Video Game / Hitman 3

Death Awaits

Hitman 3 (stylized as HITMAN III) is the eighth game of the Hitman series by IO Interactive. The final installment in the World of Assassination Trilogy preceded by Hitman (2016) and Hitman 2, it is also the first game of the franchise to be self-published by IO Interactive. It was released on January 20th, 2021 for the Playstation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows as a timed exclusive for the Epic Games Store, as well as releasing on the Microsoft Store. A year later it was released onto Steam, as well being available to play on Xbox Game Pass. It also had a Google Stadia port, which came with some exclusive content and Save State sharing among other Stadia friends. The PS4 and PC ports can also utilise PSVR and PC Virtual Reality to serve as a first-person mode. It was also one of the first released Cloud Gaming titles for the Switch.

Set almost immediately after the events of its predecessor, Hitman 3 continues the story of Agent 47 and Lucas Grey as they hunt down the Partners, the elusive leaders of Providence.

Hitman 3 offers seven locations; among them is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, an old manor in Dartmoor, England, a nightclub in Berlin, Germany, a visit to the city of Chongqing, China, a walkabout in a vineyard in Mendoza, Argentina, a moving train in the Carpathian Mountains, and Ambrose Island, a post-launch location released for free set between the events of "Another Life" and "The Ark Society" from Hitman 2. In addition, following in the footsteps of 2, both that game and 2016 are included as "Access Passes" for 3, and unlike 2's implementation of its Embedded Precursor, progress does transfer over to this game, later made available for free within this game.

Mechanically, Hitman 3 plays pretty much identically to its predecessors, though it does have a few notable changes. The enemy A.I. has been made smarter, the gameplay is more experimental (almost none of the levels follow the same format from one another), the addition of a camera to hack door locks (and act as a Photo Mode), some doors now have keypads which requires memorising combinations, and unlockable persistent shortcuts have been added to reward exploration, giving the player a quicker means to get to a specific part of a level on their next run.

On October 4th, 2022, IO Interactive announced that the much-awaited "Freelancer" mode would arrive at the end of Year 2 on January 26th, 2023. Set after the events of the main game, the mode is a Roguelike campaign, with 47 earning "Merces" by completing a track of contracts with complications attached, opening safes, pacifying couriers, and buying items from merchants to use in a run and bring back to your own customisable safehouse. It also features vastly different rulesets to the main game. A Closed Beta technical stress-test ran via Steam from November 3rd - 7th, 2022, while ten minutes of gameplay footage of the mode was also released to explain the mechanics.

As such, due to the sheer amount of changes and unique tropes for it, Freelancer Mode has its own subpage:

• Hitman 3 Freelancer

---

On January 3rd, 2023, IO Interactive announced that the game would be retitled HITMAN - World of Assassination, and the purchasing experience would be "drastically simplified" to two options instead of the confusing DLC system players had to endure; HITMAN – World of Assassination (all three games, 2016's GOTY DLC, and the standard access pass from the second game) and HITMAN – World of Assassination Deluxe Edition (Hitman 2's expansion access pass, and this games' 7 Deadly Sins DLC and Deluxe Pack DLC), which would take effect on January 26th, 2023. Hitman (2016) and Hitman 2 were de-listed on all storefronts for much the same reasons as above. No word on those games' servers being shut down, however.

Not to be confused with Hitman: Contracts, the actual third entry into the franchise.

Spoilers for the Previous Games in the trilogy, as well as for Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman will be unmarked here. You have been warned! Spoilers from this game are marked as such.

---

All your hard work, all your tropes, only sped up the process.

