I've played hitman a whooole lot over the last year or two, but it's been almost exclusively the roguelike mode. It was only very recently that I decided to properly go through the singleplayer campaign - and not just go through it, but do every mission story on every level.

Having just finished Hitman 1, I feel like I've started to see some interesting design throughlines and thought it'd be fun to talk about and pick apart the mechanical decisions involved. Just be warned; this is going to be very, very long.

Well, I promised it, and here it is. I'm going to note that I'm probably going to chill out after this because marathoning all of hitman 2 in like 3 days was genuinely slightly unhealthy.

SO. I played through the hitman 2 campaign and did all the mission stories. What's changed? What's the same? I once again have a lot to talk about so here's the read more break. This time it's ONLY 5000 words!!!

---

So Hitman 2 has some major ideas about changing up design principles

The intent behind certain things has changed, and that's had a lot of both direct effects and knock-on effects on Mission Stories. Let's go over some of the core elements first.

Big level design changes

Platforming is everywhere

In hitman 1 there was, I would say, a moderate amount of opportunities to climb and the like, but by and large they were only allowed to circumvent major stronghold access in very specific locations, and often didn't feature at all elsewhere. Often those opportunities came to a very hard stop whenever they hit the entry point to an area that the developers preferred you find a disguise in. It was cautious and attempted not to interfere with the disguise-changing play.

Hitman 2 throws that entirely out the window - I think if I had to sum up a single element that Hitman 2 is interested in changing up, it's that it wants levels to be significantly more freeform. Huge public zones with tons of entry points into sanctums festoon basically every stage. Interiors are more stealthable due to lots more things to crouch behind. The result is that the basics of an Access ask are hugely opened up - the player now nearly always has a viable choice between finding a relevant disguise, sneaking around, or both. "Both," you say? Well, that brings me to...

Disguise Breakers are everywhere

A general feature of hitman 1 that was mostly used to push the player to circumvent major gateway locations - by far they were most-often placed stationary at stairs and key doorways. Disguise breakers have now, generally, been removed from many of those locations (or turned into patrollers) and then salted generously across the entire map. This has a huge effect on inter-area routing, which used to not even be a concern almost at all. In Hitman 1, with exceptions, once you got into a zone you were relatively free to explore it except for specific choke points. In Hitman 2, you always need to be alert.

The above in combination gives the designers a few extra tools in their toolbox -

• The Routing Ask, which has players work their way through a location festooned with Disguise Breakers, sometimes while doing another activity
• More-viable sidegrade disguises. In Hitman 1 there often wasn't much reason to discard high-security outfits unless you were switching to a new sanctum with its own progression. Hitman 2, by comparison, has many sub-outfits or parallel access lines that have different assigned disguise breakers, allowing the player different access within the same area. (The rule hitman 1 had where disguise breakers were almost always NPCs with the same outfit of you is thrown out the window).
• More open disguise economy. This new threat allows some outfits (usually security) to access more of the map without actively trivializing its challenges. (This was a big problem in Marrakesh) A more widespread ability to challenge the player without said challenge always being focused on entry points gives the designers a much larger capability to give even high-tier outfit players something to consider when approaching a target - which means they can allow those outfits wider access to more portions of the map. Useful solution to a definite problem!

Bodyguards

This is minor compared to the previous two, but while a few targets had bodyguards who followed them around in Hitman 1, it's become a HUGE thing in H2 and it lends a utility to mission stories that remove those guards that said mission stories might otherwise lack. Hitman 2's emphasis on very open levels means that some targets, even embedded ones, are much more accessible than they used to be, so pulling that back a bit with an extra challenge at the end leaves Mission Stories some room to give the core kill action some benefits for players who, by now, know plenty well how to do a poisoning on their own.

Changes to the goals of Mission Stories

Opening Up

Mission stories themselves seem to have undergone a moderate realignment. The above "opening-up" of options has carried through into mission stories, which generally spend a lot less time pointing the player directly at options and more time asking the player to find their way somewhere themselves and not telling them how. This extends to Means asks, which are much more common now - it's now very rare for a story to directly provide a needed screwdriver or poison (though you can often find them moderately nearby).

It's often left up to players to explore zones on their own for these kinds of things, which means most exploration is now self-guided rather than the more direct area-based tutorialization that hitman 1 was interested in. Similarly, I can only think of one or two mission stories in the entirety of Hitman 2 that asks the player to get a specific disguise type, whereas this was a very core element of Hitman 1. Now, instead, Open Access asks tend to simply point the player at a location and say "go there, somehow" and leave the rest to decisionmaking.

