Hitman / Tropes M to Z

Tropes A to C - Tropes D to L - Tropes M to Z

This page covers general tropes found in the Hitman series.

Subjective tropes go to the YMMV page.

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M

• MacGuffin Melee:
  • "Invitation to a Party". Fearing for his life, Gen. Zhupikov defects to Germany in order to gain political asylum there. He also takes with him a missile guidance system, which he intends to sell to NATO once he arrives in Germany. To make matters more interesting, the Russians are plenty mad that the General has defected and have sent a cleaner to the Embassy.
  • Your next major task in SA is to retrieve some valuable cargo for the client. It was stolen by fanatics (with the help of the renegade Mr. 17) who have hidden it in the desert. In addition to obtaining the cargo, you are also to kill the people responsible for its theft.
  • Once again, the girl in Absolution.
• Mad Bomber:
  • Your third target in C47, Frantz, must be apprehended before he can detonate a chemical bomb at the upcoming United Nations summit in Budapest.
  • Blake Dexter favors his company's line of anti-personnel landmines. He also rigs a hotel and apartment building to explode to rid himself of 47. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
• Mad Doctor:
  • Ort-Meyer created you from the DNA of himself and that of his friends, Lee Hong, Pablo Belisario Ochoa, Frantz Fuchs, and Boris Deruzka a.k.a. Arkadij Jegorov. They all met during their stints in the French Foreign Legion. After they went about their separate ways, they helped to set up Dr. Ort-Meyer's experiments in DNA research and cloning using money from their respective enterprises. However, the impatience of the other participants, gathered from the letters left behind after killing them, may have led Ort-Meyer into using The Agency to kill them. In addition, judging from the Doctor's own ramblings, another reason for having his friends killed is so he could have all of the clones, and glory, to himself. The power he gained from all of the cloning research made him megalomaniacal.
  • Paging Dr. Cropse... When he's not checking into hotels under horrible aliases, 47 has his pick of doctor disguises: a psychotherapist in the Romanian asylum, and a surgeon in the cult hospital. Careful with that scalpel.
  • To prevent Soders from trading a full list of ICA operatives to Providence, 47 can impersonate the chief surgeon at the hospital where Soders is hiding.
• Made of Iron:
  • On the default difficulty, 47 can withstand noticeably more damage than other stealth game protagonists such as Sam Fisher, Solid Snake, or Garrett. Likewise, each game usually has a handful of unique enemies who are part of the main plot and can survive significantly more damage than the regular Mooks.
  • Pablo Ochoa takes the cake. After he takes a dose of cocaine, 47 can riddle him with bullets and he'll stop and taunt 47. He does this a couple of times until he drops. Subverted if you can shoot him before he snorts the line.
  • Downplayed with Sergei Zavorotko, the second game's Big Bad. He can survive several shots, but an assault rifle or the M60 can bring him down relatively quickly.
• The Mafia:
  • None other than the Sicilian mob. The headquarters of Giulliani's group is the family villa, Borghese, in the countryside of Palermo.
  • In "Flatline", 47 flies out to California to sneak into a celebrity rehab clinic. A trio of New York mobsters have taken refuge there.
  • The Chicago Outfit is vaguely hinted at, but not mentioned, in the city levels of Absolution. Dom Osmond represents the 'bad' sort of mafia, peddling vice and beating his seditious sex workers to death with a baseball bat. Tommy Clemenza represents the 'good' sort of mafia — the gentlemanly type who's into opera and will offer protection for a price.
• Make It Look Like an Accident:
  • A game mechanic introduced in Blood Money. The player can shove people over balconies, rig heavy objects to fall on top of them and so on. It won't fool the coroner (their deaths are reported as "murders" in the press), but it will confuse the guards and keep them off you back. Of course, the obvious question is if you were to assassinate someone, why would you do it in such a questionable way? 'There are a million and one ways we can have this man killed, let's prioritize the least plausible ones.'
  • Vice president Spaulding Burke was killed in a supposed limousine crash (staged by The Franchise). He died on the Maryland Beltway around 5:40 PM, when said limo spun out of control, flipped into oncoming traffic and was hit by a southbound tractor trailer. Yuck.
  • The famous tenor, Alvaro D'Alvade, was once charged with the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. The charges were dropped after the girl refused to testify and subsequently 'disappeared'. Although Alvaro did fall under suspicion, her body was later found in a ravine and her death ruled a suicide.
• Man on Fire:
  • In Blood Money, a gangster in the tutorial level threatens to immolate the divorce lawyer. That's one way of getting out of paying alimony.
  • In "A New Life," 47 can coat a barbecue in lighter fluid, causing it to set the target's wife on fire when she uses it. (She isn't a target, but it counts as an "accident," so it doesn't affect the rating for the mission.) If you set the lawyer or Vinnie's wife on fire, they leave behind a flayed skeleton instead of the usual death pose. Pretty grisly.
  • In "Flatline", you can kill one of the mafiosos by tinkering with a gas stove he has hidden in his room.
  • "A Dance With the Devil": Boy, they really hand you this one on a platter, don't they? While dressed as a bouncer or Agent Martinez, go backstage and rig the pyro show to aim at Vaana. Eventually, the hostess catches aflame and leaps into a fish tank to cool herself—only to be eaten by a shark.
  • A recurring accidental kill in Absolution is from the use of a spilling gasoline pump. A flicked cigarette is the usual starting spark, but in one challenge, the player must spill out three separate gasoline pumps, then set off a remote explosive which blows up the entire gas station and hopefully your two targets with it.
  • Another one from Absolution is centered on a scientist trying to find a cure for his hair loss. You can mix in "fire paste" into his glowing beaker full of hair tonic, turning it red. He applies some to his head, which catches fire. Presumably the radiation from the mysterious hair tonic wouldn't have killed him fast enough.
  • One of 47's targets in "Beldingford Manor" has dozed off in a recliner in front of a fireplace. He can be killed by dropping a jug of gasoline down the chimney.
• Marathon Level:
  • In Hitman 1 and 2, it takes many tries to reach Pablo, Boris, and Hayomoto, so whatever you bring here will be all you'll have later:
    1. The Columbia and Rotterdam missions all take place on a huge map, and will prove to be your most frustrating time. (Enjoy the huge salary, at least.) "Plutonium Runs Loose"" is definitely the hardest mission in the entire game. You could say the Colombia missions are harder, but the difference here is that this final Rotterdam mission is not only a matter of survival, but of absolute stealth and precision. If Boris gets wise to your presence he'll arm his nuke and split in a car, turning the harbor to ashes. The map is so large that it's easy to forget a few minor details and botch the whole mission. Ironically, its Contracts counterpart, "Deadly Cargo", combines this with some of the objectives of "Gunrunner's Paradise", yet is nowhere near as long.
    2. "Hidden Valley." This mission was voted by the Hitman fans as the Second worst mission of the whole franchise, "At the Gates" being the first.
• Meet the New Boss:
  • Pablo isn't seen or mentioned in any of the sequels/remakes. Instead, 47 is sent to assassinate another drug lord, this time in Chile. In "A Vintage Year" there are several pictures of 47 in the hacienda, furthering the Pablo connection. 47's only other target located in Latin America, who also just happens to be a druglord? This could just be a coincidence, or a subtle retcon on the part of the developers. The missions share other similarities, such as the presence of an underground cocaine lab, exfiltration by airplane, or the fact that both targets are located in a secluded room on the upper floor of their mansion.
  • Sergei takes 47 on errands, and then tries to kill him when the plan comes together. Also, like the good Doctor Ort-Meyer, Sergei won't come out of hiding until you kill all of his henchmen.
    • Sheriff Skurky hides within a local church and uses the priest as a shield, just as Sergei does in SA. Also, the showdown with Travis (Absolution) is similar to the final battle with Sergei: A rain-swept cemetery with plenty of guards, and Travis hiding behind an impenetrable door.
  • Mr. 17 is an earlier clone specimen created by Dr. Ort-Meyer. He was most likely locked away in the asylum and later sprung loose when Sergei and his partner came looking for 47. Like the previous game's Mr. 48s, he doesn't have much in the way of brains, and is easily brainwashed by Deewanna Ji into hijacking the nuclear warhead meant for Sergei. After the cult leader dies, he returns to work for Sergei, ambushing Mr. 47 from inside of the Pushkin Building.
    • If you get too close to Mark Parchezzi during the White House shootout, he will detonate some explosives and kill the both of you. A similar tactic was used by Mr. 17 when he first appeared in India. Both 17 and Parchezzi are inferior products of the same cloning program which made 47.
  • In Silent Assassin, you face two morbidly-obese twin brothers: one is an introvert who enjoys hacking (ahem), the other an extrovert who loves women and fine art. Remember the Meat King?
    • In "Basement Killing," Charlie's twin was not responsible for the sale of the weapons guidance system, and was a victim of mistaken identity. In "Meat King's Party", Campbell takes the fall for his brother, Malcolm, after the missing girl's father demands satisfaction and fails to get it from the courts.
    • Dom Osmond acts as a composite of Campbell Sturrock, a club owner who dotes on his murderous brother (Instead of the air freshener murder room, we have the Hawaii-themed torture room), and Lord Winston Beldingford, a pervert who is assassinated with the help of a two-way mirror. Dom also secretly films his customers, much like Lorne DeHaviland does.
  • In Silent Assassin, your ultimate goal in Japan is to eliminate Masahiro Hayamoto, a majordomo in a Yakuza and a well-known agoraphobe. He has recently come into possession of a MacGuffin you need, and he's handy with a kendo sword. It takes 4 missions to finally kill him, and Mr. 47 boosts one of his vehicles to escape. Oh, and the upper floor of his headquarters contains a brothel with Mei Ling and a nosy geisha who might give away your position. Sound familiar?
  • "The King of Chinatown" should be a walk down memory lane for older players. Push the King down a manhole ("The Seafood Massacre"), sneak in the pagoda and poison his thermos ("Slaying a Dragon"), or trick him into ingesting some fugu ("Tracking Hayomoto").
  • "Hunter and Hunted" is clearly a reference to the Hitman: Blood Money mission where 47 goes to a Mardi Gras to stop a political assassination by three persons in black: Angelina Mason, Mark Purayah II and Raymond Kulinsky. The targets this time are Wade's three hitmen, who are coercing/buying information on Birdie's whereabouts in Chinatown. The mission is set during the Chinese New Year, when the streets are choked with partygoers.
  • Dr. Ashford is an amalgam of the doctors who gave 47 his regular rotation of drugs in the asylum. It's interesting that 47 flashes back to his childhood when Victoria mentions the grotesque experiments she has had to undergo. Sanchez is another former test subject of Dr. Ashford, the result of a defective "super-soldier" serum back in the eighties. As a side effect, he developed gigantism. It is mentioned in "Death Factory" that Ashford performs barbarous experiments on "crazies and vagrants", and even assigns numbers to them instead of names.