---

A - K

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • While the AI is quite smart, much like the other two games in the trilogy, it is still able to be manipulated into doing certain actions, such as luring a guard away from the area with a dropped weapon or the briefcase.
  • Blunt objects only knock the target unconscious. In real life, blunt objects with enough force applied onto them can kill from blunt force trauma (something which Blood Money portrayed accurately). Of course, if there were no objects that knocked people out, the game wouldn't be balanced, and collateral damage would be much more frequent among players, so this is a nice middle-ground to give players some more options to get rid of pesky guards.
  • Like with Hitman 2, 2016, Absolution, and Blood Money, closets and bins are never checked for bodies, so you'll always have the opportunity to take care of at least a few pesky NPCs.
  • No one makes a note of any disguises lying on the ground, so you can change to them when you need them.
  • As in 2016 and 2, every disguise, when discarded, is shown as being stored in a plastic bag roughly the size of a small backpack. This is believable when said disguise is, say, a t-shirt and shorts, but you can fit a whole set of heavy tactical armor in an identical bag. Additionally, NPCs do not consider random bags of discarded clothing the least bit suspicious, and will completely ignore them no matter where they are.
  • Guards don't get suspicious if they escort you out for trespassing repeatedly. So as long as you're willing to go back to the start of the exit, you can try as many times as you need to sneak through a trespassing zone. Like in 2016 and 2, this does void a Silent Assassin run.
  • You can poison somebody with rat poison, follow them to an isolated area, and then knock them out; they won't die despite the stuff remaining in their bodies, nor can they drown in their own vomit.
  • 47 can poison food or drinks in full view of the public (including the intended target) if 47 is wearing any kind of food service uniform, such as a waiter, a bartender, or a chef.
  • When 47 has to talk to someone while disguised as someone specific, his targets almost never notice that the person's voice has changed, even if they know them personally.
  • Even if one-of-a-kind characters are killed in public, you can still take their clothes and pretend to be them. Not even the guards who bagged the body will question their sudden reappearance.
  • Like in the previous entries, once your target dies, Diana, Grey, Olivia, and 47 will immediately know about it, no matter how impossible (for example, poisoning someone's food and walking to the nearest exit to wait). If 47 had to see his target's body, it would slow the gameplay down considerably.
  • Shoving targets over ledges and poisoning them count as accidents, although they would look like obvious murders in real life.
  • You only have to disable a surveillance system once on a map. It doesn't matter if there are multiple locations with no logical reason for all their systems to be connected; you don't have to worry about the cameras anymore. Likewise, a guard will only investigate if they actually see or hear you sabotaging the security system; they won't wonder why their monitor screens are suddenly blank or what happened to a destroyed camera if they discover it later.
  • People screaming in pain and shouting for help draws little attention (Colorado and Hawke's Bay in the Legacy Packs are the sole exceptions, where a Target Lockdown is triggered).
  • 47 can eliminate targets during phone calls without alerting the other end.
  • In Berlin, Jiao only notices that an agent has been taken out if they are killed, so you are free to knock agents out without them going radio silent or evacuating.
  • Despite there being several areas where photography is forbidden, the player is still able to use 47's camera to do just that. This makes it possible to use the camera's secondary function (it's the closest thing the game has to a photo mode) without bothering the player.
  • 47 is given free rein to poison food and drinks when dressed as a chef, waiter, bartender, or other food service employee. This is the case no matter what specific poison is used, meaning NPC witnesses may be overlooking anything from the relatively innocuous^note like adding an extra ingredient to a mixed drink from a bottle they didn't see the label of to the blatantly criminal.^note like sprinkling rat poison pellets on top of a dish from a container clearly labeled as such.
• Acoustic License: Unless you are really far away from the person in a conversation, their voices become noticeably clearer when really close to them, no matter if they are in a nightclub or near a radio.
• A.K.A.-47: Played Straight. No weapon in-game shares its name with its real-world counterpart. This was either to avoid copyright issues, or to simply put the money that would have been spent on licensing to other uses. The Black Lily, ICA19, Blackballer, Sieger 300, and the Silverballer all avoid this problem, as they're better known by their nicknames at this point.
• Alone with the Psycho: The psycho being you, of course. Like in the previous games, this one also lets you have extended conversations with your target or a notable NPC, so 47 can disguise himself as someone else (such as the target's accomplice, a lawyer, butler, you name it), and lure the unsuspecting target into an isolated room or area for a little chat before killing them. This can even be a Dead Person Impersonation, if 47 killed the real person to get their clothes.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The inventory system from the previous games has been carried over wholesale, which includes the ability to change 47's starting outfit. Having the Hitman 2016 or Hitman 2 Access Passes nets you the suits added in both of those games (see those games for their respective lists). While some costumes are exclusive to their level, getting full mastery in a level unlocks a variation of that level's unique location-specific suit to your starting inventory (except Carpathian Mountains as you cannot bring in a suit), something which previously required Elusive Target completion on a given level in prior entries. The "Deluxe Edition" DLC also includes an outfit designed to fit each level's DLC Escalation. You can then use them in any level you see fit. Some suits can also be gotten through challenges, escalations, or level completion - those tied to specific content will be listed on its folder.
  • Pre-ordering the game came with the "Trinity Pack", which includes three suits; the Premiere White Suit, the Crimson Red Suit, and Ultimate Black Suit, a trio of Palette Swap outfits based on the Color Motif of each game in the trilogy. As of this writing, they are not available for purchase and remain pre-order exclusive.
  • Signing up for an IOI account nets you three suits based on IOI properties; The Freedom Phantom Suit, the Futo suit, and the Lynch suit.
  • Completing "The Final Test" nets you the "Tactical Turtleneck" from the ICA tutorial missions and "Patient Zero" from the titular campaign. It was added to the game as free reward in patch 3.11 (February 2021).
  • The rewards for beating elusive targets - with or without a silent assassin rank - are still the same as in the previous two titles.
  • Owning the Hitman content also gives access to the Requiem suit from that game.
• Anti-Escape Mechanism: Melee weapons act as Homing Boulders, so if a target is fleeing from you, as soon as you get the auto-lock on onto their head with a briefcase or a knife, then it will stop them from running away as soon as said item pacifies/kills them.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game adds keypad locks into the mix with unique codes. The code of each lock always stays the same, allowing players to just memorize/write them down for further runs of the level, one loading screen hint actually points this out.
  • Going into a frisk zone then immediately (as in, less than a second later) exiting will retain silent assassin.
  • Frisking is only done once per disguise on a given entry point, meaning if you're going from one floor to the next and then back again, you don't have to stop to get frisked constantly.
  • The game autosaves regularly, so making a mistake doesn’t force you to replay an entire level. It's disabled on Master difficulty, however.
  • Upon death, NPCs drop their items, while in Blood Money they remained on the body, making them irretrievable in some cases. This way, if you push someone out-of-bounds, their items can still be picked up.
  • As in Hitman 2, if you're carrying something that would raise suspicion if it's found during a frisk, the game won't let you get frisked until you get rid of it.
  • Like in the previous entries, NPCs don't care about doors opening on their own. If they did, then that'd raise suspicion, and frankly would make stealth crawl to a halt.
  • There are a few items only obtainable by beating a certain amount of Featured Challenges. Fortunately, they will be marked as beaten even if you ignore any or all optional objectives, and beating the mission is enough to count. There are a few contracts that have forced objectives and are trickier than usual, but the great majority of them consist mainly of optional objectives.
  • On the Casual and Professional difficulties, completing challenges and acquiring their rewards doesn't actually require you to complete the level. For example, you can complete the wine tour in Mendoza, load a save made before you completed said challenge, and carry on with another challenge like killing Yates with a grape crusher. Master Mode averts this, however, as it expects you to play the level with only one save slot as a fallback.
  • Unlike in Blood Money and older games in the series, running isn't suspicious to NPCs, and it barely makes any additional noise, sparing the player from the need to go through large parts of the game at a glacial pace. Similarly, crouching in plain view of NPCs will attract casual attention and comments, but won't raise suspicion or out you on its own.
  • If the player walks into an NPC for long enough, 47 will pass straight through them, to prevent NPCs from blocking mission-critical passageways.
  • A detonator's wireless relay, the ones accompanying every remote device (like the explosives and the electrocution items) have infinite range on a level. You can be on the other side of the Mendoza vineyard, and as soon as you press the trigger, your target will be killed/pacified/electrocuted. The sole exception is in Hokkaido available via the Legacy Pack, in which the Curator has his own remote to control his neurochip that can only be activated when within immediate range of him (as it's for his own personal use).
  • Unlike in 2016 or 2, the game no longer requires players to do the "Silent Assassin" or "Sniper Assassin" challenges once per difficulty; doing a Silent Assassin run any difficulty will net the achievement and challenge for that level.
  • Normally, once you begin completing objectives during Elusive Target contracts, you can't restart or quit anymore. However, if you're disconnected from the internet, you can restart from the beginning without penalty.
  • Fire Pokers and Lead Pipes are now able to be carried around in any disguise without causing suspicion, whereas the previous two games made them an illegal item without a security disguise.
  • Sniper rifles have been tweaked once more, and can now be openly carried around as long as 47 is wearing a specific disguise, such as the point man in Colorado, a biker in Berlin, or as a mercenary in Mendoza.
  • You can unlock doors with the lockpick/disposable scrambler/keycard if it's in your briefcase, unlike in the past two games that did not allow for this, and forced you to take it out beforehand to open said door. Something to note is that this only works on doors, and not safes, grey cabinets, or other locked items.
  • Mission Stories have a fair amount of flexibility built into them. Required non-unique disguises and items can be obtained from any source on the level, and certain mission stories involving unique non-target NPCs will be counted as complete whether 47 assumes their identity or merely removes whatever obstacle was preventing them from doing their job.^note e.g. One mission story in Dartmoor involves luring the target outside for a family portrait; it can be completed either by dressing up as the photographer or by simply fixing the photographer's flash equipment and allowing him to discover the repair.
• The Artifact:
  • The "White Sunset", "Sunset Rubber Duck", and "Orange Pinstripe Briefcase" items have a color scheme consisting of purple, orange, and white — the same color scheme associated with the Google Stadia branding and advertising. These items were initially exclusive to that platform, but since Stadia went defunct back in January 2023, these colors make no sense now, and new players won't understand the reference. The "Cloud 9" challenge pack (where these items are unlocked from) has a name that does allude to the cloud and IoT, which does somewhat help re-establish the reference in a roundabout way.
  • The "Phantom" suit's name alludes to Ghost Mode, which was available in 2. The mode shut down not long before 3 released, so the original meaning of the name will be lost on any new player. The suit was an unlock for the mode too, but is now an unlock for completing 35 Featured Contracts in 3 unless you did a save transfer.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions: The games' NPCs have realistic conversations, which flesh out the game world, allude to future or past events, or act as intel for the mission. The AI is usually quite smart about how it reacts to you doing weird things, like bumping into them or trying to enter somewhere restricted.
• Artificial Brilliance: As per usual, IOI has improved the notoriously bad AI that plagued the older games:
  • NPCs can see reflections in mirrors, so you have to duck if you want to take out the target washing his hands instead of standing up.
  • If 47 is found trespassing, he will be escorted out, except in certain situations.^note He is visibly armed, is wearing a forbidden disguise, or the area is labeled "Hostile" on the minimap
  • If the detection bar rises to about halfway, when an NPC loses their sight of 47 they will check the immediate area, as they are certain they saw something.
  • If the alarm is triggered, the target(s) will be escorted to safety. If the safe point is compromised, they will be escorted elsewhere.
  • Guards will flank 47 if given the opportunity. Any firefight can end in quick death if there's even one way a guard can get behind 47, as they will use it while others keep 47 occupied.
  • If 47 is taking cover in a different room, the guards might not enter and instead take cover and refuse to leave unless 47 escapes through another route. If 47 pokes his head out of the room, they will open fire.
  • Guards will pick up any firearms they find, and civilians will tell the nearest guard if they find one. They'll also disarm explosives unless they look harmless.