Basic Tutorialization is kind of over, and Bespoke Content is in

In Hitman 1 a number of the basic stories kind of pushed the player towards (or explicitly instructed them to) take actions that would become common later. For example, A Drink to Die For in Paris is basically tutorializing the player on poisoning targets. That kind of thing is over. The vast majority of mission story kill types in Hitman 2 are either highly bespoke kills during specific opportunities, or open-ended situations where the target is placed in a vulnerable position (usually near you) and you can do whatever you like. The game assumes you know about poisoning, environmental objects, etc, and integrates them into asks occasionally but will almost never demand you finish your target off with one of them as a mission story capstone. They're mundane now.

It's time to switch up the challenges

Hitman seems keenly aware that players are likely to have already gone through the Hitman 1 campaign and that they need some new challenges for Mission Story players beyond just creating higher and higher walls (aka Hokkaido) between the early and late security levels. The changes to the level design (micro-outfits, disguise breakers) help a lot here - but there's generally a few ways they do this within mission stories as well.

• New Ask: The Room Challenge
  The Room Challenge is a new design element for Hitman 2 and it more-or-less immediately becomes clear that the designers LOVE it, because it is a core element of a huge number of Mission Stories. In the Room Challenge, you're tasked with accomplishing something in a room. This is nearly always, but not entirely always, stealing the outfit off of a unique NPC inside said room. There will always be as few as 2 and as many as 4-5 other NPCs in that room. Your goal, then, is either to dispose of the lot or carefully extract your target so you can get what you need. If the room is public, usually there's poisoning and distraction opportunities. If it's private, then usually the occupants patrol - but the How of each challenge is entirely up to you. Besides facilitating the general open-endedness previously mentioned, this mechanic is very useful because catastrophic consequences in a single room are way less likely if the player fails. For this reason, it's more or less completely replaced the old New Target ask.
• New Ask: The Event Target.
  The other half of the replaced New Target ask. In Hitman 1, New Targets were always treated like miniature versions of your actual targets. They'd patrol around, or they'd walk somewhere on a time limit, and you had to figure out how to get to them despite them generally being in very public locations. The Event Target simplifies this heavily; When you activate the mission story, they get up, and they immediately start walking toward somewhere private where you can pummel them. The most complex version of this will occasionally have them patrol between two locations, but generally speaking this is almost always a freebie. This features pretty heavily parts of the campaign the developers want to be on the easier side.
• The Kill Step is no longer free
  A general safe assumption in Hitman 1 was that if you were playing a direct, the step where you execute the kill was going to be an absolute freebie. The only exceptions, basically ever, were draw-outs and indirects. That is no longer true. Now, kill steps can include their own mission asks, just like any other step. Sometimes this just adds more to-dos, but sometimes this means the player has to act very fast when they realize what's being asked of them. Or avoid messing up at all. To facilitate this, we have a new mechanic:
• New Mechanic: The Trap.
  The other new favourite Mission Story Designer's tool, the Trap, comes in three varieties, all meant to mess with the player's expectations coming in from Hitman 1.
  The Wait For It: A trap that tries to trick the player into killing their target too early, while others are watching. This is ALL OVER THE PLACE in hitman 2. The player needs to wait out a monologue, typically, while keeping an eye on when the local guards finally turn their backs. Sometimes the safe moment is telegraphed and sometimes it's non-obvious, but the key element is that of leaving opportunities for players to jump the gun and get themselves in trouble.
  The Prep Trap: The player gets to the end of the mission story and... wait, where are they going? That's right, the window was already missed. Usually this requires the player to have acquired the relevant item or poisoned a drink, etc, beforehand. What distinguishes it from the classic Indirect in Hitman 1 is that it may not give you any indication you're about to fail out until you already have. Sneaky sneaky! Once again, a situation that can turn a desperate player to make silly/funny mistakes.
  The SA Trap: The meanest (and rarest) of all of them, a trap that causes complacent players to lose their Silent Assassin status. Comes in only a few forms but generally punishes a lack of due diligence leading up to the kill step.

