During the tutorial you overhear a conversation between a goon and a receptionist, and the obsession with sex and other such baser indulgencies is enough to make you feel like you might well be doing humanity a favour when you eventually push the goon over a railing to his death. Even more than this, the conversations are, at best, vapid. The women are hyper-sexualised, with tiny little waists and swollen chests, just as the men are riddled with bulging muscles and even more repulsive veins wrapping around their arms and necks like vines. Blood Money was the game that made you actively want to end the lives of almost everyone you come across. It takes away a good deal of empathy when you can't understand what someone is saying, but it's never going to make you dislike someone. The first two Hitman games alienated you with language, placing you in locales that took English away from you and left the majority of the NPCs as foreign nationals.
But Hitman's world is not ours, and that's IO's smartest move. Without Mardi Gras, with its giant colourful crow outfits, or the Heaven and Hell club, where everyone wears horrifically over-styled angel and demon masks, it might cut a little too close to the bone. But it's also absurd, and that takes the edge off. Disguising, strangling, sneaking and blasting our way through mostly civilian locations to kill whoever has the bounty on their head, along with a sizable handful of their personal entourage. There are no redeeming features to the bald, bar-coded clone, and yet we still thrill to be placed a few feet behind his head. But Agent 47 isn't some kind-faced Jean Reno with a plucky Natalie Portman by his side. It's a murder simulator, right? IO is, quite literally, simulating murder, albeit of the professional variety.
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