Hitman Go
Behind the gunshots, the garroting, the exploration and the sleuthing, the Hitman series has always belonged to the puzzle genre. The freedom those games afford you is the freedom to choose your own puzzle pieces, but ultimately you only have one goal, one problem to solve. That’s all it’s really ever been, but much like its protagonist, it’s been hiding in plain sight, using props to fool you into misidentifying it.
When you first boot up Hitman Go, the cool, dreamy score kicks in – clinical and cold, but spacey and surreal. You unpack a Hitman-flavored board game, replete with mission-themed front cover, unfurling levels, and little subbuteo figures for characters. Moving along tram lines scored across the playing field, these figures zip through the levels with static charm. The feeling of watching your grim-faced little 47 making his herky-jerky way through the charming diorama feels great; more importantly, it feels like Hitman. The clothes, the tools of death, the lavish and detailed levels, and the tongue-in-cheek characters – it’s all here.
The reason that Hitman Go works as well it does is twofold: Firstly, It presents you with a compelling, challenging puzzle box filled with fiendish solutions, variable strategies, and engaging mechanics. Secondly, it distills the essence and identity of the series perfectly while eschewing the gameplay and mechanics that players have come to know and love. It’s like having your portrait done by a boardwalk cartoon caricaturist. Despite the end result looking wacky, out of proportion, and exaggerated, it’s unmistakably you. Hitman Go draws strength from the similarity it shares with its bigger brethren in terms of mechanics: evaluate every approach path available, before considering the tools at your disposal, and plotting the right route to your mark. It’s all there. In fact, it’s so stark and stripped-back, it engenders your creativity with a sparser palette.
Making a puzzle game out of an action game seemed odd, but then, IO had been making an action game out of a puzzle game for years.