  • In "Absolution" (the final mission of said game), we get the Praetorians, the poster child for The Franchise after 47 took a weed-whacker to the organization.
  • This nostalgia is evident in the references to "Anathema" found in "World of Tomorrow", such as the flower delivery man and the target playing golf.
  • The Jordan Cross hit serves no purpose other than drawing Cross' father away from his private island so the Shadow Client can take him out. The ICA is not happy upon finding out about this. Ironically, the ICA used the exact same method to draw out Hayamoto in Silent Assassin. Jordan also bears some similarities to Chad Bingham, a scion who escaped justice following a crime of passion, and now lives in fear of his father.
  • Deewanna Ji and Soders are both awaiting a transplant heart in a state-of-the-art hospital complex. The difference is you can actually destroy Soders' donor heart. This only works because the patient has situs inversus and the probability of finding an inverted heart in time is effectively zero.
  • In Hitman 2, one opportunity has you disguise yourself as a celebrity tattoo artist who has a session scheduled with Rico Delgado, just like the Dutch biker boss in Contracts.
  • "Another Life" resembles the similarly-titled and quite popular level from Blood Money.
  • The targets in Austria are three members of the Yardbirds, a notorious team of masked robbers, of which Kalvin "The Sparrow" Ritter was a member before his death. In Blood Money, 47 was hired to take on the Crows, a trio of high-profile assassins in bird costumes.
• The Men in Black:
  • Mr. X in Silent Assassin. He's the brains of the operation, with Sergei contributing his manpower and muscle to the cause.
  • The MIB skin is used frequently in Blood Money: some bouncers dress in black, as do the FBI, Secret service, and members of The Franchise.
  • In Absolution, Diana's head of security is wearing a black suit and sunglasses, unlike the guards in the adjacent wings. This character stays in the rumpus room by default, and your goal is to obtain a keycard he has. Unfortunately you can't rely on pickpocketing with all these rent-a-cops teeming around, so you have to somehow drug/kill the MIB.
• Metal Detector Checkpoint:
  • The Galar Hotel has a quite a few in place for the world summit, including one stationed at the front door (in the remake, that is). It's possible to smuggle a gun inside if you're clever, just as it's possible to smuggle Fritz's bomb out (it's a mission objective). A security uniform helps — cops are supposed to be armed, of course.
  • These make a comeback in "Basement Killing". You have to dress up as a fireman or a pizza boy to pass through them; luckily those fireman's axes have a lot of 'secondary' uses...
  • In Blood Money, your final mission requires you to infiltrate the White House as part of a tour group. The main challenge is the metal-detector/X-ray checkpoint. There's a number of ways to smuggle weapons inside - your Sniper Rifle can be upgraded with a special foil-covered Attache Case which can glide through the X-Ray, but you can also smuggle in your trusty Silverballers by slipping them into a tourist's luggage. When the soccer mom gets nabbed at the checkpoint, the guns are confiscated, and you can then retrieve them from the Marine lock-up after you've 'borrowed' a uniform, preferably.
• Mirror Boss: Mr. 48. They're supposedly much more deadly, but once you fight them, it quickly becomes clear their only 'advancement' is a lack of free will. They lack the rigor, creativity, and experience of Mr. 47. The same goes for Mr. 17, another prototype who escaped from the lab and found his calling as a hitman.
• Mob War:
  • The Chinese campaign seems to take place over a few days or weeks as you inevitably turn the Triad world upside down.
  • Due to "a recent shift" in the power structure of the New York mob, Mr. 47 will have to rub out a few Italians in the mission "Flatline". There are three button men secretly staying at the rehab clinic. None of the targets (Carmine, Lorenzo, and Rudy) actually have a substance abuse problem, they're just taking a vacation so as to avoid their friends back home.
  • In "Till Death Do Us Part", the bride wins her mob war without firing a shot.
  • The Agency vs. The Franchise (which ended very poorly for the latter). More recently, The Agency found themselves in the cross-hairs of Providence—though the end of the Colorado levels retconned at least a few targets from old Hitman games as Providence members.
• More Deadly Than the Male:
  • Ultimately, 47 subverts the trope throughout the whole series. Many a femme fatale have fallen before their bald male rival, with Diana as the sole exception.
  • Diana Burnwood. Easily the cleverest woman in the series, but there is a downside. She can even make hardened killers look stupid. 47 learned that.
  • It is mentioned that Lee Hong's only weakness is women.
  • At Lorne's, there is a dark-haired woman in one hall who will beckon you into a side room. If you follow, she'll try to kill you, and she suddenly counts as a target. Teach her why real assassins shoot first and taunt later. She doesn't count as an optional objective or have an interesting weapon, so there's not much point to this little encounter.
  • Margeaux takes over her father's drug cartel after Pappy's dementia takes a turn for the worse, mainly due to paranoia about being assassinated like Skip. She also arranges for the downfall of the Gator gang, killing six of their members and marrying their leader, Buddy, whom she puts a hit on immediately after their wedding. With Pappy, Skip, and Buddy all taking their dirt nap, Margeaux winds up holding the whole pie.
• Ms. Fanservice:
  • Diana Burnwood mostly in Absolution where she get a fanservice heavy Shower Scene in both the trailer and the game. Although nothing explict is seen, most shots of her have Toplessness from the Back, Shoulders-Up Nudity or her Sexy Silhouette behind the frosted glass. When 47 shoots her, she conveniently falls while drapping the curtain around her like a Modesty Towel.
  • Blood Money has Mrs. Sinistra, who wears a black bikini with red see-through sarong wrapped around her waist for the entire mission.
  • Absolution has Layla Stockton who tries to seduce 47 by luring him to her room and doing a Striptease down to her Black Bra and Panties with the camera panning all over her body, before she pulls a gun and attempts to kill you. In-Universe 47 doesn't fall for it, but some players might.
• Mugged for Disguise:
  • A very common tactic, with 47 capable of both finding disguises already lying around (generally as laundry) and killing or knocking out people for their clothes. One Size Fits All, so there are very few outfits in the game (usually ones owned by people of very different, usually obese, body types or ones worn by people that the player isn't meant to disguise themselves as anyway, such as targets) that 47 cannot wear. Absolution even lets 47 steal some samurai armor in Blackwater Park and pose on armor stands to hide himself.
  • In Absolution, wearing a disguise seems to mean you're a neon sign. You might buy that for a small squad of bodyguards, but it's hard to believe every Chicago police officer (of which there are 12,000) knows every other Chicago police officer by face. Anyway, this forces you to use disguises in conjunction with blending and sneaking. Mostly sneaking, mind you.
• Multiple Endings: Blood Money, depending on whether you randomly pan the camera around and find out you're supposed to frantically analog-twirl/press W. This perhaps falls more under Non-Standard Game Over or Fission Mailed, depending on your interpretation.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Not necessarily Agent 47’s own philosophy, but as the series’ eponymous contract killer, he has built his entire career and reputation around enforcing this trope for others. Although he charges a ridiculously high price for the job, he still receives plenty of work, because his clients have already decided that his targets absolutely must go away forever, no matter how much it will cost them.
• Murder Simulator: Hitman is in fact the murder simulator, more so than any other. None of the Moral Guardians had noticed however, if anything they were more drawn to Blood Money and the Beautifully Executed or Shockingly Executed marketing. There has also been controversy over the portrayal of the Shi'ites as killers, as well as a smart phone app where you could send a contract to Mr. 47 to kill real people (what could go wrong?), which was quickly closed down, or the "nun" trailer (PVC-clad dominatrixes being shot, beaten, stabbed, and garroted by the very male Agent 47) which seemingly glamorized and fetishized violence toward women, and then kept going to the 'place a hit on your friends!' thing. IO managed to get an article in the Guardian, and even a tweet from Charlie Brooker:
  Brooker: Trail for Hitman: Absolution is terrible shit aimed at base, clueless imbeciles. Fuck the game industry if it thinks this shit works. Fuck it.
• Mysterious Employer:
  • Dr. Ort-Meyer in the original game.
  • Sergei Zavorotko was a Russian crime lord who, with an unnamed man, formed a plan to lure Agent 47 out of retirement after he quit the ICA. Sergei needed to get Agent 47 out of retirement in order to kill all of his business associates, because he wants to sell nuclear weapons to a Sikh cult.
  • The Shadow Client in (2016) is this, as he uses proxies and people who would want your targets dead to further his own ends. In Hitman 2, he is revealed to be targeting Providence, a global cabal who run the worlds in secret.
• Myth Arc: Codename 47, Silent Assassin, Blood Money, and (2016) all featured conspiracy story arcs that run in the background to the individual assassination stories. As powerful as he is, 47 is more often than not just a tool for the greater powers to eliminate key targets with, something which is actually a Discussed Trope in the World of Assassination Trilogy.
• Mythology Gag:
  • There is a scarecrow functioning as a training doll in The Gontranno Sanctuary in Silent Assassin which has Ivan's clothes and hat. You crossed paths with him in "Gunrunner's Paradise."
  • The Jaguar from "The Jungle God" was stuffed and mounted on Lord Winston's staircase. Later, it is sold to Charlie Sidjan, a collector of rare artifacts—along with Lee Hong's jade dragon figurine.
  • In "A Dance With The Devil", next to the "torture room" where the couples are necking, the guy sitting on the couch is wearing the same costume as the defense attorney in Contracts. But you can't get into the room, only look into it from behind a gate, so you can't take the outfit.
  • If you add the nailgun to your inventory, examine the description: It is a Rieper 2000 Pro nailgun. (Dig the C47 reference.)
  • Cheung Chou Chinese Restaurant is a location in Codename 47. This restaurant gets advertised in a Blood Money newspaper and serves "specials" named after the Chinese Triad hits of a past Hitman games: "Deep Fried Red Dragon feet", "Blue Lotus Spring Rolls", "Zun's Noodle Feast -6 persons" (probably cause Zun was really fat), and "Mei Ling Stir Fry".
  • In Absolution, Birdie tells 47 that he ought to run from Blake Dexter's men. 47 responds with "I don't believe in running". A bit of a joke towards the extremely twitchy guards who would react to 47 running with gunfire in the first few games, such as Silent Assassin, no doubt.
  • Tom the Tailor is referenced in the 2016 Hitman game. During the final tutorial Level, Jasper Knight radios in to talk to the KGB and refers to himself as "Blind Tailor".
  • In Sapienza, two guards can be heard discussing movies, and one of them mentions a horror film called The Haunting of Beldingford Manor.

