Hitman 3's Story Fails Where Dark Souls Succeeds

Polygon's review of Hitman 3 starts like this:
Shockingly, what Hitman 3 wants most is to tell you a story.

Why is that shocking? Because Hitman 3 is the conclusion to a trilogy with terrible storytelling.

In Hitman (2016) there is a story between each level: a bald mega-assassin and sketch comedy dress-up champion known only as 47 and his handler Diana shoot, stab, poison, and ironically humiliate their way through the criminal elite. What story is there is easily ignorable post-Bourne euro-thriller stuff that feels like the plot of a Mission: Impossible movie: an excuse for cool stuff to happen in exotic places.

Hitman 2 saw its budget cut when developer IO Interactive was cut loose from long-time publisher Square Enix, and the result is cutscenes with static images: not the most gripping storytelling device. Still, Hitman 2 tries to continue the story from the first game, as a mysterious "shadow client" is revealed to have been behind all of 47's contracts, who are secretly members of a worldwide cabal called "Providence" which is exactly like "Quantum/Spectre" from the Daniel Craig Bond films, right down to the secret society pewter lapel pins.

For Hitman 3, there was a lot of press right before release about how IOI was making an effort to tie the story threads together and, look, they did, but they did so with barely more elegance than in the very first game. The genius of the Hitman trilogy's structure is that each game is fully playable in the following release: you can play all of Hitman 2016 & Hitman 2 in Hitman 3, allowing you to experience the story all at once. And doing it this way is somehow worse than experiencing it in three chunks.

Hitman's storytelling strengths have always been in how the stories play out in individual levels. The levels are designed to be repeated: the first trip through is often more a recon mission than an honest attempt, your successful assassinations usually due to fluke or relying on the old standbys like rat poison and a good 'ol bullet to the noggin.

(One thing Hitman simulates quite well is the confusion and disorganization that happens in an emergency. You can often pull a gun out and shoot your target dead and, as long as no one immediately starts shooting at you, get pretty far into your escape before the guards mobilize and start hunting you down.)

Each level is a puzzle box, designed to be played multiple times, and there are stories within the levels that are explicitly laid out using the game's Mission Story system, or left to you to discover. Anything unusual or eye-catching is usually a path to a murderin' and though it's not hard to guess what you have to do, you still feel really smart when you figure it out. 

(Shout out to my favourite kill in the series: a tech bro who has designed killer robots that identify their targets using a photograph has magazine covers of his own face all over his office.)

These stories range in plausibility from a check-your-brain-at-the-door blockbuster to the obviously absurd, and the black comedy irony of each is delightful. The storytelling within the missions know the idea of a bald guy wearing disguises to sneak into high security areas is absurd: that's why the people whose disguises you can wear are always bald men in their 30s or 40s. You buy into the fantasy because it's fun, the same way it's fun watching Tom Cruise haul ass through Paris or jump out of an airplane.

But ooof mama that meta story. See, I'm not saying the story in Mission: Impossible: Fallout is good, but the storytelling really is! There's great pacing, the stakes start high and get higher, there's some lovely emotional beats and some good humour. Writing something that balanced, and maintaining that balance through the production process, is really hard and unfortunately the storytelling in Hitman is just not up to it.

So where does my clickbait headline of mentioning Dark Souls, the Candyman of video game writing, come in? One of the things that Hitman does do well is seeding a lot of the connective tissue of their stories using environmental storytelling: notes, overhead conversations, signs and logos and newspaper clippings, & the granddaddy of non-traditional game storytelling: audio logs. Here, down in the margins between the absurd Quibi-original quality meta story and the Soderbergh black comedy of the mission stories, are valuable context for what you're doing, and little hints about the repercussions of your actions. They provide some answers to the questions asked during the game's unscrupulous cutscenes: tough, hard-to-answer questions like "Who's this guy?" and "Why did he get shot?"

I played Hitman 2016 and Hitman 2 again within Hitman 3 specifically to give the story another chance. I remember being pretty meh on it the first time around, and pretty much just skipped the cutscenes for Hitman 2. However, now that I'm a vet of the series, I knew better to take my time and explore and eavesdrop and read everything as I was on my way to completing the missions stories. I knew to be curious and poke around and read the things that I found.

What I discovered was… the same information you get from watching the cutscenes. See, Hitman 2016 was sort of a reboot, but they also tease that the prior games in the series are canon: the post-tutorial cutscene has highlights of memorable kills from the original Codename 47, Blood Money, etc. All your faves! The problem is, Hitman 2016 also relies on that most tired of protagonist cliches: the mysterious past. 47 doesn't know where he came from, he doesn't even know his name, all he knows is that he's a trained killer and a killer drummer. 

Except, we do know where 47 came from: you go there at the end of Codename 47. You also go there at the end of Hitman 2, and it's the same place? And you've been there before? But 47 doesn't seem to recognize it except from his childhood memories?

(I haven't mentioned who the shadow client is: it's 47's long-lost "brother", another victim of the Black Widow-esque murder orphanage, who used you and Diana to kill the people who created them and then he's a good guy for a bit until he's tossed aside in a cutscene in Hitman 3.)

This culminates in Hitman 3's most desperate storytelling moments: the "revelation" that 47 killed Diana's parents—my first laugh out loud gaming moment of 2021 as the bad guy, The Constant, hands Diana a folder the subtitles helpfully label, I swear to god, "47'S PLAN TO KILL DIANA'S PARENTS"—and the ol' magic memory-erasing serum that is breathlessly introduced, explained, and then discarded by an NPC in the very last level.

Are these moments set up in the other games? I don't think so. I never came across anything that said Diana was motivated by revenge or that her family had been killed. It's also a massive red herring, in a "shocking" bait and switch loyalty reversal that shows Diana and 47 were working together the whole time to get closer to The Constant, a man who keeps walking right up to Diana, in person, with no one else around! 

(Also, it's implied the revelation 47 killed her family pushes Diana to finally climb to the top of Providence, to seize the power she's secretly always wanted and it's like, really? Can't she just want power? Does a woman have to be motivated by the death of her loved ones to be a climber? Kamala Harris didn't go into law because her family was murdered!)

Also also, why not make one of your earlier targets Diana's parents! Then the player would actually be complicit in their deaths instead of making you press the detonator button in a dream sequence at the end of the entire trilogy. Maybe that would add some consequences to your actions?

The little lore tidbits and environmental storytelling in the Souls games work because they add context to an intriguing setting and because the story in those games is so obtuse that it's a surprise they have one at all. The Souls series is intentionally post-Internet, post-GameFAQs, post-Reddit: you can't just hop on YouTube the day the game comes out and watch a walkthrough or fifty video essays explaining everything to you. The hostility is the point!

Hitman has no hostility, and hiding valuable insights is only valuable if those insights are insightful. There's no revelation in Hitman's storytelling, no deeper understanding of anyone's motivations, and nothing so clever as a tacit acknowledgement, in the big picture meta story, that the whole situation is ridiculous. The whole thing ends up feeling like a poorly directed sketch show with multiple writers each fighting to tell their kind of story. The result is an experience with some highlights but an overall feeling of bewilderment.

And then you throw a banana at a guy and it knocks him unconscious and his friend walks over and slips on the peel and he gets knocked unconscious and you're like: this is the story! I'm the story! I'm the best sketch writer! Stop telling me you want to tell a good story and just fucking do it. It's not like there aren't a ton of examples out there to draw from.