Mission Stories are for the Early, Challenges are for the Late

This is a dynamic it took me awhile to recognize but it's very keenly obvious once you play enough. In Hitman 2, with only a few exceptions, Mission Stories all begin at Security Level 0 (47's starter outfit). The remainder mostly start at the next tier up. The Late Direct, meanwhile, has been more or less moved entirely into Challenges with - I'm guessing - the assumption that if you've somehow infiltrated a sanctum without a mission story you probably don't need much guidance anyway. These "Mission Story Challenges" act almost exactly like real mission stories, with conversations in the world hinting to what the player needs to do with them. The main difference is they don't telegraph their next steps the way real mission stories do. It's an interesting change. I think I could probably argue that it dilutes the identity of mission stories a bit but, at the same time, I can see the argument - it's clear they want to cater to people who want to find stuff themselves but absolutely will not turn off the mission story objective markers, and this is that half-measure.

Way more bespoke content

This is less of a direct structural design thing and more about narrative philosophy, but I think it's worth noting that the amount of bespoke-ness in mission stories has MASSIVELY increased compared to Hitman 1 - Probably 70% of mission stories on average now bring you into a direct and extended conversation with the target a privilege that was often reserved for Long Directs in Hitman 1. It's clear they know that people love this stuff and want more of it. Beyond that, there's a lot more chatting than before and the number of mission stories that specifically have you grab a unique disguise as opposed to a generic (or none at all) has increased to nearly 60-70% of the total, compared to maybe 1-2 per level in the first game.

Difficulty curve

Generally speaking, most Mission Stories in Hitman 1 had a fairly even spread of complexity. Each level would have a few that were short and a few that were long. This time around, that complexity is much more biased towards where in the campaign the level in question is. Miami has nearly all very straightforward 2-steppers while nearly every mission in Isle of Sgail is some sort of massive all-encompassing trial. Later missions get longer mission stories. This makes sense to some degree but it's a very different philosophy from Hitman 1's kind of "evenly spread butter" style of design.

Obfuscation

Lastly, to facilitate adding a sense of mystery to the above (and especially to Traps), mission stories now tend to mark themselves as complete substantially before the actual kill opportunity. For most standard directs the obvious opp comes 10 or so seconds later, while for some missions this is the point where you have to do a final few unstated steps to see everything through. I suspect the reasoning behind this change is not just to keep the player on their toes, but to allow impatient murdery-types to finish things off quickly and move on rather than waiting for the dialogue to exhaust itself (facilitating more open-endedness).

That is to say: It's Similar And Different

Hitman 2 has a lot of fairly adjusted priorities over the original game and that means I've had to make some real adjustment to the shaping of our categories. Trying to unify this design philosophy with the examples from Hitman 1 would probably be revealing in some ways and a nightmare in others. So let's just rebuild it!

Toolbox Patch Notes

Rewards

• Access Rewards have been expanded due to heavy use of walk-ins that leave players in inner sanctums where they can then, at their own risk, decide to wander. Some levels now facilitate this behaviour by having links between sanctums the player can take advantage of after a Mission Story.
• Opportunity Rewards are significantly less guaranteed than they used to be. Much of the new challenge space in the game has expanded here.
• Setpiece Rewards have been split into two. The "47 confronts the target directly" type is now so common that it's more remarkable when it isn't present. Meanwhile, The mass-murder spectacle of the Grand Finale has mostly been offloaded to environmental objects that aren't part of Mission Stories - there are a number of new ones that explode/fall/etc realllll big.
• REMOVED: Familiarity rewards have been mostly replaced with broader usage of Access rewards. Most mission stories no longer take you through substantial swathes of an area (except on your own initiative) and are more of an A-to-B direct progression.

Asks

• Access Asks are now significantly more open-ended and acquiring an outfit for them may be entirely optional. They nearly always now simply tell you to go to a location and leave the rest up to you. With only 1-2 exceptions, Open Access is the only type of Access ask anymore - Guided has been removed in the general stripping-out of explicit tutorialization.
• Distract-Cess has been largely integrated as a design element of other challenges rather than alone by itself. It sees heavy use in Routing and Room Challenges.
• REMOVED: New Target, as previously mentioned, has been replaced with the following:
• NEW: Room Challenge (see description in an earlier section)
• NEW: Target Event (see description in an earlier section)
• Means asks are now integrated into many stories, which usually no longer provide tools when needed, This brings back the exploration element slightly but leaves it much more in the player's hands.
• Setup asks are now mostly present as part of Traps, rather than tutorialization of environment objects.
• NEW: Trap asks pass/fail the player based on conditions they may not be aware of. They're often used to keep players on their toes, given most players are likely used to the structure of hitman 1 mission stories by now.
• NEW: Routing asks place the player in a location and make navigating it the tricky part due to the presence of Disguise Breakers. Usually these are accompanied by some sort of activity the player has to do to keep them in the area, like interacting with objects.
• NEW: Sideshow asks present the player with a very simple puzzle obstacle. Following some pipes, a multiple-choice quiz, throwing something at an object to make it fall, poisoning only the target when serving customers. These asks generally are extremely simplistic and don't seem meant to challenge so much as they seem meant to provide some thematic variety.

