“Traditions of the Trade” – Hitman: Contracts

Hitman: Contracts is another oddity in the year of sequels. I’m going to be playing plenty of remasters of older games as I move towards the present day, but few as hasty as this: a third game in a series that consists in large part of revised missions from the first game, not even four years old. The key here is the key to much of the last few years I’ve gone through — the domination of consoles meant that revising the PC exclusive Hitman: Codename 47 on PS2 (and to a lesser extent Xbox) would open up a large new audience. Pitching its redone missions next to some new stuff stopped it from being a completely backwards move. Even if it was still far from being Hitman: Expands.

Contracts even manages to find a way to make its backwards looks make sense in-narrative. Genetically engineered assassin protagonist Agent 47 gets shot in the intro, and then spends the game working his way through memories and visions prompted by what he encounters as he lies possibly dying. It works that as he goes further and deeper within himself, he starts retreading more familiar ground, and even the way that a couple of different missions from the original get squashed together into one fits the workings of an increasingly fevered mind. 

It’s the kind of concept which the Hitman series is able to pull off well because, once again, IOI are willing to take aesthetic and structural risks to support their world. There isn’t the grandiosity of Silent Assassin, but there is an inward-focused surreality that’s a good substitute. Choral flourishes are replaced by pounding, desaturated electronic takes on the music. After an intro mission going back to Agent 47’s escape from a nightmarish asylum, the first assassination mission proper takes place at a fetish party at a meat processing plant. People dance and mingle next to hanging animal carcasses and all the doors are bloodstained. It’s grim, gory, a little bit torture porn in places, and vividly stylised. And it makes creeping around and sneaking up on people feel fresh again. Just about every mission takes place in the dark in the rain, a nod to the protagonist’s present circumstances and an asset for atmosphere.

Contracts adds more chances to kill people in different ways than ever (poisoning, gas explosion, suffocation-by-pillow) and the freedom to sneak around in disguises and construct and improvise deadly plans is a big part of its appeal. The combination of access to information and sensitive AI that powers much of its tension works great. It’s not just expecting a lot from its players to figure out its intricacies that makes it stand out, though, but its expectations when it comes to an artful and sometimes oblique narrative approach.

As the series loops back in on itself though, the worst aspects come through again as well. Going back to the meat plant, the main assassination target is basically Fat Bastard from Austin Powers, its focus on his gluttony a telling example of how the game tries to merge its aesthetic and moral judgements in a lazy and harmful way. A mission in Hong Kong gives you a list of nameless identical-looking Triad members to dispatch, whose appearance is straight out of some racist yellow peril fantasy of a century ago. Even without being able to read more than a few words of Chinese I could see that the massive hanging banners throughout the level did not look right, and yep, some characters are mirrored and meaninglessly repeated. In a game whose world is so focused on attention-to-detail and style, these glaring exceptions strike right at the heart of its appeal, and the fact that they still appear in a mission which IOI had years to correct makes it even worse. When you hold your lead character and audience to exacting expectations, it’s all the more pressing to do the same for yourself.

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Top of the charts for week ending 1 May 2004:

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Top of the charts for week ending 8 May 2004:

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