  • Guards can tell which direction a silenced sniper shot was fired from if they see someone getting shot. They will then investigate the origin of the shot.
  • Guards will now use flashbang grenades in combat if you stay in one area for too long or enough guards gather in the area.
  • If you release a winch to drop something or shoot someone but the guards don't witness it, they will still know it was you if you hang around the vicinity.
  • While you can still hide inside closets, chests, etc., guards will now realize that if you entered a room and disappeared without a trace, they'll stay a little longer to try and coax you out of hiding. Naturally, staying put is the better option.
  • If the player drops a gun within the sight of another guard while disguised as one, the guard will initially berate 47 as he should always keep it holstered. Even if 47 disappears from that character's sight, the guard will get suspicious and chase you. However, if you drop a gun when the guard isn't looking, they will later treat it as if it came out of nowhere, wondering where it came from. NPCs who find guns on the floor will report them to a nearby guard, as long as they didn’t see you drop them.
  • Leave a briefcase lying around, and they will be reported to the nearest guard and is taken to a safe location - it could be rigged to explode, after all. Leaving your briefcase behind in the view of a guard is treated as a hostile action by guards for this reason.
• Area of Effect: Grenades work like this, though special mention goes to the Emetic Grenade as its AOE is fairly visible.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Basically any of the SMGs, shotguns, or pistols that aren't silenced. Their only real use in a silent run is to distract guards by triggering a target lockdown, or by using them as a gun lure to get them away from a specific area.
• Badass in a Nice Suit:
  • 47 has many options to choose from when it comes to suit selection; Classic (Suits with a tie, as with the signature suit), Formal (Suits that are for parties, or are otherwise more complex, such as The Cashmerian), Coats (suits with a coat, like the Winter Suit or the Snow Festival suit), Casual (shirts and trousers, or loose fitting suits, such as the Smart Casual suit or the Summer Suave suit), Tactical (suits that aim for more purpose points than style points, such as the Freedom Phantom suit, or the Raven suit), and finally Themed (miscellaneous suits that don't fit into other categories, like the Santa 47 suit, the Lynch suit, or the Arkian Tuxedo).
  • The Suit Only challenges involve completing an entire mission in a suit. There are two variations: Suit Only (complete the mission without changing out of your suit), and Silent Assassin, Suit Only (complete a mission without changing out of your suit, and do not get spotted).
• Bilingual Bonus: Mendoza and Chongqing have NPCs partially speak in their native tongue, as well as English.
• Bland-Name Product: Besides brands made specifically for the game's lore (see below), there's thinly-veiled parodies such as Fountain View in place of Mountain Dew, Dr. Popp in place of Dr. Pepper, Franz ketchup and Hanz Ketchup being stand ins for Heinz.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!:
  • A silver Krugermeier is an unlock, to go with the gold one that can be imported from Hitman 2.
  • The deluxe DLC items include a golden suit (with a devil mask), briefcase, and SMG.
  • The "Seven Deadly Sins" DLC packs usually contain various flashy items - see their folder below for details.
  • Beating the final mission gives you the ICA19 Goldballer, a golden recolor of 47's signature weapon.
• Bookends: The first game of the "World of Assassination" trilogy started with 47's initiation into the ICA, while the Grand Finale third entry focuses on how their long-lived partnership ultimately ends. Even better, Erich Soders's initial dislike towards 47 means that 47's time with them both started and ended on hostile terms.
• Boring Yet Practical: Quite a few:
  • The Screwdriver: One of the most versatile weapons 47 has to play with. It can be used as a distraction tool, a melee attack, or thrown as a weapon, a means to set up environmental traps, and it can be carried openly with any disguise on all difficulties. Most levels have at least one screwdriver somewhere on the map, making it a versatile tool all-round. Completing enough Featured Contracts will unlock a screwdriver permanently in your inventory, allowing you to use one without even having to collect it in the map first.
  • The Hobby Wrench: Completing 20 Featured Contracts unlocks this item to your inventory, and, much like the screwdriver, it can be used as a distraction tool, a pacification tool via melee or throwing, can be a means to set up various environmental traps, and it's able to be carried openly with any disguise regardless of difficulty. What makes it more useful than the screwdriver, however, is the fact that it can be used to take out non-targets without killing them, making it a great item for Silent Assassin attempts. It can also be unlocked far earlier than the screwdriver, which requires you to complete 70 featured contracts.
  • The Briefcase: You have a throwable distraction, and it can be used to knock people out. Oh, and you can stuff a sniper rifle in it to transport it to a more ideal location. Plus, if you bring one into the level with you, you essentially get it for "free", since you can bring another object, one that's more lethal, inside of it.
  • Coins: They can not only be thrown, they can be placed. If anyone spots a coin you've interacted with, they'll go and pick it up. Place one on a puddle or a cliff, and you've just set up a potential accident. All levels have them, so they're a reliable option to distract people. Same goes for gold bars.
  • Completing 25 featured contracts gives the player a hobby knife. While it functions like any other knife, it can be openly carried in any disguise on any difficulty. Some levels like Berlin and Mendoza also have them within the level too.
  • Any silenced pistol (heck, most silenced weapons), which carries on the franchise's tradition of it being the most useful firearm in the game. The basic ICA19 is available from the beginning, combining quiet shooting with decent stopping power.
  • The ICA Flash Phone, as well as other flash devices, are useful for getting past guards in Silent Assassin runs by blinding them for a few seconds, especially if there's no easy way around them.
  • The Camera. What seems just like an in-universe tool to gather intel, hack locks, and take pretty pictures as this game's version of a photo mode, it also essentially acts like a sniper rifle lens; zoom and all, meaning providing there's some distance between you and the subject, you can stalk them to work out their patterns and routines...and take pictures of them if need be (which also stops the in-game time, so you can analyse what they're doing). It's surprisingly useful for such a mundane item.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Getting full mastery in a level unlocks a unique item for that level, as well as that level's suit with gloves (except for the Carpathian Mountains, which has no suit). These items tend to be Joke Items which definitely still have utility in the game, but aren't really all that useful to anyone skilled enough to unlock them to begin with:
  • For Dubai, you get an ICA Proximity Explosive MK III and the Ashen Suit with Gloves.
  • For Dartmoor, you get the Bartoli Woodsman Hunting Rifle and the Classic Cut Long Coat Suit with Gloves.
  • For Berlin, you get the Remote Explosive Devil Rubber Duck, as well as the Number 6 with Gloves; the suit worn by Lucas Grey in the Hitman (2016) cinematics.
  • For Chonqqing, you get the Neon City Suit with Gloves, as well as the Hackl Leviathan Sniper Rifle Covert.
  • For Mendoza, you get the Black and White Tuxedo Set (with Gloves), and the Sieger 300 Viper.
  • For Carpathian Mountains, you get the ICA Tactical Shotgun Covert.
  • For Ambrose Island, you get the Guerilla Wetsuit, and the Molotov Cocktail.
• Brand X: Rampart beer, Damberg ketchup, Crunchies chips, Full Metal Orange soda, Harpy beer, Thwack soda, and many others we could list were made for the game.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Completing certain challenges can lead to this happening:
  "Silent Assassin", "Suit Only", "Silent Assassin, Suit Only"
• Briefcase Blaster: Briefcases can be used to conceal sniper rifles or other large firearms. Taking sniper rifles out from the briefcase no longer takes upwards of ten seconds either, as it did with most rifles in Blood Money (the W2000 is the exception as it was practically instant). Instead, most rifles take a more reasonable five seconds to unpack, again with the exception of the Sieger 300 series (the w2000's), which are near instantly unpacked from the briefcase.
• Camping a Crapper: You can drown people in toilets by first making them sick. Or by sneaking behind them, choking them, and then snapping their neck. Or shooting them in the head.
• Choke Holds: As usual, present and accounted for. This is the main way of pacifying NPCs so you can use their clothes as a disguise. Related is the Fiber Wire, which is the default equipped item for your "tools" slot in your loadout.
• Cold Sniper: 47 is very distanced from human emotions. He is also very skilled with a sniper rifle.
• Complexity Addiction: It's possible to invoke this, and many player-made contracts rely on it.
• Compilation Re-release: Unlike Hitman 2's Legacy Pack system which has to be downloaded separately, all but two locations from the previous games in the Trilogy are included in this game. Only New York and Haven Island require a DLC purchase but those were non-base game locations for 2.
• Conspicuously Selective Perception:
  • 47 reaps both the rewards and the pitfalls of this trope. On the one hand, guards and witnesses take no note of the six-foot-tall bald guy with a bar code tattoo on his head stomping around the scene, so long as the player doesn't do anything illegal directly in their line of sight. That said, no disguise is foolproof as most disguises have enforcers, meaning there will always be at least a few people that won't be fooled — especially those wearing the same uniform as 47. The general public, as well as targets, are always taken in by his disguises, no matter how little he resembles the person he's impersonating. On the other hand, security and police pay attention to him and only to him. NPCs can traipse through restricted areas, and mostly pass through security checkpoints without being frisked (Mendoza is the sole exception), something 47 can't do.
• Continuity Nod: Unusually for the games, 47's face makes him look a fair bit younger here, and he bears a striking resemblance to his Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman design, as seen here.◊
• Corrupted Contingency: Targets Carl Ingram and Marcus Stuyvesant who are holed up in a massive skyscraper in Dubai. In the event of a security alert, they are to be evacuated by helicopter; if the helicopter becomes useless due to the pilot being absent, the two men will instead parachute off the building to safety. Should the player decide to make the assassination as subtle and as seemingly accidental as possible, they can sabotage the parachutes well in advance, knock out/kill the pilot, deliberately trigger a security alert, and then sit back and watch as Ingram and Stuyvesant unwittingly fling themselves to their deaths.
• Cosmetic Award: Some of the unlocks are functionally identical to another item, with only cosmetic differences. This is especially apparent with the "MK III" items, and all but one of the "MK II" line of items and weapons, which are almost the same as their standard counterparts, but with a pink "2" decal stuck on the side.
  • The "El Matador" is a prettier looking "The Striker" Hand Cannon reskin from the 2016 access pass that was originally from Hitman (2016). It's also your reward for completing 26 Escalations on the Hitman 2 locations.
• Costumes Change Your Size: By and large averted. The closest you get is a few millimeters, but that's about it. The game's NPCs that you disguise as are mostly the same height as you, or taller. This is necessary so that the clothes can be placed onto 47's model with minimal clipping issues.
• Crowbar Combatant: Many of the levels have crowbars to forcefully open doors with, as well as to to knock someone out in a pinch. You can also unlock one to use in your inventory.
• Cutting the Knot: Any device that can be tampered with by a screwdriver can be shot at with a firearm to provide the same effect. Similarly, firearms of high enough caliber or high rate of fire can open doors (The Striker, Shotguns, El Matador, F/A pistols; basically anything that isn't the Silverballer really).
• Darker and Edgier: Than the rest of the World of Assassination trilogy. The locations are a lot darker, grittier, and more claustrophobic, and the "high society" theme of the previous games is only really touched on in two levels. The plot features much higher stakes (with 47 directly going up against an Ancient Conspiracy), as well as returning to the series questions of who 47 is as a person that Silent Assassin and Contracts discussed.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of The Stoic archetype. In prior games, 47 is treated as this trope, as when it came to his emotions, he was shown mimicking them in-game to get where he wants, but he couldn't actually express them properly, due to Ort-Meyer stunting his brains' emotional center. Since Hitman 2 however, the antidote to 47's conditioning has now taken full effect, opening those emotions back up, and as a result, he acts rather differently here. Notably, his voice in this game has more emotional weight behind it compared to past games, and 47's dialog isn't just dry snarking at people, actually showing both determination at killing the Partners in Dubai, reacts with surprise and scowls at the ICA Agents sent to kill him in Berlin, and in Chongqing, he gives some advice to a passer-by on the topic of friends and relationships, despite this having no benefit to him or the mission, solely to keep the two together. It's also exploited by Diana, as she lures him to Mendoza, using their long-time partnership to capture him, fully taking advantage of this, knowing that 47 will always follow her, no matter what.
• Dead Man's Chest: You can hide bodies (pacified or dead) in large containers, such as wardrobes, garbage bins, closets, crates, really anything box-shaped, and there's a good chance you can store a body in it. On a related note, you can use water to hide dead bodies too, like the river in Dartmoor, or throw them off The Sceptre in Dubai, which'll "hide" the body.
• Depth of Field: There's a camera item that serves as the games' Photo Mode. It includes a depth-of-field filter to blur the background that can get as shallow as a 4x zoom.
• Destruction Equals Off-Switch: Shooting the security tapes with a gun will kill the cameras in the level, letting you not worry about them spotting you as you explore. On Professional and Master difficulty, doing this is an incredibly wise idea before you start any meaningful progress within the level.