The New Principles

Let's extrapolate out the above.

1. A good mission story is self-contained. Of all the old principles, this is clearly the one that mattered most to Hitman 2's designers, because the loop has been completely closed here. No Mission Story in this game leaves you without at least a window on your target, with the odd exception of the two that are mechanical tutorials (we'll get to that).
2. A good mission story should showcase character. I've made an edit to this one because by and large area showcases are no longer a thing. But mission stories have never been more directly integrated with the personalities of the targets you're going after, and embed you in the world much more strongly than before.
3. A good mission story should not duplicate. Still in play, as before. Only a few mission stories cover the same locations, and even those try to avoid the same sub-areas. New unique outfits make disguise duplication much less of a concern as well.
4. A good mission story should not invalidate. This has largely been addressed via the level design changes to disguise breakers and outfits.
5. NEW: A good mission story should provide options. There's a very strong focus in Hitman 2 over giving the player multiple routes in at least one step of each storyline, whether that's Open Access challenges, or occasional multiple-choice options during the kill step. It's clearly a massive designer priority.

And lastly, the part I know you've all been waiting for:

Mission Story Archetypes

This was a hard one. Things have been substantially realigned in Hitman 2. Things are now modular on a level that I can no longer consistently point to elements like whether length and difficulty are going to be especially determinant of rewards (to my immense frustration!!). Nonetheless, here's what we have. Note that I won't be referring to security level start-locations in these because they're literally nearly all at security 0.

The Direct Opportunity

It's back! And it's even more dominant now! Anything that isn't one of these is labeled "OUTLIER" in my notes.

The Simple Direct (Hitman 2)

I'm not exaggerating when I say the vast majority of mission stories in the game are these. They have some slightly new properties compared to Hitman 1.

The Simple Direct:

• Always has exactly two steps of meaningfully challenging Asks
• One of those steps will nearly always be a Room Challenge or Event Target ask.
• Always has a final kill step that provides a completely safe Opportunity to the player (but MAY contain a Wait For It that requires them to hold off until the right moment)
• May ask you to bring in outside items
• May, rarely, contain an SA Trap if you don't hide the body or exit the premises properly
• May have a Sideshow during any step, including the kill step

The Simple Direct will never:

• End without an free kill opportunity appearing within a 30-second window afterward
• Cause you to lose your opportunity because you didn't do something specific in advance
• Have an difficult Ask during the kill step (Wait For It and Sideshow are allowed)

Classic Example: Intravenous. Ask 1: Infiltrate medical area (easy). Ask 2: Room challenge (easy) to get the doctor's outfit and clear out a patient. Then leads you directly to the poison you need and walks you through using it. Free from there.

Weird Example: Submerged, which ends with a colossally confusingly designed SA Trap OR BUG that instantly alerts everyone in the room unless you exit the catwalk in an incredibly specific way

All Examples:

• Miami (A Perfect Machine, Intravenous, The Triumph, Pretty in Pink)
• Santa Fortuna (Half Baked, Heart of Stone, Submerged)
• Mumbai (A Close Shave, A Matter of Discipline, Broad Strokes)
• Whittleton Creek (An Apple a Day, House for Sale)
• Isle of Sgail (Social Climbing)
• New York (None)
• Maldives (None)

The Back-Direct

A new type of mission story that backloads the difficulty by substituting out the 2nd challenge step for a challenge during the kill step. Tends to be trickier to deal with.

The Back-Direct:

• Always has exactly one step that is a Target Event or Room Challenge rewarding a unique disguise, followed by a kill step with a challenging Ask to kill the target unseen
• Always ends with a direct meetup between you and your target where the challenge is that guards or other observers remain present
• May have a 0-risk Sideshow step in addition to the above
• Always has a walk-in to the target's sanctum and leaves you with an outfit that has access to it.