N

• Nail 'Em: Why, yes, you can use a nail gun. Not very effective from anywhere but point-blank, and it requires a headshot to take down someone. Still, it's a weapon you can carry openly if you're wearing a worker's suit.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name:
  • Agent 47 was cloned from disgraced German scientist Doctor Ortmeyer and 4 other men whom he served with in the army.
  • The Fuchs siblings in "Traditions of the Trade". And Hendrik Schmutz in "House of cards", to some extent (blond race supremacist).
• Neck Snap:
  • After gunning down his father, Dr. Ort-Meyer, there's a scene of him cradling the Doctor's head before twisting it around.
  • "Flatline". Weightlifting can be fatal.
  • In Blood Money, 47 does this to a target instead of garroting them if the kill takes place on an uneven surface. There's even a sound effect.
  • 47 performs this on Sanchez (with his legs) during the Cutscene Boss battle in the Absolution mission "Fight Night". He can also perform this as a quicker alternative to knocking someone out in a stealth melee attack.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles:
  • Boris is smart: he conducts business in the overcrowded Rotterdam harbor under cover of dark. By planting a GPS in the payment briefcase, The Agency tracks his ship down to Dock 45.
  • In "St. Petersberg Stakeout", 47 must snipe one of the Generals convening at the Pushkin Building, but the Agency doesn't tell you which General. Listen to Diana's banter, and pull the trigger once David Bateson confirms that you're looking at the right guy.
  • In New Orleans, your job is to keep track of the hitmen in bird costumes. Unlike other civilians in Hitman, the mass of partygoers will, by and large, ignore you; they won't notice when you do naughty things in relative proximity. (The cops and the big birds are the ones you really have to be concerned with.) The problem is having to spot Angelina or Billy Jack in this mob, which is made tougher by the partygoers wearing bird hats. The second task is to carry out the hits, which can be done in any order. All three carry walkie-talkies which give away the position of the other two: Raymond is atop one of the three music bars, Angelina is circling the block at ground level, and Marc is hiding on the top floor of the "Crow's Nest".
  • "A Dance With the Devil" has 2 targets and 2 concealed hitmen attending a masquerade ball. (On the Professional difficulty level, both Eve and Maynard John will be marked as civilians on the map.) Since they hand you Martinez and Vaana on a platter, and the duel with Maynard is a scripted event, all you have to do is figure out where Eve is hiding and kill her without affecting your rating. She's quite easy to find, actually. The hard part is killing her before she kills you.
• Nerf:
  • In Contracts, the Ballers are nerfed to dish out less damage than service pistols, as well as lower accuracy.
  • In Absolution, they now use an 8-round magazine instead of the 9. Also, each gun is now fired alternately as opposed to previous games where they were fired simultaneously, allowing for better ammo efficiency but halving the damage. As compensation, they both come with silencers and long slide now, so you don't have to upgrade them.
  • The semi-auto W2000. See, in the older games, having a semi-auto rifle was a game breaking advantage, since you could pop heads from a safe perch all day long. In Blood Money, the developers realized their mistake and replaced it with a bolt-action W2000, which is behind a paywall and takes longer to obtain. You begin the game with a semi-auto one, but it has a much bigger kick and makes your shots go wild.
  • You cannot bring the M195 (from "The Motorcade Interception") into "Kirov Park Meeting", even with All Weapons cheat. Most likely, this is to prevent you from disabling the armored limousines with it.
  • The good news is that the stungun lives up to its promises, as a single zap from any side will drop any enemy, even a riot cop. However, it cannot be used on other levels. Even in a completed game, the stun gun will not be in the collected weapon inventory. Obviously this is not a bug but deliberate design.
  • Enemies bleed out in Blood Money, so the knife is no longer the ultimate stealth weapon. Melee weapons also get covered with gore in one strike, removing their camouflage.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • In the second and third games, it's very hard to achieve a completely stealthful mission, because the guards are extremely skittish and will instantly raise the alarm if they see you doing anything even remotely suspicious. Blood Money tones this down a lot; so long as you have the right disguise and don't commit any criminal acts, the guards will generally ignore you.
  • IO Interactive has promised that the Purist mode in Absolution will be this and IO delivered. Not only does it reduce your health and your instinct capacity, it removes the new HUD so you have no idea how much ammo you have left, what weapon you're equipped with, or if you're being spotted.
    • Even without Purist mode, Absolution rivals Codename 47 and Silent Assassin as the most difficult Hitman experience yet. Unlike Contracts and Blood Money, the guards in Absolution will quickly detect you even with the proper disguise if you do not use instinct. Moreover, the save system has been replaced by checkpoints, many of which are found in rather obscure locations. These can lead to a lot of frustration if you're going for a Silent Assassin run.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Sniper rifles have absolutely zero bullet drop. This gets especially silly when the second game has a crossbow that fires in a straight line at the range of several hundred meters.
• No Hero Discount: It's hard being a Hitman. In later missions, the ICA stops making it's "recommendations"; if you skip the inventory screen at the start of the level, you'll be stuck with just the fiber wire to raid a complex. Not fun at all.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • The targets in Nuristan are clones of Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Osama Bin Laden.
  • "Scoop" is a reference to the rapper Snoop Dogg.
  • Lorne DeHavilland is a parody of Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner, and the Pink Mansion is a more fanciful version of the Playboy Mansion. Lorne is said in his in-game biography to be a born-again Christian, a reference to Hustler founder Larry Flynt.
  • In "Amendment XXV", Daniel Morris' plan mirrors a conspiracy theory related to Gerald Ford's real-life rise to the presidency. Ford was also voted into the vice presidency by congress, later to abruptly become acting president, without being popularly elected to either office. However, both of Ford's successions were caused by corruption-related resignations instead of deaths.
    • Morris might also be a sly wink to Al Gore. Supposedly, Hillary trod on his toes back when he was VP.
  • Hitman 2016: The chess player is Bobby Fischer, the disgraced grandmaster who went to the USSR to compete.
  • Thomas Cross seems to be a mix of many media moguls, with the added touch of being into pretty shady things. Jordan Cross’ microphone is also called a Branson, so it’s safe to call it a deliberate reference—along with the fact that both men (Thomas Cross and Richard Branson) live on remote private islands. It's also mentioned that Thomas has aerospace holdings, including his own space station.
• No-Gear Level:
  • In Codename 47, you are to go to Romania for a final assignment, and it takes place within a psychiatric hospital. A relatively simple mission, but there is more than meets the eye here. It is a high security facility and you are not allowed to bring in firearms. Diana doesn't even allow you to purchase weapons. When you reach the basement, you will find that whatever Body Armor you brought with you has been stripped away. In addition, while you still have the weapons you gained from the previous mission, any extra ammo will be stripped away as well. And, finally, there is no map to display on this mission.
  • In Silent Assassin, you start the last mission with nothing but the reel of piano wire, while every enemy has a gun — and no spare ammo to loot. It is immensely satisfying when you break into your weapons storage locker after skulking around and being extremely vulnerable.
  • This Happens again in "Skurky's Law", when 47 is captured by the police and has to break out of a county jail.
  • In most of the games, the player can choose not to bring any weapons with them as a Self-Imposed Challenge......or if they're just short of cash.
  • "Situs Inversus" is set in a combination resort/health spa/surgical clinic, catering to the rich and powerful. Security is said to be extraordinarily tight, meaning 47 is unable to smuggle any gear in with him - not even his trusty fiber wire - until the player has reached full level mastery. Some equipment caches will unlock earlier. However, none are in the immediate vicinity of any of the level's potential starting points, only one cache can be used at a time, and each cache can hold only one item... with further size restrictions^note i.e. no weapons or gear larger than a pistol imposed on the cache sites unlocked first.
• Nonstandard Game Over:
  • You can get two in cutscene form in Blood Money, the first one at Lorne DeHavilland's party, where a Franchise assassin stabs you in the neck if you don't kill her quickly enough, the second being stabbed to death by the completely psychotic Eve at the Heaven and Hell party, again if you stand still and let her kill you.
  • Also, at the end of Codename 47, if you let Dr. Ort-Meyer get too close to you without killing him, he'll stab you with a syringe and you black out... and wake up in the sanitorium again, in a sequence that's disturbingly similar to the very start of the game...
  • Codename 47 also has a scene during the mission 'Find the U'wa Tribe', in which 47 can get killed and dragged off by a jaguar in a cutscene.
  • In Absolution's "Operation Sledgehammer" mission, if 47 waits too long to shoot Sheriff Skurky before he fires, 47 slowly dies as Skurky stands over him and gloats.
  • Again in Absolution, in the Factory Compound level, there is a room with what appears to be a large bomb suspended from the ceiling. Hit the bomb too many times and the scene flashes white. You are then treated to a special cutscene involving a giant mushroom cloud before the game over screen appears.
  • Also in 'Absolution'', in the Central Heating level of Rosewood Orphanage, 47 will have a point-shooting face-off at the end of the level. If the player does not target all enemies in time, Wade will murder 47 in one shot and the player is shown a cutscene of wade talking to his corpse.
  • Again in Absolution, during the Penthouse level of Blackwater Park, Layla Stockton will pull a gun on 47 if he confronts her inside of the panic room. Failing to shoot her in time will result in her shooting 47 in the head before casually approaching him and grinding her stiletto heel in his groin.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Frequent, especially in Blood Money and Absolution, which has the option of making a hit look like a freak accident. A risky way of murdering the King of Chinatown, for instance, is pushing him into a wide open sewer grate.
  • "Where do you want me to put these fireworks" "Oh, you just put them beside that gasoline pump". How about an open vat of petrol underneath a balcony? Or a generator next to a metallic fence? And be sure to pour your kerosene and lighter fluid in very similar-looking jugs.
  • Played for laughs in "Dexter Industries", as Dexter has mines and explosives in the main lobby of his company to reassure potential partners on their storage safety. (Only in America.) Naturally, all of them can all be re-armed and detonated, including the active nuclear warhead hanging precariously over the main desk.
  • Hitman (2016): Why on earth would they put mines everywhere at a fashion show?!
• Nostalgia Level: Many of the missions from Contracts are remade from Codename 47.
  • Hitman GO has a set of levels based on Curtains Down from Blood Money, and another for St. Petersburg Stakeout from Silent Assassin.
• Notice This: [ ! ]
  • On the lower difficulties, "Points of Interest" are indicated on the map. It's replaced with the "Instinct Mode" in Absolution, which highlights enemy patrol paths and objects of interest. You may also see a cutscene at the start of the level hinting at 47's next move.

