T w e n t y S i d e d

In a game brimming with stupid irritations, the scene where Victoria kills everyone but her captor is one of the most irritating and stupid. After building up her powers for an entire game, they finally reveal them just for the sake of a useless cutscene that accomplishes nothing. After failing to give our damsel any personality whatsoever, they finally give her a moment of screen time to reveal she’s stupid, useless, and overly emotional. I guess Dexter knew she was stupid, since he made no effort to protect himself from her and was completely unafraid of her even as she slaughtered his men. Apparently he knows he’s wearing plot armor?

It wouldn’t even be that hard to fix this: After she kills all the mooks, she fires a bullet right at Dexter’s cackling face without hurting him. The camera pulls back to reveal he’s on the other side of a bulletproof glass wall. It’s still dumb and contrived, but at least the damsel and villain don’t both need to behave like complete morons to make this scene work.

Look, I know it’s completely unfair to compare Hitman: Absolution to some dream game I have in my head. It can’t even succeed at the very shallow goals it set for itself, so asking for something thematically ambitious and mechanically complex is like asking Tommy Wiseau to come up with The Usual Suspects. It’s totally unreasonable and a recipe for disaster.

But you know what? This game is already an unreasonable disaster on many levels, so who cares? What are the writers gonna do? Have me stupidly captured by idiot villains in another dozen cutscenes? So let’s talk about what I wanted when the game started telling us that Victoria was a super-badass. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hitman Absolution EP17: The Least Samurai”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I have to admit I kind of lost it this week. This part of the game is so egregiously incompetent that I stopped analyzing the game and just got angry at it. The part where you’re captured in a cutscene (again!) is probably not quite as bad as the end of the Terminus mission in terms of “authorial blunders per minute”, but this one tries my patience a lot more.

Skurkey has his dominatrix here at work not because it makes any kind of sense in how people would behave, but because the writers wanted more of whatever this is. I can’t can’t tell is this is supposed to be fanservice or mocking BDSM culture, but it’s really confusing either way. Skurkey has been established as a pretty dim bulb, but even if you ghost this entire area he still gets you with this electrocution trap, meaning he’s both clairvoyant and way more clever than the writers have shown him to be. And then two seconds later it reveals he didn’t even know you’re the Hitman! So why did he leave that trap? Okay, I accept that this world has videogame electricity where exposing current to a puddle of water makes a knockout trap instead of, you know, blowing a fuse. But does the Sheriff just randomly make this shock trap outside his office for no reason?

And then we have yet another section where Dexter cackles over you and refuses to kill you for no good reason and instead leaves you in an easily escape-able situation. None of this makes sense or fits together. It’s just an endless chain of the very worst videogame cliches, repeated over and over again. This blend of “dark, serious, and edgy” with “willfully stupid, childish, and absurd” is contemptible. This is a game that’s trying to do some sort of introspection while at the same time lacking any sense of self-awareness.

For better or worse, this is our last week with Hitman: Absolution.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.