The Back-Direct will never:

• End without providing you either a specific kill opportunity or a very large window within the next minute or so
• Provide you with a completely safe/unobserved kill opportunity without additional work

Classic Example: Hallowed Ground, which starts with a fairly telegraphed Room Challenge to impersonate a local shaman followed by an exceptionally open-ended follow-through where your target just kind of walks between 3-4 moderately guarded and VERY obvious kill opportunities until you figure out one of them

Weird Example: Deadly Art, requires you to navigate an exceptionally lengthy Wait For It sequence followed by maybe the meanest SA Trap in the game where a guard comes back in 5-6 minutes after you've performed the kill and checks EVERYWHERE you could have put the body

All Examples:

• Miami (None)
• Santa Fortuna (Deadly Art, Hallowed Ground)
• Mumbai (A Dress to Die For, Picture Perfect)
• Whittleton Creek (None)
• Isle of Sgail (None)
• New York (None)
• Maldives (None)

The Jumbo Direct

A combination of the above two concepts, the Jumbo Direct is a Simple Direct that also demands something out of you during the kill step. Generally a little easier than a Back-Direct but harder than a Simple. Gradually begins to replace the Simple Direct later in the campaign.

The Jumbo Direct:

• Always has exactly two steps of meaningfully challenging Asks followed by a kill step with a notable Ask OR a kill step with an SA trap that requires significant extra work to avoid (or both)
• Variant A: Does not bring the player and their target together and has the player set a trap that is likely to cause collateral damage
• Variant B: Brings the player and their target together and features a poisoning the player could have performed had they known it was present in advance (may have other, riskier options)
• Usually but not always leaves you in a sanctum with access

The Jumbo Direct will never:

• Give you a completely free SA kill
• End without pointing you at an extremely direct and obvious kill method

Classic Example: No Smoking Area, which is guaranteed to kill your target's bodyguard and void SA if you follow the mission story's instructions to the letter and don't intercept him somehow

Weird Example: Winds of Change, which can BECOME A freebie if you answer a question correctly and sit through a very long Wait For It but is otherwise a Variant B (and asks an absurd amount of the player beside)

All Examples:

• Miami (None)
• Santa Fortuna (None)
• Mumbai (Gone With The Wind)
• Whittleton Creek (No Smoking Area, Whack-A-Mole)
• Isle of Sgail (Winds of Change)
• New York (None)
• Maldives (Take a Deep Breath)

The Long Direct

The Long Direct is back but has lost much of its identity. No longer is it a guarantee of sanctum access or a meetup with your target. It is merely long. There's also not many of them anymore.

The Long Direct:

• Will always include either an Event Target AND a Room Challenge, or two Room Challenges, and then some third Ask step.
• May ask you to bring in outside items

The Long Direct will never:

• Have an Ask during the kill step.
• Have an SA trap.

All Examples:

• Miami (None)
• Santa Fortuna (Backpacker)
• Mumbai (None)
• Whittleton Creek (None)
• Isle of Sgail (It Belongs in a Museum, A Phoenix From The Ashes)
• New York (None)
• Maldives (None)

The Indirect Draw

It's back! It's been combined with the Draw-Out! It's not really used to tutorialize environment objects anymore! Now tends, instead, to throw a bunch of windows at you and let you work it out.

The Indirect:

• Will always have exactly 2 meaningful Ask steps.
• Draws the target out, usually directly to you (but not always)
• Marks itself complete extremely early, before anything has happened, and then hands multiple Windows to you to get at the target
• May be easier if you already know to make specific preparations beforehand

The Indirect will never:

• Hand you an explicitly telegraphed or bespoke kill (nor a bespoke SA trap)
• Tell you what to do after the target is drawn out

Classic Example: Flames Rekindled, which has you infiltrate an area and then infiltrate a sub-area and rewards you with a cavalcade of windows that you probably will fail to take advantage of the first time because you don't know where your target is going

Weird Example: The Water Horse, which sends the target a million miles away to a location you may not even know existed but if you can chase him fast enough it's kinda free

All Examples:

• Miami (None)
• Santa Fortuna (None)
• Mumbai (Flames Rekindled)
• Whittleton Creek (None)
• Isle of Sgail (None)
• New York (The Expose, On and Off Again)
• Maldives (The Shape Changer, The Water Horse)

The Mini Direct

A weirdly food-themed outlier.

The Mini Direct:

• Always has exactly one meaningful challenge step
• Has a weirdly high chance of containing a Sideshow in which you serve food
• Always has a final kill step that provides a completely safe Opportunity to the player

The Mini Direct will never:

• End without giving you a totally free kill opportunity
• SA Trap you
• Be Big

Classic Example: The Munchies (Miami) has you KO a single guy out on the docks by himself and then rewards you by drawing the target ALL the way out of his sanctum for a freebie kill at no further effort.