O

• Of Corpse He's Alive:
  • Alastair Beldingford keeps ordering more whiskey, so at any point 47 can poison the caske, and that will snuff him out. Everyone will assume Alistair couldn't hold his whiskey, so leave the body as is.
  • In "A New Life", if you can poison Vinnie in his barcalounger while he's watching TV, the FBI agent will sit back down next to Vinnie and never even notice he's dead.
• Off on a Technicality: Bullets make pretty good cases. Mainly cold ones.
  • In Pablo's capsule biography, it is mentioned that he joined the Foreign Legion to avoid punishment for slaying a Judge.
  • The "Meat King" beats a murder rap when the victim, a teenage girl, vanished without a trace. 47 is hired to dig up ironclad evidence of her murder and to dispense his own unique brand of justice. It turns out the King was just covering for his brother, Malcolm, who was really responsible for the killing.
  • Joseph "Swing King" Clarence was found not guilty of a gross negligence after one of his fairground attractions killed forty people. Money talks, and killers walk. However, the legal battle bled Joseph's finances dry, and he's on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. After his wife leaves him, Joseph 'Breaks Bad' and re-purposes the husk of his theme park into a crack den.
  • With the help of the American Ambassador, Richard Delehunt, Alvaro got himself off the hook for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl.
  • One of the citizens suing Dexter Industries misses his court date by a hair. Sheriff Skurky explains the witness got tied up downstairs after an "accident" involving his deputies.
    Judge: [struggling not to grin] Think he'll pull through?
    Sheriff: Ahhhh, it's not lookin' good. He, uh... he hit his head pretty hard.
  • Ken Morgan led the defense of Jordan Cross when his then-girlfriend mysteriously fell to her death from Cross' penthouse loft in DUMBO, New York. Thanks to Ken's legal wizardry, Hannah was branded an out-of-control party girl, and Jordan came out smelling like roses.
  • Thanks to the machinations of Yuki Yamazaki, no less than five Yakuza bosses walked free after a supposedly-airtight sting operation.
• Office Golf:
  • There is a putter in Judge Strickland's office (Absolution). Handy if you want to impersonate him.
  • In "Anathema" (Silent Assassin), the Don's on the upstairs balcony, practicing his golf stroke. After he does, he stands there for a second looking at the ball, which is your cue to snipe him. The club is much weaker in this edition; it will take several whacks to drop an enemy.
• Omniscient Council of Vagueness: The Agency is a large, secretive network about which we know very little, only that it's an international syndicate with links to some unknown royal family. The only contact was Diana and we know little about her either. You're the world's greatest assassin and you still know little-to-nothing about the corporation for which you work.
• Ominous Latin Chanting:
  • Silent Assassin has a bombastic score provided by the Budapest Symphony orchestra. A few of Blood Money's tracks make use of a chorus, also.
  • The track 'Apocalypse', for example, features lyrics that speak of a great eternal race of builders that threaten the listener with complete cosmic destruction.
• Once an Episode: There'll be a sniper mission, a mission at a crowded party, a mission in the snow (or at least with it), a rescue mission involving Smith, a double-cross in the penultimate mission, and a firefight at the end.
  • Although Absolution is the first game in which Smith is completely absent.
  • 2016 slightly subvert with the firefight at the end, but since it's only Season 1, the pattern may still hold.
• One Bullet Clips: Shockingly averted in Hitman: Codename 47. If you reload, the entire magazine is tossed away.
• One Bullet Left: You're allowed 1 kill, 1 shot, 1 close-call, and/or 1 alert. How you spend them is up to you. It can be done easily enough. Sometimes you have to shoot out a computer screen, leaving you with only a knife or fiber wire kill the target.
• One Dose Fits All:
  • Any poison or sedative administered to any NPC will be equally effective on any of them.
  • In the fish restaurant mission, it's possible to assassinate both targets by serving them poisoned tea. Both die very shortly afterwards within a few seconds of each other, despite their different sizes.
  • In SA, sedating an NPC with a given amount of chloroform will knock them out for a fixed period of time, regardless of whether they are a petite woman or a burly Russian gangster. There is also at least one instance in which a possible means to assassinate two targets is to serve them the same poisoned drink near-simultaneously, following which they both drop dead within seconds of each other, despite their different sizes.
  • In Blood Money, the poison and anaesthetic syringes affect every NPC exactly the same way, regardless of size or constitution.
• One-Hit Polykill: All it takes is one audible gunshot and your targets will flee the scene. (Sniper rifles are very LOUD.) So why not kill two birds with stone? Always remember that sniper bullets can kill two at once.
• One Size Fits All: It makes sense that guard uniforms would fit all body types, but the "Invitation to a Party" and "Death on the Mississippi" missions take the cake. There is a guest wandering around in a tuxedo with an invite/VIP card in his hand. You can take his tux (which is now yours) and it will fit perfectly.
• Open Secret: Throughout the Hitman series, the International Contract Agency had been portrayed as an extremely secret clandestine organisation, connected to most major nations' secret services and the UN, only every operating through proxies' proxies. After their reformation in Absolution however, something changed, as they began to send large squadrons of highly conscipuous operatives in ICA uniform and marked vehicles to take over urban centres, where they cordon off streets, search houses and round up civilians like a police force. At one point, one of the ICA directors even swoops down on a South Dakota courthouse in an ICA helicopter and declares to the town's sheriff over megaphone that they're taking over. So much for subtlety.
• Optional Sexual Encounter:
  • Hitman exploits this trope on one occasion and parodies it in another. While attempting to assassinate a Senator's playboy son, you may be "seduced" by a character who invites you to a bedroom. She's an assassin, the one was marked in the mission loading screen with a shadow and question mark. You will die if you stupidly follow her in. In the "New Life" mission, where you are assassinating a witness under FBI protection, the intoxicated wife of the target will invite you to the bedroom. She'll pass out before doing anything, though.
  • There's a third situation in a Vegas hotel later in the game; encountering a drunk, older woman stumbling about the halls, she'll invite you back to her room, where she'll awkwardly attempt to dance and be 'sexy', ending with her passing out on the floor. It's not a complete waste of time - her balcony gives you a nice view of the Target's suite.
  • In Absolution, if you follow Layla Stockton (Traci Lords) into the hidden panic room, what follows is a cutscene wherein Layla performs a striptease before making a grab for her gun holster. ("Let Layla take you Heaven.")
• Optional Stealth: In the Hitman series, you can play the game like a typical Third-Person Shooter; however, you get a better rating (and thus unlock better weapons) by using stealth and deception to bump off your targets. The protagonist 47 is quite vulnerable to gunfire however, and for the first few instalments was unable to heal in the course of a mission, so even you wish to kill everyone in sight you would have to do it somewhat carefully. Blood Money added the ability to purchase bulletproof vests and medication to stave off injury, mitigating this somewhat. Granted, this ability was removed in Absolution and remained absent in 2016.
• Outside-Context Problem: Agent 47 for most of the groups he is sent after, such as Providence. He cannot be bought. He cannot be reasoned with. He cannot be stopped. Depending on how he approaches his targets, he can either be a ghost that no one sees that creates "accidents", or a specter of death that leaves a trail of corpses in his wake. The moment he sets his sights on a target, that person has hours, days at most, left to live.
• Overlord Jr.:
  • Hayomoto Junior. Not a patch on his old man, but he nonetheless handles all of the negotiations on behalf of the clan.
  • Lord Winston Beldingford and his son, Alistair, in "Beldingford Manor".
  • The Delgado vineyard disguises a cocaine factory that Manuel is set to inherit. Manuel also samples the merchandise regularly, which is why he's considered to be the weak link in their operation. He has no formal education, and his listed hobbies include "cocaine, water-skiing, tennis and downloading internet porn."
  • The Delgado cartel is revisited in Hitman 2, still trying to maintain their good name with their philanthropic endeavors. This time, the Don's nephew is working with a chemist to distribute a form of "super-cocaine".
  • "Pappy" LeBlanc is a Mississippi crime boss as well as the father of Margeaux, who is arranged to be married to the boss of a rival cartel. Margeaux has other plans, and hires 47 to bumps off her father, uncle, and husband, allowing her to skip town with all their cash; when last seen Margeuax is partying with a Chippendales dancer in Vegas.
  • Lenny Dexter, son of arms magnate Blake Dexter, is a low-ranking (almost subterranean) gangster in Hope. He is, however, much more amicable and, as 47 notes in his log, ripe for interrogation. He tries his hand at being leader of the Hope Cougars, and later a hired gun for Wade, but fails miserably at each: his whole gang revolts, and Lenny accidentally plugs a nun in the head, leading to his execution in the desert. He probably could've turned out okay had his life gone differently, but we are in the darkest timeline.
  • Hitman 2's Sierra Knox has a frosty relationship with her father, Robot Master and war profiteer Robert Knox. This echoes a similar relationship between Jordan Cross and his father, oligarch Thomas Cross. Jordan and Sierra are no angels themselves, however.

P

• Pacifist Run: You can choose to help people or avoid harming them, but the job comes first. Getting Silent Assassin ratings in 2 and Contracts generally requires the player to kill or harm no one except for the target(s) of each mission. In Blood Money, the player can kill as many people as they like and still get a Silent Assassin rating, so as long as they Make It Look Like an Accident.
• Paid Harem:
  • In Codename 47, Lee Hong's Restaurant had a swanky brothel attached. If you pocketed a VIP pass on your way inside, 47 was allowed a moment alone with Mei Ling...well, let's not get too nostalgic. Mei Ling survived, lived long and married a prince... No, actually she shacked up with yet another majordomo, and can be found lounging in his castle (to 47's annoyance).
  • In the campiest scene (and thus best-known scene) in Silent Assassin, Charlie's lady friends will magically produce revolvers from their g-strings and cap you on sight.
  • The "Meat King" is found in a living quarters on the second floor, where he lays in bed with two leather-clad prostitutes and is brought entire roasted chickens many times per day. Livin' the dream!
  • In a repurposed funhouse on the edge of the Southland Amusement Park, "Scoop" reclines on a bed/throne with his hoes. The crack factory is also staffed by bikini-clad molls.
  • If you feel like poking around the hotel rooms in New Orleans, there's a big bird relaxing with his two hoochies.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: The main game-play premise of the series. In Absolution however, a disguise will still arouse suspicion from certain people who will then try to approach you. In response, 47 can lower his head and raise a hand over his face (which consumes Instinct) or "pacify" them if they get too close.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: 47's targets are invariably incredibly depraved criminals. It's only in Blood Money that 47 is seen killing "innocents" as part of the story.
  • Even then, the innocent deaths comes back to bite him later on, as the Shadow Client calls it out.
  "Do you realize the kind of world you've been shaping? Does the ICA? Does your handler? I live in that world. I have seen the consequences. I have felt the cost. That's what defines me."
• Perfect Poison:
  • That's some serious bad-ass "Poison", eh? Bottles of cyanide and even rat poison will have the same, immediate effect.
  • Hand Waved in Blood Money: one of Agent 47's primary weapons is a syringe that can be used to inject targets at the jugular or to poison food. For efficiency's sake, instead of using a single poison, a mixture of chemicals is used: sodium pentothol, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Since this is the exact combination of chemicals used in lethal injection executions, the victim dies quickly and noiselessly....Which only kinda makes sense. In lethal injections they use multiple IVs so the poisons don't mix beforehand and undergo a process called precipitation. A fancy way of saying they get all waxy and won't go in. And it can still take two hours for the victim to die. It would work better to just use one of the first two (the more fast acting drugs) and strangle the person after they pass out. However, Blood Money's use of poison still makes more sense than the previous game, Contracts: in several levels, you're forced to look for poisons in the surrounding area and dose people's food or drink with it, and weedkiller or rat poison aren't exactly painless or quiet.
  • It should be noted the the poison in Blood Money isn't undetectable; kills with poison count as regular kills rather than accidents, and the newspaper headlines make mention of it.
  • Hitman (2016) introduces emetic poisons, one variant of which is rat poison. Boxes of these are seen scattered throughout most levels, particularly near kitchens. Dosing anyone with emetic poison will cause them to find the nearest bathroom or bin and throw up violently, but won't kill them. It is useful to get an individual somewhere quiet should you require their disguise or in order to obtain a drowning kill.
• Pistol-Whipping: Introduced in Silent Assassin, if 47 is within close-range of anyone. He can do this in Blood Money and Absolution to pacify human shields.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Despite their long history, 47 and Diana have no romantic interaction.
• Police Are Useless:
  • "Hunter and Hunted". On the floor 47 is staying in, there's a switchbox at the end of the hall which will be useful for getting past the riot police. These fools are completely helpless in the dark; you can waltz right past them and they won't take notice. Also, if you escape via the ambulance, the not-so-bright patrolman will stroke his chin before waving you through.
  • "A New Life". A small lampshade-hanging occurs if you plant the donuts and then hide to the side side of the surveillance van. You see a pair of feet below the vans backdoors and hear "Ooooh donuts! Nice... Full disclosure: We're actually FBI."
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • Don Giulliani oversees the kidnapping of the padre himself, greeting him with a stiff shot to a jaw and another to the ribs when Vitorrio won't stop screaming.
  • In India, the hospital bilks old rich people out of their money and funnels it to the cult leader.
  • Near the start of the "'Til Death Do Us Part", several wedding guests can be seen leisurely shooting alligators, an activity which Agent 47 can join in on. The target, Pappy LeBlanc, is more sympathetic to the gators (possibly in memory of his brother, the leader of the Gator Gang) and will even toss them chicken wings.
  • The strike team in "Rosewood" need swift death. Wade lays waste to an children's hospital full of clergymen, something which disturbs even his posse. ("Whatever happened to duct tape?") As if that wasn't enough, some hoods are ransacking the drug dispensary for personal and entrepreneurial use.
• Precision F-Strike: In Blood Money, 47 reacts to Diana's apparent betrayal by shouting "Bitch!" at her. This is the only time 47 has ever been verbally aggressive on-screen.
  • Victoria shouts "You bastard!" at Dexter before single-handedly taking down all of his guards.
• Pretentious Latin Motto: The Agency's is Merces Letifer, "lethal trade".
• Professional Killer: Perhaps the ur-example in all of video gaming. Agent 47’s picture could be placed in the dictionary next to the word assassin and all of its synonyms. 47 typically takes contracts in exchange for money, but he has dabbled in the other types of professional killing from time to time.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • 47 doesn't buy for a second that Diana needs his help in "Requiem". A moment's hesitation is all she needs to syringe him.
  • A few of 47's targets are aware of their upcoming hit, and take steps to make your job extra difficult.
  • Vinnie went so far as to surrender himself to the FBI in exchange for entering witness protection. Described as a paranoid shut-in, he gets hysterical whenever his FBI escort is delayed or doesn't meet him at the top of the stairs.
  • The 'crazy' father of the bride in Blood Money. It's quite funny to listen to an Alex Jones look-a-like banging on about clones and shadow governments and such, only to be proven right in his obituary.
• Psycho Psychologist: Ort-Meyer and his cronies, including Ödön Kovács, work as "doctors" in the Romanian Asylum where 47 was schooled in murder.
  • In "Flatline", the psychiatrist outfit can go anywhere in the clinic apart from the medical wing, which opens up a few kill opportunities. Walk up to one of the mobsters staying at Pine Cone; he'll mention that it's time for his therapy session and lead you to the office upstairs. He'll jabber on for a while, so just walk behind the chair and wire him. Sometimes, a second target will also claim session time.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: Agent 47's personal theme music, ever since Blood Money, is "Ave Maria".