• Dirty Coward: Surprisingly averted for the most part, as the great majority of the targets are Defiant to the End instead; Ingram just says he'll see Edwards in hell, and even The Constant is a Graceful Loser when you catch up to them.
• Distinction Without a Difference:
  • As with the previous game, "Mission Stories" are the exact same system as "Opportunities" introduced in 2016.
  • The MKIII Items are this out of necessity, so new players are not denied unlocks from DLC or the previous games' legacy packs. Unlike the much ridiculed MKII items of Hitman 2, not all of them are named "MK III" (like Dartmoor's ICA19 Shortballer; a clear MKIII of 47's iconic ICA19 Silverballer from 2016).
• Door to Before: Inverted. Some of the unlockable persistent shortcuts in the game qualify, as they are often placed in the level where having them open would be greatly beneficial to the player from the offset. Of course, the reason is to reward repeated exploration (Dubai has one to the right when you spawn in normally, but requires a long detour to actually open and use).
• Easier Than Easy: The idea behind Casual Mode is to allow players who aren't familiar with Hitman's mechanics to still have a chance at completing the game. Cameras are absent from this mode, there are fewer guards, and firefights are considerably less deadly. Interestingly, you are also able to complete most of the challenges (including the SA/SO ones) on this mode too, so if you have a particularly troubling time with a level, you can lower the difficulty and not get locked out of rewards.
• Easily-Overheard Conversation: A staple of the franchise, and how you’ll get most of the intel on your targets. Crosses into Welcometo Corneria with notable NPCs, such as the staff in Mendoza asking for a torch to light the pit, as well as your targets, who will always spout the same dialogue near you whenever you enter a room.
• Easter Egg: Entering certain numbers into a keypad, then pressing OK will give a response from 47; those being 47 ("Perfect"), 420 ("Good Party?"), 69 ("Ho, ho, ho"), and 666 ("Aye").
• Easy Level Trick: Writing down and/or memorizing the game's keypad lock codes streamlines a lot of the game's longer levels - not to mention the new shortcut system.
• Embedded Precursor: As with the second game in the series, all of the levels from the previous entries were available to download in this game at launch, though, unlike that implementation, progress could be transferred over to this new installment. When Hitman 3 was rebranded to World of Assassination, the content of the previous two games was made available to all players without having to transfer it from the previous installment. Not to mention the unified package takes up less space than half the first two combined.^note We're not kidding; Hitman 2 was 155GB with all the DLC and locations installed, Hitman 3 under the same conditions is 64GB, a reduction of almost 66%!
• Exact Eavesdropping: The game notifies you when a conversation you're overhearing could lead you to an assassination opportunity, or towards another mission objective.
• Exact Words: 47 will sometimes indulge in this if he's in disguise. For example, giving the wine tour in Mendoza will make 47 use the amount of grapes being stored as bodies.
• Extremely Short Timespan: While 2016 and 2 have a break of a few weeks or several months between levels, this game has about two weeks, or oftentimes a few days between levels instead due to the circumstances (Haven Island in 2 to Dubai happened over at least two weeks, Dubai to Dartmoor within a week, Dartmoor to Berlin take place a few days after one another, Berlin to Chongqing happen about a week apart, Mendoza takes place around 3 days after Chongqing, and Carpathian Mountains happens no more than a few days after Mendoza).
• Failsafe Failure: Most elaborate accidents require you to sabotage not one, but two things in order to get them to work. Triggering the emergency evacuation in Dubai makes the targets run for the helicopter, but if you've taken out the pilot, they run back up to their emergency parachutes to jump off the building. Knifing the parachutes in advance causes them to leap off not knowing they're doomed. Other things like overloading dangerous machinery to electrocute targets or disabling safety measures is par for the course for the rest of the game.
• Flavor Text: All the weapons, poisons, and suits have one to describe their effects (if any) on the player/target.
  Coconut: A Coconut.
• Foreshadowing: The cover. Judging by the High Collar of Doom and what can be seen of the texture on the back, 47 is wearing Lucas's jacket. Now why would he be wearing it...?
• Game Mod: While Hitman 2 received a few modding tools at the (almost immediate) end of its lifespan, this game has a full-blown modding community right from the get-go that made a concerted effort to document the Glacier 2 engine and make mods for it. This covers everything from offline improvements like playing offline Elusive Targets, model replacements like playing as Lucas Grey, Diana, or even Mark Faba. IOI's stance on modding, as of June 2020, is that and their only real request is to not Content Leak upcoming content on public channels, so all this means is that mods are here to stay, and IOI are seemingly in cautious approval of the modding scene as they are apparently working on a proper modding policy.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Despite there being several areas that explicitly forbid taking pictures^note The reception desk at Club Hölle outright having obtainable stickers meant to cover the guest's phone cameras, nobody objects to 47 using the camera item to do just that. Given that the camera also doubles as the game's photo mode, this is more or less justified to allow players take screenshots of whatever they please.
• Give Me Your Inventory Item: A lot of Mission Stories have specific NPCs require you to do a Fetch Quest to get an important item, which then you have to give them in order to pass (such as the photo for Ingram in Dubai).
• Goofy Print Underwear: Pops up on occasion when you steal a disguise from guards or NPCs.
• Goggles Do Nothing: The white Shadow suit has a pair of tri-focal lenses that serve no purpose to the player.
• Grand Finale: IOI have stated that this game is the last in the series of the World of Assassination trilogy.
• Hammerspace:
  • This is how the briefcase acts. Unlike in Blood Money, where you could only use it for sniper rifles, here you can fit just about any weapon, melee or tool in the briefcase, be it a sniper rifle, a long-sword, coin, or the lockpick. Can turn into Bag of Holding for certain items, such as the long-sword and the "A New Bat" bat, which are far longer than the briefcase, and yet can still be stashed inside of it.
  • 47 himself can hold three large items (One gun on his back, one item in his right and left hands respectively), but can have an infinite amount of pistols, coins, snooker balls, and various other small items in his suit.
• Handbag of Hurt: The Briefcase can be used in this way, acting as an impromptu melee weapon should you need to. Like other objects, you can also aim it at a persons head, and it'll knock them out.
• Hand Cannon: The "El Matador" is a golden M1911 variant chambered in .357 magnum. It's basically a reskin of "The Striker" from the 2016 Access Pass. It kills in one shot, pierces multiple bodies with one bullet, and is so powerful it will cause enemies to fly through the air and flip end-over-end, likely a reference to the broken physics of the Silverballers in the earlier games. To unlock it, you need to complete 26 Escalations on the Hitman 2 maps.
• Harder Than Hard: Master mode is very tough and will likely require players to retry several times to get the hang of the new rules. Bloody kills and most accidents ruin an NPCs disguise, as well as NPCs being more attentive to gun sounds. In short, IOI looked at possible tactics most players would use for each level, since most routes have at least one new obstacle specifically to make it more impractical to those trying it.
• Hidden in Plain Sight:
  • The "Blend In" mechanic allows 47 to conceal himself by performing a mundane action within the environment as long as he is wearing the appropriate disguise while doing so. For example, washing a bar while disguised as a bartender, mopping the floor while disguised as a janitor, chopping vegetables while disguised as a cook, etc. While this might seem at first redundant, this allows 47 to be overlooked by people who would otherwise see through his disguise, allowing him a safe spot to overhear information or wait to make his move.
  • Blending into both crowds of people and bushes/foliage returns from 2.
• Hidden Weapons: You can hide small items in your suit (coins, pistols, a screwdriver, etc.), though some of the later unlockable weapons, such as the 5mm pistol, the folding knife and the collapsible baton, are deliberately designed to be concealed from guards during a frisk search.
  • You can also hide weapons by putting them in the briefcase, though you can't get frisked when an illegal item is in there.
• Hide Your Children: As per the rest of the series, there are no children in the Sceptre, playing in the streets of Chongqing, or any kids in Mendoza. The sole exception is Child Diana at the start of Carpathian Mountains, as it's 47 re-enacting the moment he killed Diana's parents.
• Homing Boulders: Thrown weapons, melee items, food items, as well as your briefcase, are able to track targets around corners and through walls.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: As with H2, you can play Hitman 3's levels on Casual, Professional, or Master difficulties. Casual mode has very forgiving combat, no security cameras, and Mission Stories are active. Professional mode adds back in the security cameras, as well as the smarter AI, and getting into combat isn't advised, while Master Mode only lets you save once, disables auto-saving, and the AI is smarter still. They will also respond to running (crouch-running is unaffected).
• I Fought the Law and the Law Won: If you go openly loud after a particular messy hit, then the local law enforcement/guards will bring you down rather quickly on anything above Casual Difficulty.
• I Have a Family: Pointing a gun at civilians and making them beg for their lives will often make them say a variation of this, and some of these responses can be legitimately gut-wrenching to hear out loud.
• Immediate Sequel: The game begins, at the latest, two weeks after the events of Hitman 2.
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • The Fiber Wire has this baggage among players. It's still fairly useful, which is why it's your default "tool" in your loadout for when you first start a level. The issue is that most players replace it with a more useful tool, such as a lockpick (which unlocks conventionally locked doors, and most maps have them, so it's a no-brainer to take it), the Disposable Scrambler/Keycard Hacker (which unlocks doors with keycards, with the same reasoning as lockpicks) or sedative/emetic weapons (which are useful for breaking guards away from the target). In contrast, the Fiber Wire simply lets you take down a target silently when they have their back to you, and allows you to drag them out of sight without having to manually press the "drag body" prompt, which is Boring, but Practical when compared to other weapon and tool choices. Its only real use is completing the "Piano Man" challenge on each level, or for speedrunning a level that may require precise timing so people don't see you. Otherwise, pretty much any other tool or small item is more useful to bring along.
  • The various Remote Explosives. While they can be useful for setting up accident kills, they are otherwise "fun" items that don't have much use in a Silent Assassin Run. Using these will give you the "Bomber" rating though.
• Internal Homage: Several levels take visual and thematic influence from the earlier titles:^note Silent Assassin being the notable exception, but it was referenced in (2016)'s Hokkaido level.
  • Codename 47 is homaged with the return to China and Romania, and with the Easter Egg ending.
  • Contracts is homaged by the game's darker themes, a level in a British mansion, the rainy streets of China, and 47's Dream Sequence in Providence's train.
  • Blood Money is homaged through the design of Diana's office and Mendoza, which takes a lot from "A Vintage Year". Then there's Diana's poisonous Trojan Horse Gambit.
  • Absolution is homaged in Berlin with 47 going rogue, with the ICA team being essentially Saints V2, and with 47's voiceovers in Mendoza. Diana and 47 starting anew after ICA's destruction also bears similarities to Diana essentially rebuilding the ICA after the events of Absolution.
• Item-Drop Mechanic: Anyone carrying something will immediately drop it if they are killed, knocked out or sedated. This is to ensure that mission-critical items and otherwise useful items (such as door keys and keycards) don't fall into the abyss in places like the Dubai building.
• It's Probably Nothing: Literally the response of guards when they semi-spot you/inspect an area where they hear a sound, and they quote the trope in response. Normally to their undoing.
• Instant Sedation: Sedative poisons act on a target or NPC almost immediately after they've been consumed, in which they will be put to sleep and, if found, will not count towards the "Body Found" section of the scoring screen. The only exception is if the Target has a Mission Story where drinking poison would be animated (such as Francesca De Santis).
• Janitor Impersonation Infiltration: The Modus Operandi for 47 and his penchant for disguises. Played straight in On Top Of The World, where you can enter as part of the maintenance crew.
• Karmic Death: Most of the targets have at least one:
  • Marcus and Carl being killed by 47 after watching a stream of Grey giving them an anger-fueled rant on simply being used as tools by Providence.
  • You can kill Alexa Carlisle by pushing her off a balcony, the exact same way she killed her own brother years ago. Alternatively, you can arrange for her to be killed by Emma Carlisle, who is her brother's illegimate daughter.
  • Killing Hush by overloading his brain with the same machine he uses to perform inhumane experiments on the homeless.
  • Killing Royce by using her own behavior experiment (which involves firing three employees) to get her burned alive.
  • Killing Don by letting Diana stab him first, and 47 finishing the job, the very people he despises. Alternatively, you can reveal to his wife that he was the one responsible for ruining her career, leading to her killing him in rage.
  • Killing The Constant's memories of Providence by using an improved version of the serum that 47 once took to wipe his memories. While this does not kill him, he's essentially been given a Fate Worse than Death.
• The Key Is Behind the Lock: If there's a locked room in this game, then there's a good chance the key (or keycard) to said locked room is in there too.

