IO Interactive’s Hitman series has an image problem. 

The problem is that Hitman is the best slapstick comedy improv murder theatre ever created, and doesn’t know how to convey that to its prospective audience. Instead, Hitman games are always marketed as gritty assassin simulators, and jammed full of super-serious-spy cutscenes with the narrative density of an exceedingly expired can of spaghetti sauce.

2006’s Hitman: Blood Money ran magazine adverts with centerfold spreads of murdered women, with captions like ‘Perfectly Executed’, while in 2012, Hitman: Absolution led with an ill-conceived trailer full of sexually suggestive, heavily-armed nuns, whom Agent 47 proceeded to murder in a climactic gunfight viewed through lingering gratuitous torture-porn shots.

More recently, the rebooted Hitman games managed to avoid obvious mis-steps, yet still hid their playful sandboxes behind interminable dour cutscenes sketching a complex web of covert operations between someone called the ‘shadow client’, a secret organisation called Providence, an international spy ring whose name utterly escapes me, and various other narrative devices whose purpose distills down to one simple truth:

You’re going to be told to kill someone. Sometimes two people, sometimes four. Sometimes you’ll do it by poisoning their drink, sometimes by staging a horrific accident while you smugly stroll out through oblivious security. Sometimes you’ll do it while wearing a clown suit, or dressed as an anthropomorphic mascot or the Phantom of the Opera.

Sometimes you’ll be mistaken for another famous bald man - because there’s always another famous bald man you just happen to look remarkably similar to - and you’ll parade around in their clothes, living their fraught little lives until the time comes to strike.

Sometimes you’ll throw briefcases round corners.

And sometimes you’ll cosh a waiter to steal his uniform only to realise they weren’t alone and instinctively throw a hammer at the onlooker before they sound the alarm and yet someone still comes to investigate the weighty thunk of hammer hitting bone and you’ll do a murder quick before scuttling out through a side-door, a trail of havoc and devastation in your wake.

The problem is that it’s hard to convey how ridiculous and joyful and playful Hitman is, and so it’s easier just to advertise to people who want to murder women in sexy lingerie, and spin them a yarn about how they’re definitely an edgy assassin with a mysterious past rather than the straight-man in a ludicrous black-comedy world. 

And that does Hitman a disservice.