Weird Example: Hostile Termination (New York) for some reason lacks a food serving minigame. Seems like a big oversight.

All Examples:

• Miami (The Munchies)
• Santa Fortuna (None)
• Mumbai (None)
• Whittleton Creek (Charbroiled)
• Isle of Sgail (None)
• New York (Hostile Termination)
• Maldives (None)

The Trap Direct

An outlier exclusive to one of Miami's two targets that I can only assume is meant to familiarize players with the later, meaner Traps that other levels deploy.

All Examples:

• Turbo Charged (Miami) asks you for a specific disguise and to grab a screwdriver so you can sabotage a car and pull out your target. What it doesn't tell you is that you need to, unprompted, grab some nitro from a nearby garage and fill the car with it so it explodes. If you don't do this he fixes the car and leaves.
• The New Army (Miami) asks you to do a fairly free Target Event and walks you into the target's sanctum. If you didn't pick up a specific photo along the way from a hallway the demonstration goes fine and you don't kill anyone. Notably you can leave in the middle of the presentation and come back so this is a little more forgiving.

Last Honors

A specific Isle of Sgail storyline that asks so much of you I have no reasonable way of categorizing it. It has 4 distinct and high-difficulty Ask steps followed by a lengthy Wait For It. It then "rewards" you with an outfit that has no access anywhere. There's no reason under god this story should be this hard but there it is. Isle of Sgail is weird like this.

A Lucrative Opportunity / Idle Hands

A pair of Maldives Mission Stories that are an alternate take on the Cross-up. Both targets want the same USB Drive. It is at the deepest part of the deepest sanctum on the map and you're given no guidance to getting there at all. If you manage it your reward is that you can use the usb drive for both targets, so the second one is semi-free. Notably BOTH of them have SA Traps on the kills. Mean.

The Non-Directs

There's not many of these so this is gonna be pretty quick!

The Mechanics Tutorial

Somewhat similar to the Virus storyline in Sapienza in Hitman 1, these are meant to introduce you to the non-kill objectives in the two relevant levels (Finding clues in Whittleton Creek and breaking into the bank vault in New York). They have a weird tendancy to end WAY before actually giving you any useful progression and are more like pointers to remind you that the objective exists.

All Examples:

• Breadcrumb Trail (Whittleton Creek) basically just vaguely gestures at some of the locations for your clue-finding objective. This one's especially weird because all of these are literally already marked on your map. It makes me wonder if this was a real problem in playtesting.
• The Heist introduces an alternate way to accomplish the data-gathering questline by opening the bank vault. It does this by pointing you at, by far, the most annoying way to get into the vault, and not the way safer back stair. I assume that no one could tell the keycard on floor 3 was for the basement (this is not very telegraphed) and that's why this exists.

The Job Interview

A Story Mission in New York that is a pure Let Me In! What! These kind of aren't needed anymore but here we are. The joke with this one is that you play a Sideshow and if you win you get an outfit that has full access to the level except inner sanctums. It's very silly and kind of zero-effort.

Final Club

To me, the biggest outlier in the game. Final Club is an Isle of Sgail (yup, again) storyline that demands you gather 10(!) coins out of 30 hidden around the level in order to get both a Let Me In (the game's only one, escalating your Access level to around 3) and a walk-in directly behind your target that gives you a huge number of Windows. Also ends in a room with a Mission Story intro for your other target. It all feels very bespoke. But the coins are EVERYWHERE - hidden on the grounds in restricted areas, carried on various NPCs in hard to get to locations. Realistically if you can do this mission - which is something like 10x longer than any other - you can probably get into Sgail's innards way more easily somewhere else. It's all spectacle. But that DOES make it memorable.

Final Thoughts

• The idea of speccing your level of intensity to campaign progression is so smart I'm amazed they didn't do it before. Is it because Hitman 1 was episodic?
• There's a lot of "Level themes" in terms of design trends here I didn't go into that make me wonder if they had specific, separate designers working on specific levels
• Isle of Sgail is so absurdly over the top in what it asks of the player, that level is fun but wowww
• I don't think there's a single level here I'd call boring! They're all solid! That said, I'm not a huge fan of the non-kill objectives, IMO they're way overly restrictive
• Marathoning this game and this post over 3 days was a bad idea and I am very sore (it was fun tho) and I am going to take a break now