ear since 2000, the handler whose relationship with the asset has been the series’ only actual character work — tells him that she has always known he killed her parents. She’s known the whole time. She took the job anyway, and worked with him for two decades, and the scene plays as a dance because there’s nothing to be done about it.

Then the train. 47 reaches Edwards and injects him with his own serum, and Edwards, mid-sentence, stops being anyone. And Diana injects 47 — frees him, wipes the conditioning, ends the asset — and then wakes him up and gives him a new contract. The series ends with the handler doing to 47 exactly what Providence did, for better reasons, and asking nobody’s permission.

It rhymes with the levels. Every Hitman map is a machine full of people on schedules who don’t know they’re on schedules, and the reward for mastering it is that you can move them around. The last cutscene points that at the one relationship the game had, and lets it be true.