R

• Ragdoll Physics:
  • The original is primitive by today's standards, but C47 is notable as well for being a technical pioneer. It didn't actually invent ragdoll physics (the first one to actually use it was Jurassic Park: Trespasser) but it was a major force for popularizing it, and articles like this one explain secrets of the early Glacier engine that were very influential in the 2000-2008 era, before game engines came with full physics simulation built-in as a standard feature.
  • As this was the early stages, shooting someone with, say, an elephant gun could very easily catapult them over a 10ft wall and across the map. (The SILENT BUT DEADLY ASSASSIN!) Even 47's trademark .45s were enough to make someone go cartwheeling backwards, and if you were accurate enough to repeatedly land hits on them while they were in midair, it could make for some truly amazing acrobatic feats.
  • Codename 47 marvels with its sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. Not only were people blown across the room when both shots were fired at once, bodies were sometimes wedged in ceiling lights, pipes, or just the ceiling corner. Being classified as pistols, the shotgun can be dual wielded, giving it four times the force of a normal shotgun. The trick worked so well, a fat bodyguard was blown out the window and into the South China Sea.
  • Also in Codename 47 was a man-portable M134 Minigun. Firing at 10,000 RPM and each bullet inflicting the force of a sniper rifle, it can force a pile of dead bodies (which it made) into spaces in between crates or under heavy furniture.
• Railing Kill
  • In Blood Money at least, pushing someone into a railing causes them to fall over it, and their death will be considered an accident by anyone discovering the body, no matter how many other 'accidental' or overtly-suspicious deaths may have occurred on the premises. It kills them even when the rail is three feet off the ground.
  • Should you choose to dispose of Doctor Valentine in Absolution by tampering with his hair-growth formula, in the midst of his panicked running around, he'll run straight into a railing and plummet.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking:
  • A few of the major super-criminals, notably Pablo Ochoa in the first game, Big Bad Sergei Zavrotko in the second game, and Lee Hong in the first and third games can survive significantly more damage than standard Mooks (they can take a few dozen 9mm rounds to the chest, as opposed to just 2 or 3 for everyone else). They all die instantly from headshots or assault rifle fire, though, so it's not too noticeable.
  • In Blood Money, final villain Alexander Cayne has a little over twice as much health as a standard enemy despite being a withered old man in a wheelchair, and he's also equipped with one of the game's best pistols. Likewise, Blake Dexter isn't quite as tough as some of the villains from the earlier games, but can still take noticeably more damage and is packing one hell of a machine gun. (Note: this may be justified in that these guys would be expected to be wearing body armor.)
• The Rashomon: minor differences exist between several missions in Codename: 47 and their remade versions in Contracts: which versions are "true" is never made explicit.
• Rated M for Manly:
  • This is a series about a genetically-engineered assassin violently killing arms dealers and drug barons whilst wearing awesome suits and toting big guns.
  • IO-Interactive had a crazy launch party for Absolution—pole dancers and all.
• Red Baron:
  • The secret achievements. For instance, running around with a meat cleaver will inspire the local news to dub you "The Butcher". If you like sniping, then pick a WA2000 sniper rifle and put a silencer on it, look for a cool sniping spot (there is at least one in almost every level like a ferries wheel or a tree house) and head shot everyone in the level. It'll gives you a special rating named "RUSSIAN HARE".
  • Lee Hong is known in the underworld as "The Man With No Conscience".
  • Mr. "Meat King" and Mr. "Swing King" (no relation). Both are warm-ups for harder missions ahead.
  • The "Bayou Beauty".
  • Keep your eye on The Sparrow...Kalvin Ritter, that is.
  • Ken Morgan studied law at Cambridge, where he was nicknamed "The Brick" for his square-shouldered frame and ruthless cross-examinations.
  • "The Maelstrom", so-named for his acts of piracy on the high seas. He is like the Dread Pirate Roberts of the Hitman universe.
• Regenerating Health: Added in Absolution, although it only restores up to a portion of your total health. Also, unlike most examples it is extremely slow, so much so that it's not at all practical for combat purposes. It mostly fills up quietly while you're exploring, and is more to prevent you from getting stuck by making sure you always have at least enough health to survive a few bullets should you stumble into a firefight. Not that it matters on the hardest difficulty, Purist.
• Remember the New Guy?:
  • In Silent Assassin, Mr. X claims to have actually witnessed 47 in action. It happened in Rotterdam, when 47 was chasing after the biker gang and Boris. Needless to say, X does not appear in C47 or Contracts as an onlooker or otherwise. After that, we're introduced to Boris' hitherto unknown brother, Sergei, who is making inquiries about his death.
  • In Contracts, 47 is ambushed without warning and shot in the middle of a hit. As Diana explains in Blood Money, in recent years a group known as The Franchise has entered the mix and been putting serious pressure on the Agency. According to Cayne, he first got wind of 47's scent during the Chilean mission, which occured sometime between SA and Contracts.
  • President Stewart was also elected president in November 2000, the same year C47 took place.
  • Absolution introduces Travis, Birdie, and Tom the Tailor. The first is Diana's mentor at ICA, the second is an information broker 47 apparently often uses, whilst the third is the maker of 47's suits. None of them had been seen or mentioned prior to Absolution.
• Remilitarized Zone:
  • The St. Petersberg levels in SA, most noticeably "Tubeway Torpedo". Not only do you have to kill a Russian Army General, but there's a CIA agent being held in captivity in the general's bunker.
  • "The Bjarkov Bomb". You'll need to borrow a hazmat suit from the Red Army to enter the submarine, which is where Bjarkov builds his dirty bombs.
  • "Death Factory", the weapons testing area of Blake Dexter's plant. Of particular note is the minefield testing area, where Dr. Green sits in his skybox and detonates hogs in a facsimile of 1950's American suburbia. Dr. Green informs you over the intercom that the whole place is honeycombed with mines. If you wander into the path of one, it won't be fun.
  • Hitman (2016): For 47's final exam, Soders prepares a "no-win" scenario. Which turns out to be a mock-up of a Soviet air force hangar.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: From Silent Assassin - Absolution there's at least one revolver.
  • The "Gunslinger" playstyle from Absolution encourages the player to invoke this, by getting them to make 15 kills with a revolver.
  • Generally subverted throughout the series. While revolvers have better stopping power than semi-automatics, they're louder and are incapable of mounting suppressors to mitigate that fact, have a lower ammunition capacity, slower reload time and, with one exception, can't be dual wielded. Basically, revolvers are Awesome, but Impractical.
  • Averted in the World Of Assasination trilogy. There are no revolvers available for 47 to use in any of the three games and the only appearance of one is used by the Shadow Client in a cutscene.
• Ring Menu: Contracts and Blood Money traded the drop-down menu for this. Part of the problem was it took too long to fish through your inventory in real-time.
• Roofhopping: Sicily, the Japanese Castle, the Paris hotel, and the exploding hotel from Absolution.
• Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: Many of the missions allow you to kill your targets through the use of indirect and often ingenious methods, though most are rather obvious or hard to pull off without getting spotted.
• Run for the Border:
  • In "Invitation to a Party", the last General has defected to Germany and is staying at the Embassy. The client wants his head—as well as the suitcase the General took with him.
  • In Blood Money, 47 and Diana are forced to flee to America. They narrowly escape the collapse of ICA, though Diana's hourglass is rapidly running out.
  • Jasper Knight was a world-famous chess player who murdered the Soviet ambassador, poisoning him with ricin-coated chess pieces during a match. Jasper then fled to communist Cuba, arranging safe passage across the Iron Curtain for himself. When Langley discovered what he had done, they hired Erich Soders to eliminate him. 47's final step toward becoming a full-fledged ICA agent is to recreate this hit.
• Running Gag:
  • The rubber ducks from the first game make appearances in Silent Assassin and Absolution.
  • "Allan please add details," originally a description in Blood Money which was never edited before release, has since been referenced in Absolution and Hitman (2016).