L - Z

• Leave No Survivors: Still possible, albeit it takes a lot longer than older games, as there are easily around 800 NPCs in each level. Many consider it a Self-Imposed Challenge. It's actually allowed in Carpathian Mountains as everyone on board is a Providence operative.
• Leitmotif: Snippets of "A World of Assassination" and "Mission Accomplished" are used in various parts of the games' music, notably as part of the track "Purpose" (the music used when 47 enters the Burj al Ghazali for the first time). Berlin features it in a techno remix of it, while "Chongqing Requiem" uses "Mission Accomplished" as a base, but sung really slowly and solemnly. Mendoza only uses it when you exit the level (as in Dubai's case). Dartmoor and Carpathian Mountains eschew this trend, being the first levels in the trilogy to not include any variation of the tune; fully replacing it with "In Constant Motion", which is a corruption of these tracks' leitmotif.
• Lethal Joke Weapon:
  • Muffins, soap, and apples. When thrown, they knock NPCs down, but it does not pacify them. However, sneaking behind an NPC and decking them in the back of the head does pacify them.
  • The rubber duck explosives. On one hand, they attract some attention, NPCs can pick them up by accident, and they cannot be planted on walls or equipment, but they are also surprisingly silent; their noise doesn't carry outside the room you detonate them in, so you can use them for relatively easy unnoticed explosive kills. The concussive variants are arguably even more useful, as you can use one to knock out entire groups of guards without alarming NPCs - although with the threat of one guard seeing another one go down before losing consciousness, ruining a Silent Assassin rating.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • As with 2016 and 2, there's never technically been a game called "Hitman 3" until now - Contracts" has a subtitle (although Contracts'' was already known more by its' subtitle by fans anyway)
  • On the Casual and Professional difficulties, completing challenges and acquiring their rewards doesn't actually require you to complete the level. For example, you can complete the wine tour in Mendoza, load a save made before you completed said challenge, and carry on with another challenge like killing Yates with a grape crusher. Master Mode averts this, however, as it expects you to play the level with one save slot.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Averted. The female NPCs in any given level are treated nearly identically to their male counterparts - they are equally capable of being enforcers for a given disguise/location combo, and can be knocked out or killed with no greater or lesser consequences than a male NPC. The only differences are that 47 cannot take their clothes as a disguise, and female guards are not present (as Word of God admitted that it's a balance measure). The tech crew in Dubai has a notable population of female employees, which may be a response by the developers to this complaint.
• Mad Lib Thriller Title: Escalations are named in this fashion; the titles are usually obscure references, a foreign language pun, or a play on a phrase. There's specific location examples in each folder.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Just like in previous games, this is a viable way of eliminating the target(s). Even if the body is discovered when the target gets killed in an accident or with poison, it doesn't count against the "Bodies Found" section in the post-mission scoring.
• Master of Disguise: Agent 47, natch.
• Mission-Pack Sequel: As with the previous game, you are able to import any locations you own into the newer game, only this time, it's the entirety of Hitman (2016) and Hitman 2! The only condition is that you require an IOI account this time around as a way to transfer save data (and on PC, location data) from the PS4/Xbox One to the PS5 and Xbox Series X if you buy the 9th gen version of the game, as well as from Steam to the Epic Store. While PC players initially required buying discounted Access Passes, fan backlash made IOI release a reworked system for location transfers, which was released on 18th February, 2021 and can be done here. Not only that, but the entire trilogy on is 64GB, shaving almost 100GB off, while also including the third game to boot, which is nothing short of some impressive engineering and compression.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: In keeping with the rest of the "World of Assassination" trilogy, there are no boss fights or tougher-than-normal assassination targets, unlike the earlier games in the series. However, unlike the previous 2 "World of Assassination" games, there are a couple enemy types with unique behaviours or higher stats, namely the ICA Agents in Berlin and the Elite Mooks in the final level.
• Mundane Utility: As with 2016 and 2, in addition to being used as distractions or improvised weapons, certain items can be used for their actual intended purpose - coins can be used as payment, wrenches and screwdrivers can be used to make legitimate repairs, etc.
• Mythology Gag: The names of the challenges for the "Codename 47" challenge pack are named after missions from Codename 47:
  • "The Red Dragon" refers to the triad of the same name, which 47 can kill with a sniper rifle; the challenge asks you to kill any target with a headshot from a sniper rifle.
  • "Traditions of the Trade" is in reference to the mission of the same name. It's likely referencing the canonical kill of Fritz Fuchs from the game (47 drowning him in a swimming pool).
  • "The Setup" refers to 47 being ambushed by Romanian spec ops in the mission of the same name; the challenge here asks you to kill all the guards in Carpathian Mountains.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: As with Hitman 2, this game reuses a lot of game assets from the previous entries, such as the cherub candle statues that appear in Paris also appear in Dartmoor. Weapons, as well as objects you can interact with, such as hammers, knives, cups and glasses are also shared (though this is more to do with player familiarity and game logic). NPC in-game dialog is also shared, but that's downplayed, as the NPCs have different accents for each location, with guards and scared NPCs being when they break from that.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Subverted for most weapons, as shooting where you aim at will kill them, this includes Sniper Rifles, even at long distances. The only weapon to play this straight is the Kalmer 2 tranquilizer dart gun, which has an arc that you need to learn in order to use the weapon effectively.
• No-Sell: Guards or NPCs who have white dots over their heads will get suspicious of you if you enter their line of sight while wearing their disguise, as they know everyone in the level with that particular outfit.
• No-Gear Level: About half the game this time around, at least on the initial playthrough either play this trope straight or downplay it. "On Top Of The World" has 47 parachute in and can only carry in one small item, so no guns. "Apex Predator" has 47 carrying nothing at all, and even if 47 acquires anything by killing Agent Price, he'll be frisked on the way into the club if he manages to get in past the bouncers. "Untouchable" starts with 47 as a Trojan Prisoner and even subsequent playthroughs don't allow 47 to bring anything with him or have any gear stashed anywhere to collect. Except for the latter case, this can be subverted by selecting unlocked alternative infiltration points, allowing to carry in gear as needed.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Averted. Characters and NPCs generally have accents that fit their nationalities rather than just having generic American/British accents. The only exception to this is Berlin.
• Not Completely Useless:
  • Lockpicks. They're not weapons, briefcases, poisons, or bombs of any kind, but are among the most useful things in your arsenal as they unlock conventionally locked doors (and most levels have such locked doors).
  • Breaching charges tend to make way for keycard hackers or the aforementioned lockpick due to their single use, but they are invaluable if you need to make a quick, unnoticed kill across the map or a player-made contract requires an "explosive device" kill without being detected. Just knock the victim out, drag them somewhere quiet, and drop a breaching charge next to them - the thing has a very small lethal radius and is silent to boot.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The first two levels play like fairly standard World of Assassination missions, with 47 infiltrating a place of wealth and taste, guided by Diana as his handler. The final four missions completely flip the script however, depriving 47 of anyone that could help him as his handler in the way Diana does. Berlin sees 47 completely alone, save for a short phonecall to Olivia, and deprived of mission stories, while Chongqing sees Olivia somewhat-effectively stand in for Diana, and Mendoza takes this to its logical conclusion with 47 being his own handler for the most part, complete with him narrating the mission stories. And in the Carpathian Mountains, 47 has no one to back him up.... Not like he needs it.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: The game opens with a disclaimer similar to the ones from the Assassin's Creed series, indicating that the game was made by a multicultural team of various nationalities, religions, genders, and ethnic backgrounds. At no point does the game touch on any sensitive real-life religious, political, or racial controversies, so one does wonder what the purpose of the disclaimer is meant to achieve. It's possibly a response to the internet backlash the previous game Absolution received for including latex-clad dominatrix nun assassins as enemy characters, or the much older controversy from Hitman 2: Silent Assassin where one of the levels (a luxury hospital) was architecturally based on a real-life Sikh holy site.
• Only Six Faces: As with 2016 and 2, this is a Downplayed Trope, as the game has upwards of 350 to 1000 NPCs per level (for context, Marrakesh has around 970 NPCs) so it's not going to take long until reused faces start appearing. However, the pool of face swaps is far larger than the six or eight of older games like Blood Money this trope otherwise covers. Hitman 3 has about 10-20 face models for each gender, ethnicity, race, and varying hair styles and facial hair. It's even less likely for two NPCs to be in the same clothing.
• Old Save Bonus: If you have an IOI account, you can transfer your Hitman 2 progress to the third game, though the save system is not cross-platform (as in PC -> Consoles and vice versa).
• Palette Swap:
  • Some of the suits are identical to one another in all but color, the "Phantom Suit" is just a greyscale-variant of "The Undying Look", while the "Midnight Black" suit is a black version of the Marrakesh suit from the Access Pass.
  • The "Winter Coat" suit gotten from the Hitman Legacy Pack's Old Save Bonus is identical to the one in this game in all but a tiny pin on the breast pocket. Averted with location-specific suits, which have minor model changes (normally gloves) that stop them being direct swaps.
  • The Trinity pack items are reskins of each other in white, red and black, referencing the Color Motif of each game in the trilogy. Their inventory descriptions also provide meta commentary on each game.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: This game actively tries to make special NPCs like Phineas Whitmer and Aron Ford Jr. look like 47 this time around. Seems to be a response to player complaints where characters and targets who explicitly know each other are somehow fooled by 47. This makes it more believable.
• Perfect Poison: There are three poison types in the game that can be used, all of which have pill bottle and syringe variants:
  • Lethal Poison: This kills any one person on the spot.
  • Emetic Poison: This makes the victim throw up, and they will head to the nearest toilet or bin to spew their guts out. The Sieker 1 dart gun can make people throw up from a distance.
  • Sedative Poison: This sedates people on the spot, and will make the victim immediately be put to sleep. They can, however, be woken up again, so use with caution. The Kalmer 2 tranquilizer dart gun can sedate people from a distance.
• Photo Mode: The game has a camera item that only exists to function as a photo mode from 47's first-person view (case in point, the last level strips you of all items except for the camera). It has color filter options, a Depth of Field effect to blur the background, and up to 4x zoom. It can also be used to scope out areas you haven't visited yet, functioning like a sniper scope.
• Police Are Useless: Downplayed, like in the last two games. A group of guards is perfectly capable of taking out 47, but they never call for reinforcements from outside the level. This means that even if you decide to start massacring random people in, say, a public event in Dubai, it's left to the regular security personnel and a group of bodyguards to deal with instead of someone calling a team of specialists to take care of things. Dubai and Dartmoor do justify the lack of reinforcements (the elevators to the top floor are disabled in Dubai, while Grey takes control of the security outlook outside Thornbridge Manor in Dartmoor).
• Punny Name: The poison weapons all have puns associated with their intended effects:
  • The Kalmer 2 (Calmer, as in, to sleep) and Sieker 1 (Sick, as in to throw up).
  • The poison vials all have labels; VomiTOROL (Emetic, a pun on Vomiting), resTYNZINE (Sedative, a pun on resting), and FataLIDOMIDE (Lethal, a pun on Fatal).
• Pragmatic Villainy: Since the ICA is supposed to be a neutral organisation, its agents generally do not take a stance in the morality of their missions or their targets (something which Montgomery in Apex Predator says to an undercover 47). In the end, the ICA is only concerned with completing its contracts, and the fact that most of their targets happen to be very unsavoury characters is just a small bonus.
• Replay Value: The game has a lot of it. Part of the appeal of the series is to do the same level over and over again to find the best routes, fastest completion times, kill your targets in various eccentric ways, or just to listen to the background lore of the crowds and the target.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • There are a lot more overt references to the Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman comic series in this game than that of Hitman 2 (which was a little more vague and non-comic readers got confused by the references), and a great deal more than Hitman (2016) (which in fairness, sets up comic events). Grey repeatedly references parts of the comic to 47 and the audience, and a Mission Story in Mendoza even has 47 give a cliffnotes description of the comic itself.
  • Listening to the background lore of the crowds and the targets nets you with a surprising amount of connections to past missions. Some of the guards in Mendoza were actually hired for protecting Silvio Caruso back in 2016's "World of Tomorrow" mission, while recurring NPCs can be found in various levels, such as Sebastian Sato (from Paris) in Dubai or Florida Man (from Miami) in Berlin.
• Real-Place Background: As per tradition with the series, the levels are designed to represent the culture and architecture the real-life location would inhabit and have. Chonqqing, for example, has appropriate accents for most of its denizens, there are neon signs everywhere, and the buildings are small and cramped together.
• Save-Game Limits: While in combat, the saving system is disabled. Elusive Targets, Elusive Target Arcade, Custom Contracts, and Escalations don't allow saving at all.
• Scenery Porn: As shown here, the lighting has improved across the board in the levels and when light hits the models, the god rays from the suns are improved, mirrors project higher quality images, and Screen Space Reflections have been added to almost every shiny surface imaginable, which reflect a decently accurate image of the surroundings.
• Schmuck Bait: Almost everyone will check out any noises they hear, and pick up any placed coins/weapons 47 has interacted with. You can place a coin on a ledge, throw something to get someone to investigate, and push them off once they notice and try to pick up the coin, for example. They're not idiots though, so trying this while they are watching won't work.
  • Happens as a result of game design in some levels, too. For example, the penultimate level sees 47 start just a few meters away from one of the two assassination targets... who is currently being escorted by a dozen or so armed guards. Attempting to take her out then and there will get 47 riddled with bullets from all angles (and results in a score penalty, since she isn't actually marked as a target yet.)
• Shoot Out the Lock: Continuing from Blood Money, many doors can be shot open with adequate stopping power - as in, almost anything that isn't a pistol (unless they're The Striker or El Matador). Any explosives, from the intentionally destructive bombs to humble fire extinguishers, also work quite well if you're out of options.
• Stopped Numbering Sequels: As with Hitman (2016) and Hitman 2, it's zig-zagged once again. This is a direct sequel to Hitman 2, which itself was actually the seventh entry in the series, but this one is also technically the only game with the exact title of Hitman 3 — the actual third game in the series is the semi-remake that is Hitman: Contracts.
• Suddenly Always Knew That: Mission Stories basically exist as partially to maintain some Rule of Funny, and to show off 47's impressive skillset. In this game, he is able to:
  • Become a private detective, and search for clues as to who murdered someone, although admittedly Diana helped a bit here. ("Death in the Family").
  • Know how to operate a DJ table, and drop a beat at the right time ("Apex Predator").
  • Present a detailed history on an incredibly rare bottle of wine, of which only five bottles remain, and in a similar vein, know what the various types of machinery in the distillery do ("The Farewell").
• Super Drowning Skills:
  • Anyone will die the instant their face makes contact with water, even if it's a tiny puddle. Played with in the case of Vanya Shah, where part of her routine has her wash her face in her own personal water pond, but cannot be exploited with electricity traps. You can, of course, still dunk her head into said pond to eliminate her.
  • None of the NPCs in the game can swim. If you shove them off a ledge into water, even from a small height, they will drown. There is one specific exception: there is a certain body of water Rico Delgado can be thrown into and he'll be shown swimming in... the pond his man-eating hippo lives in.
• Sunglasses at Night: You can invoke this by playing in Berlin and donning any suit with Sunglasses, such as the Summer Suave suit, or the Tropical Suit.
• Tap on the Head: As with the previous game, 47 can bludgeon an NPC with any blunt object (or throw nearly all^* the exceptions generally being potentially squishy food items of said objects at an NPCs head) for an instant knockout - faster than the Choke Hold, but at least marginally louder depending on the exact object used. Unconscious characters will remain so permanently unless awakened by another NPC, but will display no ill effects if revived.
• Technicolor Toxin: Lethal poison is colored red, Emetic Poison is denoted the color green, and Sedative poison is denoted a yellow-orange color (the vials are blue, however).
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: The throwing mechanic is lifted from the previous game wholesale, which itself was reused from Absolution, and it locks onto NPC heads. Lethal items will always kill them, and blunt weapons will always knock them out, walls, stairs and corners be damned.^note  If an NPC goes behind cover/a wall after 47 throws something at them, it will still hit because of the game engine still telling the object to follow the head.
• Title In: When you load any location from the beginning, the game will give you one of these to indicate the mission name, the city, and the country. In the case of the tutorial mission, it changes the city to "ICA Facility" and the country to "Classified".

