Hitman: Absolution (Gameplay #3) - Long Gone Before Daylight [Purist Difficulty]
2Notoriously unforgiving games like Super Meat Boy, Hotline Miami and Trials Evolution (and to some extent also Dark Souls) all demand the player to painstakingly take in and process a lot of information about every level in order to be successful - and a truly stealth-oriented approach to Hitman: Absolution works in a similar way. This is also very different from what's offered in more traditional stealth games on the PC such as Thief or Dishonored, which are more about exploration and simply taking things very slowly. In Absolution there are of course many ways to tackle each individual challenge, but as soon as you start figuring out a really efficient approch to a particular area it immediately becomes clear that the developers spent an enormous amount of effort in order to ensure that a clean getaway would require both intimate knowledge of the level and very precise timing. Reviewers often complained about the small size of the environments, but at least as far as Purist players are concerned the levels would have been absolutely overwhelming had they been any bigger than they are. There is just so much going on at any given moment in terms of enemy patrol routes and complex scripted events (much of which will of course have to be memorized by the player) that any increase in the number of variables involved would probably have resulted in information overload.
Apart from the fascinating but undeniably problematic gameplay of Hitman: Absolution, I just can't get over how good the game actually looks. There were plenty of impressive graphical experiences in 2012 - such as the hardware-defying Halo 4 or the lavish open world richness of Far Cry 3 - but nothing else screams "next-gen" as loudly as IO Interactive's uncannily realistic environments and intricate layers of post-processing effects. The game offers both the quiet immersion of a rundown building littered with objects which tell a believable story about that very particular place and the jaw-dropping wow factor of a crowd full of people who look, behave and react more realistically than generic and quasi-randomly generated bystanders have any right to do in a video game (especially not a multi-platform title). In terms of taking the player on a journey to another world, I believe that no game since Skyrim has done a better job than Hitman: Absolution.