S

• Safe Cracking:
  • In "Lee Hong Assassion" and "Invitation to a Party", there are 4 locked safes of which one contains the item you seek.
  • A secondary objective in "The Jacuzzi Job." In order to throw off the cops, 47 is instructed to pocket some money from Charlie's safe, which is hidden behind a painting in his office.
  • Amusingly, the hippie plantation in Absolution is found to be concealing explosives in a nearby safe.
  • In "Rendezvous in Rotterdam" and "Death on the Mississippi", your objective is to break into a safe and steal back some embarrassing photos that are being held over your clients' heads.
  • "Birdie's Gift". Mr. MacGormand is blowing smoke about the gun range being difficult to beat. But if you're committed to mischief, you can break into his safe and take back the guns illegally.
• Save Scumming: Initially averted. The first installment had no in-mission saves, with limited saves being available on later games. The number of saves decreases until you reach professional, where you only get a saved game slot as a progress bonus (but don't count on it). Blood Money introduced a "Rookie" mode, which allowed infinite saves. In Absolution it sort of brings it back to the classic games with in-game checkpoints instead of manually saving. Weirdly they don't check event flags, so if you reload to the last checkpoint after you've set up an accidental kill before it actually killed your target you'll have to go and set it back up again. After Absolution the series brought back the save file system.
• Scenery Porn: Many missions have beautiful scenery, with the embassy grounds in "Invitation to a Party" from Silent Assassin, and the Heaven Party in "Dance with the Devil" from Blood Money standing out in particular.
  • If you want to drink in the sights of Chile, we wouldn't blame you. This is an absolutely gorgeous level.
  • The tutorial level in Absolution takes place in a splendid-looking mansion.
• Scope Perspective: While every game in the series is mostly in third person, aiming down a scoped weapon always lets you look through the scope directly.
• Secret Level: The final mission of Blood Money. So secret that, on the Xbox, you get an achievement for finishing the game before you get to it, and then a second, separate achievement for completing it.
  • Despite this, it's the canon ending. When Absolution was announced, it confused a number of people who thought 47 had died at the end of Blood Money.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • You get to be cool by not using a disguise. Officially an "Achievement" as of Hitman: Absolution.
  • Instinct Mode isn't that necessary in Absolution. But when it's necessary, holy shit is it necessary. You can try playing without it by throwing lots of distractions, or by using disguises sparingly (you have to turn your back to people while in disguise, which lead to goofy dance sequences where Hitman will nonchalantly walk sideways with his back to guards).
  • Many of the in-game challenges from Absolution and onwards were based on ways Hitman fans would challenge each other in previous games (no guns, suit only, etc.). Additionally, Contracts Mode is entirely a way to facilitate this between players.
• Self-Made Orphan:
  • 47 was manipulated into killing his genetic donors. Ort-Meyer even referred to him as a son.
  • Two weeks after he returned from military service, Lee Hong poisoned his own uncle to take control of the Red Dragon Triad, earning him the nickname "The Man With No Conscience".
  • Margeaux is a black widow who put out a hit on her bridegroom and father in order to inherit all their money.
• Serial Escalation: Just how corrupt is Agent 47's world is going to be?
• Sexy Secretary:
  • Carol Anne, "Mister Swing King's" niece.
  • "Traditions of the Trade". When you get to the dentist's office, talk to the helpful receptionist and she'll tell you where Fritz currently is in the hotel. It's weird how criminals always have good-looking receptionists.
  • The guards have set patterns in "The Jacuzzi Job"; the secretary in the safe room is the random element here. But she isn't too hard to dodge, and you can make minor adjustments based on what she does.
• Shared Universe:
  • At some points in Absolution, Agent 47 can run into Kane & Lynch, whose franchise was also developed by IO.
    Dunkey: Hey, look who I found. It's Lynch. From Kane and Lynch. 'Cuz IO Interactive makes those games, too. (fills him full of lead) Those games fuckin' suck."
  • During the Skurky's Law mission in Absolution as you reach the holding cells and crawl through the vent. You can oversee one of the prisoners named Kane waiting to see his daughter, Jenny. It's uncertain where Absolution takes place in the K&L timeline, though Kane is beardless and sporting his bandage from the first one.
• Ship Level:
  • In "Plutonium Runs Loose"/"Deadly Cargo", The Agency needs you to sneak about a cargo ship, the Katarina Ivanova, and kill Boris before he has time to ready his nuke.
  • "The Bjarkhov Bomb" takes place in part on an old Soviet ship and submarine. Both are permanently moored and being used as a weapons factory.
  • "Death on the Mississippi". (The Emily has no piloting wheel?)
  • Played with in "Unexpected Guest". 47's last test as an "Initiate" was to reenact one of the Agency's greatest hits: slaying a Gentleman Thief, Kalvin Ritter, aboard his private yacht. The boat, the party guests, the weapons, even the sunset—everything is fake.
• Shoot Out the Lock: If you're in too much of a hurry to pick a lock, you can always shoot it out with a silenced gun without risking nearby guards hearing you. It'll also decrease your rating at the end of the level, since you wasted a bullet.
• Shovel Strike: These appear as weapons in Contracts and Blood Money. Most notably, you can bean "Pappy" LeBlanc in the head as he's paying his respects to Skip, RIP.
• Sigil Spam: Dr. Ort-Meyer, a former Legionnaire, has a stylized Fleur De Liens as his symbol. It appears all over the lab, including the front gates, a floor lamp, Ort-Meyer's belt buckle, and on the anesthetic labels. The logo also appears on much of 47's equipment, most notably his laptop skins, gun slides, and ammo cases.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Sure, you could take your target with your high-tech customized silenced sniper rifle. Or you could push them over a railing into the river, hit them with a hammer, or drop something on them.
  Yahtzee: You can either engineer an accidental-seeming death with obscure inventory puzzles, or you can just stove their head in with a brick, 'cause you’ve got shit to do.
• Sickbed Slaying: Trust him, he's a doctor.
  • The cult leader, Deewana Ji, is awaiting a heart transplant at an island hospital. Right now his cult is at a standstill, waiting for Mr. 17's stolen nuke to arrive. Once Deewana Ji is back on his feet, he plans to unleash Armageddon by combining the nuke with an unbeatable missile defense chip. Do the world a favor and jam a scalpel in his thorax while he's being prepped for surgery.
  • The targets at the rehab facility, including Agent Smith himself, will die before their detox is over. Sal, Tony, and Giovanni (or whatever their names are) can each be strangled in the therapist's chair, drowned in the spa, or crushed to death in the exercise room. (Exploited with Smith: 47 fakes his death to make it easier to smuggle him out of the clinic.)
  • So many ways to dispatch Soders in the last mission of 2016 Season 1. Just a pleasant hello will give him a shock and kill him, and tampering with his surgery will also do, but in case you want to outsource your killing again, just show the actual chief surgeon his patient is also his father's killer, and the good doctor will off your target himself.
• Sinister Silhouettes:
  • The Big Bads of Hitman 1 & 2 are kept in shadow of most the game. Most interestingly, the flashbacks with Ort-Meyer show 4 other men conversing over the newly-hatched body of Mr. 47. As you progress through the game, it becomes clear that these silhouettes belong to Lee Hong ("Will he be able to feel any pain? It makes people obey orders."), Pablo Ochoa ("Come to papa!"), Frantz Fuchs ("His nose is very much like mine!") and Boris ("If I'd only had 50 of him in 'Nam, it'd still be French!")
  • On the loading screen for Lorne's mansion, you'll probably be curious as to who the '?' is. This represents a female assassin who's been sent to kill you by Cayne.
• Sinister Shades: A requisite for bad guys. They must all be fans of The Matrix.
• Sleazy Politician:
  • The client in Rotterdam enlists 47 to recover some photos of him having sex in the back of a police van. Not the kind of image enhancement you want, especially when running for Mayor.
  • Richard Delahunt is a one-time Presidential candidate from Louisiana who was implicated in a child sex scandal and flushed from the system. He currently serves as an ambassador to the Vatican (no comment) and resides far away in Paris, so he won't embarrass anyone back home.
  • The son of Colorado's own Senator, Chad Bingham Jr., managed to bribe his way out of prison after an adventure with a stripper went bad. Write your congressman today and help correct this grave injustice. —Scratch that, it's an election year and daddy can't afford to let Junior upset any more apple carts.
• Slashed Throat:
  • You will really come to appreciate the speed of a knife in Hitman.
  • If Angelina finds out that Raymond is dead, and payment has been delivered, she will scurry up the side of Jimmy Cilley's float and cut his throat with a huge-ass knife.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Somewhere in the middle; while the games feature an array heinous and evil characters, they do get their comeuppance in the form of 47.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness:
  • The games have always been hitting a blend between the two ends of the scale, but Absolution leans a bit more towards the silly side. Some reviewers have said that the plotline is comparable to that of a Tarantino flick. Whether or not that's a good thing is up to you.
  • Contracts is pretty far on the opposite end of the spectrum. See Darker and Edgier above.
• Sniper Scope Sway: Depending on your weapon. If you are using a fully upgraded W2000, there is little sway, though it only gets a single shot. Also, sway is affected if you move and by the length of time you hold the rifle after sighting. Sway can be eliminated by canceling the sighting and adjusting your position to the next target before sighting again.
• Sniper Pistol: In Blood Money, you can easily convert your Silverballer into one of these with the purchase of a scope. You can't buy it until relatively far into the game though. Still, combine it with a silencer, and you've got yourself a portable, mid-range headshot machine which can't easily be detected. Don't count on being able to hit things from a great distance though.
• Sniper Scope Sway: In Hitman, it depends on your rifle. If you are using a fully upgraded W2000, there is only a little sway, which can adds up to big problems since it only gets one shot (albeit one with higher precision than with a magazine). Also, sway is affected if you move and by the length of time you hold the rifle after sighting. Players can glitch out of sway by exiting the sniper sight (click click) and then re-adjusting your position before sighting again.
• Sniping Mission:
  • The first mission (apart from the tutorial) in Hitman: Codename 47. It can be done without sniping, but it is dangerous.
  • Ditto in Silent Assassin, when 47 accepts "one last job" involving a summit at the former FSB headquarters. Yet again, you can ignore Diana's yapping and just storm the place if you feel like it.
  • The third mission in 2016's Patient Zero campaign is a sniping mission set in Colorado, which has you kill 4 infected patients, and Dr. Bradley Paine, CDC.
  • The entirety of Absolution's Sniper Challenge and Hitman 2's Sniper Assassin, as you would expect.
• Songs in the Key of Panic: If you trip up and alert the police, don't worry — Jesper Kyd and Niels Bye Nielsson will be sure to let you know it.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: It would appear 47 finds peace in classical music to drown the sounds of his victims playing in his head:
  • "Ave Maria" is the main menu song in Blood Money and on some maps, upbeat music is playing while you can happily slaughter your way through the innocent crowd. Furthermore, the Ave Maria returns at the very end of the game, where it plays in the background of the final mission when 47 wakes up at his "funeral" and starts blowing mooks away left, right, and center. Specifically, the scene starts with "Ave Maria" goes into a downer tune as the shooting begins, and goes back to "Ave Maria" as 47 leaves the church to finish off the survivors.
    • "Ave Maria" shows up again in Absolution: it plays at the end of the mission "Skurky's Law", where 47 pulls an Unflinching Walk while Hope, South Dakota burns in the distance.
  • "The Meat King's Party" in Contracts. Finding the mutilated body of a young woman hanging upside-down by a meat hook while Paul Anka's "Put Your Head on My Shoulder" plays in the background and her murderer prowls around behind you is unnerving, to say the least.
• Spider-Sense: The map won't show you the guards' view cones (a la Metal Gear Solid). You do, however, get a suspicion-meter, a staple of the Hitman series, the threat meter determines how the guards react to Agent 47. When it is empty, everyone will treat Agent 47 as a normal bloke. He can generally run around without raising suspicion. When it is half full the threat meter will turn yellow/red, and this indicates that the guards have seen something suspicious and will go on alert. Running around may agitate the guards until they blow Agent 47's cover. When the meter is full it'll turn bright red, which means any guard present has seen through Agent 47's disguise and shoot on sight. In Blood Money, the threat meter will decrease over time if Agent 47 acts normally, or hides from the guards, another thing that was new to the series but long overdue.
• Spy Speak:
  • 47 and The Agency have a fondness for wordplay and passwords. You will find a few Agency contacts in Siberia (just ask for "Yuriska"), an herbalist in Lee Hong's restaurant, a neo-Nazi in the Hotel Galar, and another one in a Punjab travel agency ("Special price, only for you!")
  • In their communiqués, Ort-Meyer and his associates always sign off with the phrase. "Blood and Muscle". Late in the game, the other four donors start getting itchy feet, suggesting that they each "split the fruit", which implies they're planning to kill Ort-Meyer and seize his research.
  • In the final battle of Silent Assassin, Sergei holds Vitorrio and gunpoint and feeds him lines in the confessional booth. Vitorrio pleads with 47 to surrender to the guards and look inside "his heart". This is actually code for Aim for the heart-shaped window so glass will get in his eye and blind him.
  • Margeux is friendly to 47 when he introduces himself as "a friend" of her father's, most likely because she knows of his true identity as the man hired to kill her family.
  • In "Amendment XXV" the Vice President gets a call from the assassin he's hired to kill President Steward. To duck out of a meeting without arousing suspicion, he pretends the voice on the other end of the line is his niece.
• The Stakeout:
  • In "Rendezvous at Rotterdam", the ICA's stakeout ends in failure, forcing 47 to finish the mission all by himself.
  • Hiding behind a restaurant menu, 47 watches the "handoff" in New Orleans before the level even starts. Follow the big red bird, and he will eventually lead you to Mark Puriyah.
• Standard FPS Guns: Exaggerated, in that each game features dozens of varieties of each type of gun. Gun Porn at its finest.
• Stationary Boss:
  • The Meat King is immobilized by his own fat, and can only shout for help from his guards. How did he make it to court, you ask? Well, he needs a wheelchair to get around, and it can be seen lying next to his room. Campbell is one the few targets in this series who cannot be dragged anywhere, and you can't fiber wire him Jabba-style.
  • Unusual for an adversary in Hitman, Charlie won't defend himself or even try to flee when you confront him, instead hiding underwater like a little kid until you leave. Also a fun fact: Charlie's AI does not involve moving. At all. If you try to use anesthetic and drag him somewhere, he won't move at all. He'll float in the air and pretend to be swimming in the jacuzzi. Same happens with Fritz from Contracts if you sedate him while he's in the pool.
  • Deewanna Ji is lying on a hospital bed and awaiting a heart transplant. The same goes for Eric Soders in Hitman (2016), when you finally do confront him.
• Stealth Run: Required for the "Silent Assassin" title.
• Stealth-Based Game: And probably one of the first games in the genre to prioritize disguises and hiding in plain sight over pure stealth. The game certainly encourages you to play stealthily but it's by no means obligatory, however.
• Sticky Bomb: Mines can be placed inside suitcases or toolboxes and then detonated later from a safe distance. This is noisy and can cause the deaths of innocents, use with caution. It's also possible to stick mines to the walls, tables, trays, etc.
• The Stinger:
  • The final stage of Blood Money starts with the credits rolling while 47 is laying on a cremation table at his own funeral.
  • After the epilogue of Absolution, a scene plays where Birdie approaches a detective tracking down 47 and offering to help him.
• Storming the Castle: Lee Hong's restaurant, Pablo's mansion, Hayomoto's Castle, Gontranno Sanctuary, and Dexter Industries
• Stuffed into a Trashcan:
  • Nothing unusual about slitting your throat, taking a stroll and then hiding yourself in a recycling bin.
  • Garbage trucks can dispose of all kinds of waste. (Curiously, the body capacity is infinite.) The Terminus Hotel also has trash chutes lying conveniently open.
• Super Drowning Skills:
  • In Blood Money, arranging an "accidental" drowning is as simple as pushing an NPC headfirst into a hot tub.
  • Or better yet, pushing someone over into a pool as they're walking into it for a swim instantly kills them.
  • This method is even funnier. In "Shaving Lenny", Gavin will often stop by the balcony of the scrapyard and look down at the wide-open vat of crude oil. Not only will he drown immediately when pushed (possibly because he fell in head-first), but you will hear his death rattle (GLUG GLUG GLUG) as he sinks straight to the bottom.
• Super-Soldier: Agent 47 is a clone created from the DNA of five of the most dangerous criminals in the world - a German scientist, a Chinese Triad boss, a Colombian drug lord, an Austrian gun-for-hire and a Kazakstanian arms dealer.
• SWAT Team: 47 has to deal with various special police forces, mainly in Romania (penultimate level of Codename 47 and first level of Contracts) and France (the GIGN in the last level of Contracts). They're usually deadlier than previous mooks, armed with the best submachine guns and equipped with bulletproof vests. They'll also sweep rooms one-by-one, which makes getting past them harder than most guards.
  • The ICA has its own. At one point they seize control of a small town.

