As much as I’ve come to like the Hitman games, my journey didn’t start with any of the more celebrated entries like Silent Assassin, Blood Money or Hitman (2016), but rather the black sheep of the franchise, Hitman: Absolution. Not only was this the first Hitman game I played, it also has the honor as the series’ first installment released exclusively for seventh-gen consoles and the first entry published by Square Enix after they acquired Eidos Interactive. Making my way through the older Hitman titles naturally brought me back to where I had started, which evoked a sense of nostalgia during my most recent playthrough, which, through total happenstance, occurred exactly five years to the day from my first playthrough. That said, revisiting it in the context of everything else got me to reevaluate my opinion and how it stands as a game in a vacuum versus how it stands as a Hitman game.
