Hitman: Absolution – Steam Backlog Bonanza [Blaugust 4]

4 August, 2019. 887 words.

Inside-Baseball Note Of Possible Worth To New Bloggers during Blaugust: I forgot you’re supposed to put the more important and unique search keywords at the beginning of a blog post’s title, and thus have I changed the format for my titles and introduced an inconsistency into my Blaugust posts. (At least, that was the last SEO advice I remember reading. It changes at least once a year.)

Yesterday, Hitman: Absolution came up on the Big Board for the last day of the first week of my Blaugust Steam Backlog Bonanza. I got it as part of a “Hitman Collection” in a Steam sale for $11 in 2013, and it is the first Hitman game I have ever played.

Hitman: Absolution, it turns out, is a stealth game with lots and lots of stealth mechanics.

I don’t like stealth games very much.

I didn’t play very long.

I gave it 45 minutes, which was at least 20 minutes longer than the point where I knew there were too many stealth mechanics and there was a 100% chance that I would never play the game again after my stream ended.

This might be a great stealth game. The stealth mechanics might very well be the best in class for this genre. I honestly couldn’t say. It seemed to be behaving in a way that a stealth game should behave. You crouch behind things to avoid detection. You sneak up behind people and quietly garrote them. You throw things to distract people. You drag bodies around and hide them in bins and throw them out of windows. You put on disguises. These are all the reasons why I recoiled away from the game. But for others, those might signs that this is, in fact, a great stealth game. I don’t know.

I have very little patience for hiding behind walls and corners and waiting for enemies to walk around until they’re in the right spot for me to kill them, and there was a lot of that in Hitman: Absolution. It drives me somewhat batty whenever a game’s main mechanic demands that you stand still and wait. I don’t think I have anything like ADHD, but full-on stealth games like this sure make me feel like I do.

There are some stealth-lite games I can tolerate. The Last Of Us is right on the line, and I still haven’t finished that one yet mainly because of the stealth. Dishonored 1 was pretty close, too. Sekiro is the exact right amount of stealth for me: I can choose to be stealthy if I want, but running headlong into the middle of everyone is equally viable if necessary.

I also had quite a lot of difficulty remembering the hundred thousand different keys required for doing different actions. There was a nice lady who told me exactly what to do in the beginning, but once she left and said, “Okay now you can play the game however you want! Have fun!” I was pretty lost.

Why is CTRL ever used as a default key for anything in any game ever? Only ALT is harder to reach.

Again I want to emphasize here that it’s a well-made game. The graphics are great, the sound is great, the voice acting is great and there are a lot of recognizable names in the credits (I recognized the unchanging sound of Paladin Danse’s voice from Fallout 4, who seems to be in almost *every* video game somewhere), the cut scenes are great, and the story even seemed like it might be at least average. It’s a Square Enix game so the production value is pretty high. The problem here is me, not the game. If you like stealth games, this might be a fantastic game for you.

But will I play more? Definitely not. This game is too much stealth for me to handle.

Previously on the Steam Backlog Bonanza: Dead Space 2.

Live Stream - Hitman: Absolution

Stream Production Notes: I fumbled the microphone mute button a bit at the beginning. Normally I can mentally keep track of the mute status with help from the red X on the OBS window, but occasionally I will come out of a cut scene or something and forget to un-mute, which was the case here. While recording, I actually thought I had forgotten to un-mute the microphone for the entire first 5 minutes, but I found out hours later when I watched the stream myself that I thankfully only messed it up for about 30 seconds while dithering with the settings, which is annoying, but a lot better than missing the entire introduction.

Live productions. Sheesh. Anything that can go wrong, definitely will go wrong. And no patching in the backup microphone in post to fix it, either. It’s either 100% perfect on the first try or it’s a complete and utter failure, a shameful embarrassment that will live on the Internet for generations to come. But no pressure or anything.

Coming up on the second week of the Steam Backlog Bonanza, so you can set your calendars appropriately:

8/4 Sun Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior
8/5 Mon Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
8/6 Tue NEO Scavenger
8/7 Wed Vortex: The Gateway
8/8 Thu KHOLAT
8/9 Fri Brütal Legend
8/10 Sat Game of Thrones

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