T

• Take Cover!: Alcoves are your friends. This ability was removed in Blood Money thanks to the free-roaming camera.
• Tampering with Food and Drink:
  • One of the many methods of killing in the Hitman series is to inject sedatives or poison into food deliveries. (In the Christmas mission, you can also put aphrodisiacs into a martini to summon your mark into a more remote location.)
  • In the first three games, 47 must first locate some poison. It's either hidden in an ICA crate, one of the empty rooms, or in a sewer grate. In Blood Money, 47 always comes equipped with two types of syringes: the lethal one, which will kill the target, and non lethal one, which will stun them. Alternatively, you can prepare a needle, hover it over the food, and apply it like ketchup.
• Tap on the Head: In Blood Money, 47 can knock people out by smacking them on the back of the head with his pistol. If you leave them where they lie and someone stumbles onto them, they can be revived almost instantly. It's probably justified in the fact that 47 is slightly super-human.
• Tattooed Crook:
  • In the biker bar, it's possible to poison the tattoo artist's ink well. This will make quick work of Rutgert.
  • The hitwoman at Lorne's party in Blood Money. She has a distinctive skull and crossbones tattoo on her buttock, which sets her apart from the other bunnies. It also reveals her as an agent of the Franchise.
  • One of the saints, Dixon, has a teardrop tattoo on her right cheek in Absolution.
  • In Absolution, Wade's name in written in ink on his right hand. Lenny has much more ostentatious arm tattoos.
  • In Hitman 2, it is possible to disguise yourself as a tattoo artist in order to schedule some alone time with Rico. You'll have to do fix his tattoo as part of the "Hero of Santa Fortuna" challenge.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad:
  • Codename 47: Once Dr. Kovacs bites the dust, the local police force arrives and the building is placed on lockdown. There's a key on the wall which unlocks the rest of the sanitarium.
  • "St. Petersberg Revisited": When Mr. 17 dies, all of the guards will disperse from the Pushkin Building to look for 47. In addition, several Guards will be posted at the Metro and four more will be deployed inside the sewers. The Mr. 17 Outfit will keep the mobsters off your back as you flee the building. It should be noted that no disguise will fool the guards by the Metro no matter what, which is why you need to dive back down into the sewers.
• Tempting Fate:
  • What's that old saying about 'not tempting the wrath from atop the high thing'? In Absolution and 2016 especially, NPCs are nonchalant about standing next to windows, chandeliers, pianos, and lit fireworks.
  • In Absolution, 47 overhears a steel mill worker talking about an upcoming wrestling match. The challenger is Sanchez, your target in the upcoming mission "Fight Night". The worker currently owes a friend twenty G's, and another twenty to his girlfriend with which he bet on Sanchez. Not to worry, though, he's sure to win!
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Some civilians will report any mysterious behaviour to the guards. It is advisable not to do anything stupid in front of them. Also, do not kill them. This will take your score down in the final results screen.
• Throwing the Distraction:
  • In Blood Money, 47 can use a simple coin to distract guards. In a pinch, it works.
  • While coins are generally the best option in Blood Money, 47 can throw almost anything he can carry; guns and briefcases in particular will cause a guard to pick them up and take them to the security room, which can distract them for a lot longer.
  • In Silent Assassin, Diana gives you a cell phone and pager to entice an interrogator to wander over to the other side of his two-way mirror.
  • A subtle example. In "Hunter and Hunted", shooting a car outside of the police blockade triggers a car alarm. The gullible SWAT will go investigate the noise, leaving your target (the Inspector) all alone by his van.
  • Absolution has vastly more rubbish to collect and throw. If you've run out of Instinct, lack a henchman disguise, or you just don't want to use Instinct, you'll need a throwable object to distract the guards.
• Timed Mission:
  • In Blood Money's "The Murder of Crows", once the courier delivers the payment to Mark Purayah, the Secretary will be assassinated after taking a couple of laps of the parade route in his float. Stopping the courier from making the payoff allows you to Take Your Time (and makes it easier to fulfill the optional objective of keeping the case).
  • "Till Death Do Us Part" doesn't have a time limit, but if you wait long enough, Margeaux and Buddy will get married, which moves all of the NPCs (minus Pappy) to the gazebo out back. Killing Pappy, or ringing the wedding bell yourself, speeds up the ceremony.
  • The "Countdown" mission in Absolution is exactly what it means - 47 has four-and-a-half minutes to stop Blake Dexter before he leaves the building's roof with Victoria.
  • In "Deadly Cargo" from Contracts, the target will eventually detonate a nuke, causing the mission to fail, although it takes a long time to happen.
• Trail of Blood: Bodies leak blood, so keep it clean or else you'll lead your enemies right to them. In Absolution, there is a blood trail leading from the elevator to the chapel where Wade's goons are interrogating someone. It loudly squelches when you walk on it.
• Trap Is the Only Option:
  • The final mission of C47, as its name implies (directly states), is a Setup. Your friend at the Agency, Diana Burnwood (the one who's been sending you all these choice assignments) actually shows some concern for your safety.
  • "St. Petersberg Revisited", and the reemergence of a very familiar face.
    • That said, this time it's possible (albeit difficult) to subvert the trope; instead of taking the obvious sniper route, you can infiltrate the Pushkin building and kill 17 before he even knows you're in the square.
• Translation Convention: Cringe-inducingly played straight in Codename 47, and notably (and thoroughly) averted thereafter.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Getting the "Silent Assassin" rating can be like this occasionally. It usually involves using the environment, sometimes in rather unintuitive ways. For example, in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, one mission includes a smoke bomb in your starting equipment. You need to go into the building's laundry room and drop the smoke bomb down the chute, then hightail it over to the fire station, wait for the firemen to deploy, then sneak in and steal a uniform and axe so you can clear the security checkpoint with no questions asked, then run as fast as you can to the basement where your target is located, axe him in the head, then run back upstairs and escape via the elevator before the fire alarm ends. There's pretty much no way to figure all this out on your first playthrough without a guide.
  • Codename 47 was infamous for this. With a few exceptions, most levels had a couple of very specific ways to beat them without going sideways or exploiting the mechanics. It's why it's generally likened more to a puzzle game than a stealth game.
• Trilogy Creep: Both "Hitman Trilogy", a boxset for the PS2, and "Hitman HD Trilogy", a similar set for the PS3 and 360, actually feature the second, third and fourth entries in the Hitman series (Silent Assassin, Contracts and Blood Money), skipping the original game in the entirely. The original game in the series, Hitman Codename 47, was a PC-exclusive; not to mention Contracts is, in effect, a remake of it.
• Two Shots from Behind the Bar:
  • Blood Money's Maynard John is masquerading as a bartender in the Shark Club. When you confront him, he invites 47 to join him in a soundproofed room where they can "duel" in private.
  • In C47, the Sawn-Off is found only in the fish restaurant. Once the Chief is history, the Blue Lotus member will flee and the bartender will decide to go down guns blazing. By far the best gun in terms of entertainment (as it sends people flying), you'll have to take out the bartender if you want to get your hands on it, but once you do, make sure you make those two rounds count as those are the only shells the bartender had on hand.
  • Hitman (2016): The Escalation with "shotgun bartenders" is a lampshade.
• Tuxedo and Martini:
  • The German Embassy ("Invitation to a Party") and the Cruise Ship ("Death on the Mississippi").
  • A tuxedo is an available outfit in most games, sometimes as an unlockable.