On Top of the World.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

• Tranquillizer Dart: The Kalmer 2 tranquillizer dart gun. It has two darts and acts like a long-range sedative poison gun.
• Version-Exclusive Content: Every platform has a different unlockable suit variant. The PC version has the "Black Streak" suit, while the Playstation versions have the "Blue Streak" suit, and the Xbox versions have the "Green Streak" suit. The Stadia version had the "White Sunset" suit, but also came with an explosive duck and briefcase in orange, white, and purple colors. When Stadia shut down, the developers noted that all players, regardless of platform, would be getting those items in a later update, which came to pass in Novemeber 9th, 2023, as they can be obtained by doing challenges in the "Cloud 9" pack.
• Violation of Common Sense: Frisking is unchanged between 2 and 3, so you can still get away with having a custom 9MM gun in your briefcase (as the games' frisk system doesn't distinguish between what's on your person and what's in the briefcase), but not a letter opener!

Campaign

Returning levels from Hitman 2016^note ICA Facility, Paris, Sapienza, Marrakesh, Bangkok Colorado and Hokkaido are found here, and returning levels from Hitman 2^note Hawke's Bay, Miami, Santa Fortuna, Mumbai, Whittletown Creek, Isle of Sgàil, New York and Haven Island are found here.

Dubai: "On Top of the World"

47 and Lucas Grey head out to the inauguration of The Sceptre in Dubai, owned by the al-Ghazali family, to eliminate the Partners, now that they've been cornered by Arthur Edwards' backstabbing. Alexa Carisle, however, vacates the premises at the last minute in order to attempt damage control, leaving only her other colleagues: Marcus Stuyvesant, whose family holds major properties and shares in real estate and the entertainment industry, and Carl Ingram, an oil baron and political fix. Grey disables the elevators and leaves 47 to finish what they started.