U

• Undressing the Unconscious: A staple of the franchise, Agent 47 can undress people while they're unconscious (or dead) to use their clothes as his disguise, leaving them in their underwear. If the NPC is found by another, it will usually trigger an alert and make 47's disguise not work anymore. Depending on game, the stripped NPC will hurry to the nearest closet to get dressed.
• Unreliable Narrator:
  • Mr. Cayne in Hitman: Blood Money. Turns out he's the Final Boss.
  • And 47 himself in Contracts: all of the missions are really him remembering past missions, but his memory is clearly colored by his present state (i.e.: ambushed, shot and dying alone in a shitty hotel room).
• The Unseen:
  • Diana. Well, until Absolution, at least.
  • President Tom Stewart. Although crucial to the plot, the POTUS never actually makes an appearance in either a newspaper or the game itself.
• Upgrade vs. Prototype Fight: Twice
  • The first happens in Codename 47, with Agent 47 (prototype) battling the No. 48s (upgrade).
  • The roles are flipped in Silent Assassin, with Agent 47 (upgrade) facing off against Agent 17 (prototype).
• Use Your Head:
  • As of Blood Money, 47 can dizzy his foes with a nice headbutt.
  • In "Traditions of the Trade", if you attempt to strangle Fritz in the Hotel Galar, 47 will headbutt him and then force his head underwater, killing him in seconds.
• Useless Security Camera: Averted in Blood Money, where being spotted by a camera (even after you've removed the tape from the VCR) will send any and all guards from the security booth to your location.

V

• Van in Black:
  • In Punjab ("Temple City Ambush"), your main goal is to gain access to the doomsday cult "Gurdwara" through a secret passage in one of the shops in the city marked "Carpets International." (A pun on the ICA.) You will find another ICA contact (Agent Smith again) inside the International Parcel Service shop who will provide more info.
  • In "A New Life", the florist van is an FBI outpost. It can be used, ironically enough, to lure Vinnie to his doom: if you brought a sniper rifle you can use the phone in the FBI van to bring him to the window, then shoot him from the garage of the house opposite his.
• Vertical Kidnapping: You can do this via hiding at the top of an elevator and scooping up unlucky victims with your fiber wire, though the whole "kidnapping" part might be averted in the fact that the victim is dead...
• Victoria's Secret Compartment:
  • "The Jacuzzi Job". So where, exactly, do they keep the revolvers?
  • In "A New Life", Vinnie's ex-cohort in Cuba wants you to retrieve some evidence. Why MRS. SINISTRA has it around her neck, no one is sure. Shouldn't it be in some police station's evidence locker?
  • 47 always pulls his weapons out of his jacket collar... even when he's only wearing a tank top.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Silent Assassin, Blood Money, and Absolution feature a few challenges or optional methods to save innocent bystanders from being killed by the antagonists.
  • Granted, Absolution will give you a penalty if you are spotted by the people you are rescuing. They do thank you afterwards and promise not to tell a soul, but hey - a witness is a witness.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • Some players see how many people they can murder with a hammer without being discovered in Blood Money. Harder than it sounds, as even with a proper disguise, hammers look pretty suspicious when covered in blood.
  • It's possible to complete nearly every mission in the second game with the golf club alone, with a Silent Assassin rating.
  • Most of the settings take this up to eleven— nothing says heroism like slaughtering the entire population of a quiet suburb or massacring all the patients and staff of a rehab clinic. It's entirely possible to kill everyone on most levels; sometimes, you can even do so stealthily, though obviously that requires a bit of patience.
    • In the opening mission of Absolution, a guard is getting news that he doesn't have cancer and says "Nothing can ruin this day!" You choose to throw him out the window... that's cold, bro. (He just came down with a chronic case of dropsy.)
    • The "End of the Road" mission in Absolution is all about letting you get creative with how you dispatch a certain target... or driving away, leaving him exposed to the elements in the middle of a desert.
  • Large number of possible ratings (Terrorist, Mass Murderer, Sociopath, Deranged Slayer etc.) motivates one to experiment.
  • Here's a fun trick in Blood Money: in one mission, a woman will invite you to a private room, only to reveal herself to be another assassin. After you kill her, a guard passes by outside. Sedate him, take his clothes, and hide the body in the other room...by dragging him on top of the assassin's body. What's he going to think when he wakes up?
  • One of the achievements in Blood Money is to get exactly 47 kills. This game encourages reckless abandon and merciless slaughter. Especially made fun on the "A New Life" if you set up a sniping spot and gun down each and every FBI agent and neighbor they can manage.
  • Contracts Mode. This feature is simple, but genuinely unique. Pick a map and a target, and prerequisites for taking them out. Most of the user-created maps are mediocre, but every once in a while you'll get one that's like "kill the homeless man" wearing Agent 47's suit, with a shotgun, and then hide the body. Rake in 470,000 points.
  • In Hitman: Contracts, one mission requires you to save an abductee from a horse stable. The horses will whinny if you come too close, alerting their caretaker. You can just knock him out... or you can poison the horses' water supply with weed killer, causing them all to drop dead at once. When the caretaker sees this he runs to his room and rocks back and forth in the corner in the fetal position.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • At the end of each mission you receive data on how well you did. Your score and/or payment will be dished out on the basis of stealth and aggressiveness. A perfect score nets you a "Silent Assassin" rating. Typically, this requires you to kill ONLY the target, fire only 1 bullet per level, and never get caught.
  • In Blood Money, the music gets a lot more foreboding if you do something violent and terrible.
  • The dogs in Blood Money don't attack, unlike the dogs in the first game, but they do bark a lot and summon guards, which is bad. If you shoot one dead, its body cannot be moved.
• Villain in a White Suit: Plenty of times throughout the series:
  • C47: Pablo Ochoa. His counterpart in Blood Money, Don Delgado, wears the same attire: a white suit and pink shirt.
  • Silent Assassin: Hayomoto Junior has platinum hair and an all-white suit. Although, if you play your cards right you won't ever cross paths with him.
  • Blood Money: The Albinos dress and equip themselves in a direct parody of Mr. 47.
  • "A Dance with the Devil". The "angel" outfit in the Shark Club consists of a white mask and tuxedo.
  • "Requiem". This is the only mission in which 47 does not don his usual Suit, instead wearing white for his cremation.
  • The "King of Chinatown" will meet with "Snow", a douchey guy in a white running jacket (with popped collar, of course), and follow him into a nearby building to sample the merchandise.
  • Hitman 2016:
    • Viktor Novikov in "The Showstopper", although only wearing a while blazer, instead of the full while suit ensemble. He's part head of IAGO, a global spy ring for the wealthy elite that sends spies off to missions to gather information, then auctions off those secrets to the highest bidder.
    • 47 himself with the "Requiem" suit, which is a white suit and striped red tie.
• Villain of Another Story: Most of 47's targets have nothing to do with the plot of each game and their crimes are only touched upon lightly to explain who they are and why 47 has been hired to kill them. This is especially notable in certain missions where secondary characters are also criminals but 47 has no reason to kill them.

W

• Where It All Began:
  • "Meet Your Brother" drops 47 off right where the H:C47 tutorial ended; all you have to do is work backwards. The orderly at the desk will draw a gun on you this time.
  • Likewise, the Gontranno Sanctuary becomes a Russian stronghold after you fly back from killing Mr. 17.
• White Void Room:
  • C47 and SA used this for 47's death poses.
  • It is also used in boss encounters: Ort-Meyer, 17, and Sergei each appear in a white room when they die. The loose remake, Contracts, begins in that same white room◊ as Ort-Meyer's body, right down to the pool of blood forming a "Hitman" symbol, which is pretty surreal. The game returns to normal when you exit through a door into the lab, and you can't reenter the white room.
  • One cutscene in the second game will use this effect regardless of where 47 actually is, as if to convey that nothing else matters at the moment. The entire background will disappear until the cutscene is over.
  • Should 47 be caught by the female counter-assassin in Blood Money, the above effect will occur.
• World of Weirdness:
  • Anyone who's played the previous games knows that the AI is a challenge (and not in a good way) and the story has always been a bit "off "and oddball, full of over-the-top gangsters and bimbos. Let's face it, in BM you had to kill three hitmen dressed as birds, and in Contracts you had to kill a guy in an S&M party in a slaughterhouse (with hanging animal carcasses on the walls no less). Any fan of the series will admit the odd, quirky, and distasteful situations are part of the game's charm.
• Wolfpack Boss: No surprise here; 'boss' characters are even more well-armed and well-protected than a normal Target.
  1. Ort-Meyer himself is armed only with a puny stun-gun, which will still InstaKill you if he somehow managed to hobble over to 47 and land a hit. He is protected by the Mr. 48 brigade.
  2. Sergei's no slouch. If you trip up and alert his henchmen, chances are you will be instantly killed in a crossfire of sniper bullets. He only comes out if the goons are all dead (barring a wall cheat which suddenly & embarrassingly kills him), and when he does, he's brandishing a big ole' SPAS-12 shotgun. He can take a serious beating before dying, too, so taking him-head-on is a bad idea.
  3. "Requiem": If you act quickly to revive 47, you can shoot Cayne in the head before he is wheeled out. He travels with an escort, too, so he won't be as easy to grab when he's on the move. Cayne also packs a powerful sidearm, if it comes to that.
  4. In the showdown with Blake Dexter, he wields a devastating machine gun and is protected by mines, guards in riot gear, and a whole bunch of other shit.
  5. Absolution's Travis is an immobile enemy, but he's flanked by the Praetorian Guardsmen.

Y

• You ALL Look Familiar:
  • Palette Swaps will show up on occasion, the tour group in "Amendment XXV" being one of the biggest examples.
  • The most glaring one is Paris. There are only two civilian models, the druggie and his pink-haired girlfriend from the hotel Mr. 47 is staying at. So if you stroll past the police cars, you'll see an army of scene kids all rubbernecking at the barricade. It's ridiculous.
  • Most notably the crowd in New Orleans in Blood Money, which consists of no more than a dozen individual character templates, cloned across hundreds, if not thousands of people. Needless to say, it's quite noticeable. Having said that, Blood Money was one of the very first games to have such a huge crowd of completely autonomous polygonal characters, so they probably had to make compromises somewhere.
• You Just Told Me:
  • In Contacts, heading to the Wang Fou bar initiates a funny conversation where 47 extracts the truth from a bartender by giving him nervous bowel syndrome.
  • In Absolution, the prologue shows 47 driving up to Diana's gate in an ice cream van, pretending to be lost. The guard approaches an unseen 47 in the window and tells him they don't want any Fudgsicles today. "What about your partner?", 47 murmurs. "What partner?" the guard sneers, right before getting wired and dragged into the van.

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