---

• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • By default, 47 wears the "Ashen Suit", which resembles the "Phantom Suit", only with a different color scheme and a black tie clipped to the shirt, and also no gloves. Getting full mastery does get you a gloved variant; the "Ashen Suit with Gloves".
  • Completing the "Dagger! Dagger!" challenge unlocks the "Trendy Tourist" Suit; the outfit worn by 47 in the briefing for the level while travelling Dubai with Grey.
• Ascended Extra: It's not the same individual, but the al-Ghazali family — first mentioned during the Paris mission in Hitman (2016) — returns as a major figure. Instead of Sheikh Salman al-Ghazali in Paris, we get Omar al-Ghazali, head of the al-Ghazali family and the owner of The Sceptre, who is helping The Partners take back their power.
• Bait-and-Switch: In what seems like an intentional attempt to trick the player, the Black Gold Bar has small, orb-shaped white lights hanging from the ceiling that just happen to look nearly identical to the dots that mark characters as enforcers. Entering from the atrium makes this especially obvious, as the camera angle positions one directly over an NPC looking in your direction.
• Bookends: The first sandbox level in (2016) is Paris, which introduces Sheikh Salman Al-Ghazali. In this level, the first in Hitman 3, you get to meet another person in the Al-Ghazali family; Sheikh Omar Al Ghazali. You can even set up a meeting between Carl Ingram and the Sheikh, very much like how in Paris you could meet with Dalia while disguised as the Sheikh.
• Boléro Effect: This is used for the music in the staff-only areas of the tower. The cello and horns used gradually get louder and more bombastic while performing illegal actions.
• Bringing Back Proof: When disguised as Zana Kazem, taking a picture of Hans Lucht's body is required to complete Ingram's task.
• Chute Sabotage: An option to get rid of both targets: If 47 has a knife, he can slice parachutes that both targets will use. However, it takes a bit of work.^note The evacuation has to be triggered by flipping two swipes with a keycard.
• Continuity Nod:
  • To Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman:
    • Grey narrates over the first half of the briefing, and references how them and 47 were used as tools to do Providence's bidding "at the flick of a pen", which is in reference to their time under Ort-Meyer at "The Institute for Human Betterment"; an outlet for Providence to kill people they wanted dead. He repeats the sentiment proper to Ingram and Stuyvesant if one lets Grey talk to them via the TV as part of the "How the Mighty Fall" Mission Story.
    • Grey mentions in the briefing that it's taken 20 years to get to a stage to bring The Partners down, alluding to when 47 and Grey tried to go after The Partners before in this comic series (and failed as Ort-Meyer outsmarted them).
    • While parachuting down, Grey admits to 47 he did not think this far ahead in his plan to take down Providence, and 47 dryly remarks "You never do", and Grey's only response is a deadpan "Well, looks like someone's got their memory back". This refers back to both Issue 3^note where Grey's plan to take down Providence had him and 47 outgunned by Ort-meyer's troops, blindsiding him, and was forced to feign his death and leave 47 behind, which leads to 47's memories being altered to hate Grey instead of see him as a brother and 47 subsequently getting his memories and feelings back in Hitman 2^note Grey steals the anti-serum to reverse the effects of the Serum 47 was forced to take by Ort-Meyer in the comics, which gives him the memories back needed to find Janus.
  • Sebastian Sato, Sanguine's chief designer from Paris's "The Showstopper" mission, can be found in the tower in a rather orange suit.
  • A pair of guards can be heard discussing the safety protocol that requires two people. One asks what to do if the other needs to use the bathroom.
  • Judging by the windows, Diana is still using the same office as in Blood Money.
  • Carl Ingram can be eliminated with an explosive golf ball, much like how Silvio Caruso could be in "World of Tomorrow."
  • The penthouse chef is having an argument with a guard who comments on his cooking methods, which also happened in the first level of Hitman: Absolution.
  • If you disguise as Zana Kazem, Carl Ingram will mention to you that Crystal Dawn was hired by Providence in the past to do business in Morocco. This is in reference to 2016's "A Gilded Cage", and the military coup that Reza Zaydan (a Providence Operative and the primary target of that level) wanted to enforce, using Crystal Dawns' posters to incite further rioting.
  • Carl's assistant, Miss Cho, has a copy of the Cassandra Snow novel featured in 2016's Patient Zero campaign, written by one of that campaign's targets; Craig Black.
• Continuity Cavalcade: Getting Grey to talk to the Partners has Ingram rattle off a few of the hits in the trilogy:
  • Eugene Cobb (whom Grey murdered before the events of 2016).
  • Viktor Novikov (One of 47's targets in Paris, and the first mission in the trilogy).
  • Silvio Caruso (Primary target in Sapienza's "World of Tomorrow" mission, creator of the ETHER virus Providence wanted to use to make "armchair assassins").
  • The Washington Twins (Zoe and Sophia Washington run The Ark Society, a doomsday cult and Providence think tank asset).
  • Everyone at HAVEN (The HAVEN Trio; Ljudmila Vetrova, Tyson Williams, and Steven Bradley all run a service that changed the identities of the partners).
  • "Our Bank" refers to the Milton Fitzpatrick Bank, which both Grey and 47 had raided on two separate occasions; Grey to get all of Providences' operatives names, and the second to get the partners' new identities in "Golden Handshake".
  • And finally, he mentions Grey outing Providence, referring to the hostage tape video seen and heard in Mumbai.
• Deadly Escape Mechanism: One assassination method involves sabotaging a pair of emergency parachutes in the tower's penthouse, then triggering an evacuation. The targets will don the now faulty parachutes and plummet to their deaths.
• Disney Villain Death: There are opportunities to throw both targets off the side of the world's tallest building. You can also sabotage their parachutes before triggering an evacuation and they jump to their deaths.
• Easy Level Trick: If you begin in the atrium lobby, you immediately have line of sight towards both targets, each standing on different balconies, but exposed enough to snipe them out if you have no regard for stealth. It's completely possible to complete the mission in less than ten seconds (although you do break Silent Assassin).
• Expy: The Burj Al Ghazali is quite obviously modelled on the real-life Burj Khalifa.
• Gimmick Level: For the camera. Ingram requires you to send him a photo of someone he wants dead if you disguise as a hitman he's hired, while the main mission story for getting both Ingram and Stuyvesant in the Guest room requires extensive use of the camera to hack open windows.
• Instant Costume Change: A uniquely scripted (if not quite diegetic) case for the series; in starting through the default method of skydiving, after sneaking around through the maintenance vents and entering into the public atrium, 47 dramatically swooshes through the curtains, instantly changing out from his skydiving equipment to his signature look.
• Joke Character: Once you unlock the ability to start in the building, the wardrobe will have a duffel bag in which you can wear the Skydiving suit 47 and Grey use to enter the building. A challenge even asks you to exit the building after killing the targets by using that suit.
• Mad Lib Thriller Title: The names of the below escalations are named in this fashion:
  • "The Sebastian Principle" is all about killing Sebastian Sato in various accidents, and as the tutorial Escalation is meant to introduce you to the "Principles" of the mission type.
  • "The Sinbad Stringent" is named after the Middle Eastern sailor of the same name, one famed for having fantastical adventures. "Stringent" is referring to the explicit conditions of the escalation (using knives to throw at targets while in a limited loadout).
  • "The Phoenix Ascension" has the Phoenix portion allude to Zana "The Vulture" Kazem.
• Meaningful Name: The name of the level is in reference to where the Partners are situated; quite literally at the inauguration of the tallest building in the world. Not only that but the name is also a biblical reference to the Tower of Babel.
• Noodle Incident: Listening to the briefing in the staff conference room has the manager tell the employees not to taste any of the food, due to an incident that happened before at the opening ceremony of Omar's solar panel plant. Apparently no one wore white for five months after.
• Rejecting the Inheritance: While meeting Cornelia in-person for the last time, Marcus will discreetly offer his role in Providence to her. Cornelia, who already disapproves of her father's criminal activities and is still upset by her father's faked death, passes up the offer.
• Retool: The briefing for the level has Diana explain to 47 and Grey that Edwards escaped their custody, and that he did so by convincing one of the sailors to set him free. While this is very much an in-character method of escape for Edwards (he's been shown to be good at reading people numerous times before), it more serves to act as a Handwave to change Haven Islands' Twist Ending, which tried to imply that Grey and Edwards were in cahoots with each other as he is shown deliberately misreading Olivia's phone message on Edwards escaping and then lies to 47 about everything going to plan, which was seriously out of character for someone who had shown Undying Loyalty to 47 and his own cause up until that point.
• Rule of Symbolism: There's a lot of biblical symbolism at this level. The tree in the Penthouse atrium has two apples underneath it, the heavenly vantage point from atop the tower, while Carl Ingram even compares Edwards to the Eden serpent in one of his recordings. The whole location is also a giant allusion to the Tower of Babel, which was also a product of mortal hubris that offended God. The builders of the Tower of Babel were making it in the hopes of avoiding another flood by the hands of God - itself reminiscent of The Partners running to the top of the world trying to flee from 47 (and Carlisle bailed to be with family).
• Scenery Porn: The game wastes no time in introducing the player to just how high up the level is set in, with the default starting point being a skydive to the outside balconies and facades of the Sceptre. If you decide to look out, the camera will pan far out to give a gorgeous view of the enormous cloudy sky and various superstructures below you.
• Shout-Out:
  • The jumpsuits 47 and Grey wear on their way in bear a suspicious resemblance to the famous Sneaking Suit from Metal Gear Solid, and the insertion method - HALO jumping from a large cargo plane to infiltrate a heavily-guarded area - evokes Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
  • There are a few references to Die Hard on post-it notes seen in this level (notably "Welcome to the party pal!" - a memorable quote by John McClane). This level being set in a skyscraper...
  • The golf course on top of the tower is in reference to the helipad golf course on the Burj Al Arab.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The code to enter the staff areas is 4706, a mashup of the numbers associated with Agent 47 and Subject 6; A.K.A: Lucas Grey. The code to open the top-floor Guest Bedroom is 7465, which contains intel used to explain why Alexa left the Sceptre.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: You can poison Ingram's whiskey. Interestingly enough, he'll only drink it in front of you if you drink the wine he offers. However, if you poison his whiskey, talk to him and leave, he'll drink it later and die, leaving you to only worry about offing Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant himself is a whiskey aficionado and you can poison him just before he meets with his daughter, or if you find a special 60-year-old bottle in one of the pantries.
• The Television Talks Back: Grey wants to confront the Partners directly and let them know why he's destroyed them and their empire. You can set up a fake meeting for the two Partners in the Sheik's panic room; you can then activate the panic room and lock the two of them inside, at which point Grey will appear on the giant television screen in the center of the room and give the Partners a short "The Reason You Suck" Speech before 47 kills them:
  Ingram: "What did we ever do to you anyway?"
  Grey: "You specifically? Nothing. Providence? Everything. Providence made me. And at the flick of a pen, Providence broke me. I'm just...returning the favour. Providence has ruined the lives of countless people, expecting and facing no consequences for its actions. You take for yourselves, and those that support you, and you burn everything else to the ground from the comfort of the shadows. No More!"

Dartmoor: "Death in the Family"

Alexa Carlisle, to the surprise of most of her family, has seemingly returned from the dead. However, she knows this will not be for long, and has quickly started to contain the Constant's efforts to control Providence. In the midst of all of this, however, her brother Zachary has been found dead, seemingly having poisoned himself in his own bed. Alexa is adamant this isn't the case and has hired a London private investigator in order to solve it. 47 and Grey have come to Thornbridge Manor, the birthplace of Providence, as today the Partners will be no more, and they will walk away with information on the Constant. You are required to kill Alexa Carlisle, as well as retrieve a case file on Arthur Edwards.

---

• All for Nothing:
  • Emma's plot to kill Alexa and Zachary is pointless because the Carlisle family is now bankrupt as well as out of Providence. There is literally nothing for her to inherit or pass on to her child.
  • Similarly, Alexa and Zachary's murder of their elder brother Montgomery nearly 50 years prior is revealed to have been pointless; Montgomery planned to willingly hand them control of the family's fortune and business empire, negating their need to remove him from power.
  • The file 47 retrieves on Arthur Edwards ends up being completely useless in the end.
• Ambiguously Gay: Two manservants will fawn over Edward's (admittedly very skillful) piano playing, one even describing that "plays the strings of my heart with my piano".
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: By default 47 wears the "Classic Cut Long Coat", a rather casual outfit that consists of a plaid green long coat, a black shirt, and dark gray pants. Getting full mastery nets you the "Classic Cut Long Coat Suit with Gloves", a gloved variant of the same outfit.
  • "The Percival Passage" DLC escalation gives you the "Formal Hunting Attire".
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Carlisle family. Alexa got her position from murdering her older brother Montgomery (who was already planning to give her control), which mentally damaged her younger brother Zachary. Her eldest son Gregory is unambitious and apathetic, while her youngest son Edward is a clingy Nervous Wreck from her strict parenting. Meanwhile, Gregory's wife Emma is deeply invested in inheriting Thornbridge Manor because she's Montgomery's illegitimate daughter and has devoted her life to enacting revenge for her father's death, while her son Patrick shares his father's lack of ambition. The most normal of the family is Alexa's daughter Rebecca, who already has a successful career and is suspicious of the reasoning behind Alexa's faked death.
• Buried Alive: Averted. 47 can knock out Alexa and drag her to the grave that has been opened for her fake funeral, but dumping her into the grave is a kill in itself, perhaps because of the water in it, and covering her with dirt just adds flair.
• The Butler Did It: The butler is a suspect in the murder. He didn't do this specific murder, but gathering enough evidence regarding one he was complicit in can convince Alexa that he did. And she's not horribly upset if you do that.
• Book Ends: In the end cutscene for this mission Grey is outgunned and tries to fight back against the elite Providence soldiers, and kills himself to protect 47's cover. This mirrors events from the Birth of the Hitman comic, where 47 and Grey are outgunned by elite Providence soldiers, and Grey feigns his death to let 47 live.
• Call-Back:
  • One possible exit for 47 is a hearse parked outside the mansion. 47 used a hearse to escape Hope in Hitman: Absolution. The design of the hearse is the exact same as Absolution, minus the hood ornament.
  • The events of the past two games are repeatedly mentioned and discussed as the "1% killings". Sure, even if 47 makes a lot of the deaths look like accidents or leaves no evidence, the world is going to get suspicious of the sudden and successive deaths of multiple influential members of society, no matter how they died.
• Continuity Nod: If 47 accuses Zachary of committing suicide and then choose to stay in character by asking for the detective's fee rather than the Edwards file, Alexa will lament that she has little money left, a consequence of the Constant's betrayal.
• Double-Meaning Title: The title refers to Alexa faking her death, the death of her brother, and Lucas Grey dying in an ICA ambush.
• Driven to Suicide: Alexa, if you collect enough information to (wrongly) suggest Zachary actually did commit suicide. This involves discovering a long-hidden letter from the murdered oldest brother Montgomery stating he was going to let Alexa run the family business anyway, as he had no talent for business and she did. 47 tells her (again, wrongly) that Zachary killed himself because he couldn't take the guilt anymore. Overcome with guilt herself at realizing she murdered Montgomery for no reason and believing she's also partly responsible for Zachary's death, Alexa walks outside and jumps off the balcony. If you tell her the truth and ask for the Constant's file, she recognizes 47, hands over the file, and tells him to make Edwards hurt before killing herself.
• Dramatic Irony: Emma has been plotting for her entire life to take over the Carlisle family fortune and has married, had a kid, as well as committed murder in order to seize it. However, by the time she does, the family fortune has already been wiped out by the Constant.
• Dungeon Bypass: You can acquire the case file on Arthur Edwards by knocking out Emma Carlisle and Mr. Fernsby the butler and collecting their "Milton-Fitzpatrick bank tokens" that allegedly provide access to a safe-deposit box, no questions asked. This is especially helpful when trying for a Suit Only run, as it prevents you from needing to sneak up to the third floor and unlock the safe, bypassing numerous guards on the way.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Aron Ford Jr. is present here, and shows up in Mendoza later in the game. Here, he's doing research as to what Arthur Edwards stole from Alexa, and will periodically check up on Alexa.
• Easily Forgiven: Alexa, if falsely told that her butler killed her brother, says that he did it to protect the family and declares that there won't be any more consequences other than his guilt.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • Sure, you could engage in the elaborate "whodunnit", solving the murder yourself and getting the file on Arthur Edwards directly from Alexa herself, or you could knock her out and break her neck as soon as you are in the same room as her while she explains the case to you, and then spend a few minutes (less if you know it beforehand) in her office and unlocking the safe with the file within, before leaving undetected.
  • While getting to the case file stealthily is still difficult, fixing the garden's chemistry set and then adding the missing fuse cell to trigger the photo shoot results in Emma poisoning Alexa's drink, saving the need to kill her.
  • The Bulldog walking cane breaks the case wide open, as you can use it to access all of the secret passages in the mansion, including one that nets you an achievement for discovering it, meaning you can conclude the case in less than 5 minutes with nothing more than an initial scan of Zachary's room, and using the walking stick to access the letter hidden in a secret room in the library.
  • Solving the case (rightly or wrongly) will allow you to ask Alexa for the Edwards file which she will happily turn over, eliminating the need to decipher the safe combination or steal the tokens from Rebecca and Mr. Fernsby. Afterwards, she will walk out onto her balcony, alone and unobserved, for an easy accident kill. Should you tell her Zachary committed suicide, she will even jump to her own death.
  • Once the ladder to Zachary's balcony is unlocked, it can easily be exploited for a stealthy "Suit Only" run, traversing ledges and drain pipes to reach Alexa's office, at which point you can either drop a chandelier on her from the 3rd level walkway or climb onto the roof with a sniper rifle to shoot out the ravens' nests and trigger the Undertaker's Mission Story. Stealthily accessing the safe from that point requires the dispatching of a single guard.
• Even the Guys Want Him: A manservant fawns over Edward's piano-playing ("His music makes my heart soar!").
• Fake Difficulty: Much like Hitman 2's Whittleton Creek level, you are forced to do a mandatory objective; in this case find the file on Arthur Edwards. You cannot skip this as it's required to leave the level. However, the file is placed in a safe, of which the code; 1975, never changes, meaning getting to it is not nearly as frustrating as it was traipsing around Whittleton Creek. You can also complete the objective by collecting two halves of a token to access a backup copy of the file. At least two NPC conversations - and a level challenge - reveal the existence and whereabouts of these tokens.
• Family Portrait of Characterization: One of the Mission Stories involves setting a family photo and has many of the characteristics: The family is well dressed (rich and dignified) and has perfect posture, but they don't smile much and there's a fair bit of distance between the family members (as they don't really care for each other). The grandson's clothes are much more informal, and Alexa sits in the center emphasizing her role as head of the family.
• Feedback Rule: After completing both objectives, Diana's microphone is cut off by Grey to warn 47, resulting in this.
• Green Thumb: Zachary, Alexa's brother, was known to have a fondness for plants and grew exotic species in the greenhouse. When Emma finds them, she gets the plan to kill Zachary and Alexa with them, and fixes up chemistry equipment to make it happen.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Lucas shoots himself in the head to prevent 47's cover from being blown.
• Irony:
  • When interrogating Patrick Carlisle while disguised as the PI, he jokes that he's lucky that his father married his mother for her intelligence and not her pedigree, saving him from the inbreeding common of old money families. As it turns out, Emma is actually Gregory's cousin, thus making Patrick inbred.
  • It also turns out the brother Alexa murdered to get control... was going to give her control, voluntarily, because he thought she'd be better.
• It's Personal: Emma wants revenge on Alexa and Zachary. She has taken it on the latter and might be able to take it on the former with help from 47. Because they killed her father, Montgomery Carlisle.
• Kent Brockman News: The radios in this level have a radio talk show host interviewing a celebrity streamer/vlogger named "Price Chamberlin", which is an amalgamation of two of your future targets in Berlin; Agent Price and Agent Chamberlin. They talk about football drama, the Royal Family going on a European tour, and a famous celebrity dressing up in costume at an event in Paris hosted by the Margolis Foundation, a war orphans charity. The latter of which is a reference to Dalia Margolis, a target from 2016.
• Kissing Cousins: Emma, Gregory's wife, is actually the illegitimate daughter of Alexa's oldest brother Montgomery and a local woman, which makes her Gregory's cousin. She married into the family as part of an elaborate revenge plan to avenge the death of her father, whom Alexa and Zachary killed, by murdering the two of them so Gregory would inherit the family fortune and she'd become the new head of the Carlisle family.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: When you solve the mystery (rightly or wrongly) for Alexa, you can either ask her for money or the Arthur Edwards file. If you ask for the file, she immediately deduces that you're Agent 47. However, instead of panicking or alerting the guards, she compliments you on the subterfuge and peacefully hands it over.
• Locked Room Mystery: The crux of Zachary's death. The man was found dead in his room with the door locked, signs of poisoning, and a suicide note. The killer, Emma, got into the room by activating a secret passage outside of it involving a cane and a hidden switch in the floor, murdered Zachary, and then left through the passageway again.
• Mad Lib Thriller Title: The names of the below escalations are named in this fashion:
  • "The Baskerville Barney" is referring to the Sherlock novel "The Hounds of the Baskervilles" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, while "Barney" is English slang for "fight" (as you're killing specific people).
• Meaningful Name: While the name of the level refers to Zachary Carlisle's death and the surrounding murder mystery 47 can partake in, it's also a reference to the death of Lucas Grey, who was the closest thing 47 had family, and even considered each other brothers.
• Mini-Game: The player can choose to disguise themselves as the private investigator and solve Zachary's murder... or at least find enough evidence for a convincing frame-up. Doing so is the default mission story for the initial playthrough, in fact.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Through investigating Zachary's murder, 47 can uncover both Emma's relation with Montgomery alongside Alexa murder's of Montgomery.
• Never Suicide: While it appears that Zachary committed suicide, Alexa is not convinced and hires a private investigator to solve his death. As the player discovers, she's right. Zachary spent the night of his death shopping online for boots.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: The level is set up like an Agatha Christie-esque "whodunnit" murder mystery, taking place in a single opulent mansion in the middle of the countryside. It's not strictly necessary, but the game encourages you to play detective (literally by disguising 47 as the actual Private Detective who was hired to solve the mystery), investigating the house and the people in it for clues as they unwind the mystery surrounding Zachary Carlisle's death. The path is so intricate that it can almost feel like you're playing an entirely different game, but doing so will still net you the path to your objective of killing Alexa, including one scenario where the right revelation leads her to off herself for you. As a further bonus, regardless of whom you accuse of Zachary's murder, you can ask Alexa for the Arthur Edwards file as a reward and she will gladly turn it over, netting you both objectives nearly simultaneously if you accuse the right person.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The password to Alexa's safe is 1975, which is engraved near four random objects (a clock, a telescope, a moose's head, and a fireplace). It's the year she murdered Montgomery, which happened 46 years prior to the story.
• Red Herring: The bottle of lethal pills in Mr. Fernsby's office, the half-burnt journal of Zachary's in his fireplace, and admitted lack of an alibi would indicate that he is the killer. However, the journal compared to a list Fersnby made shows Fernsby's handwriting does not match the suicide note, and the pills are painkillers, not a plant-based poison like the one that killed Zachary.
• Retirony:
  • At the start of the mission, Grey asks 47 if he's thinking about the future they'll have when everything's all over. 47 asks Grey the same question, and he says he'll just have to settle for being the most wanted man in the world. At the end of the mission, Providence tracks him down and tries to capture him, and he kills himself so 47 won't die in a futile rescue attempt.
  • Montgomery Carlisle is revealed to have been just about to step down as head of the family's business empire at the time of his death - ironically at the hands of the very people he was about to turn it over to.
• Shoutout:
  • The politics of the staff and the wealthy inhabitants of Thornbridge, and the distrust between the two sides would not be out of place in something like Downton Abbey, which often had specific focus on this.
  • The level features several allusions to Knives Out:
    • Thornbridge Manor was clearly named after the Thrombey estate.
    • The circumstances around Zachary's fake suicide are similar to the movie's plot, in that it's an apparent Locked Room Mystery, and that he was poisoned under mysterious circumstances.
    • Zachary's room, much like the games room in the Thrombey's estate, has a secret passage.
    • The window outside Mr. Fernsby's office in Dartmoor has a cricket ball outside the window (in the film, Ransom throws a cricket ball out of the window of Harlans' office).
    • Alexa also has to deal with her losing the Manor due to Edwards taking it away from her when he gained access to Providences' assets; rather similar to the ending of the film where the Thrombey family have to deal with being written out of the will and being given to an Unexpected Successor.
  • The Featured Contracts for June 2021 were made by Outside Xbox hosts Jane "Miss Deeds" Douglass, Andy "Farrantula" Farrant, and Mike "Mighty Seven" Channell; all of which are set on this level, and all reference various Running Gags from their Hitman videos. They are "Screwy's Revenge"^*Kill The Butler and the Funeral Director with screwdrivers; the Running Gag in their videos is that whenever Jane encounters screwdrivers; she names it "Screwy", "All gone a bit Mike"^*So named as Mike has a tendency to go into levels with all the subtlety of a bulldozer, and it asks you to kill 5 specific people with a shotgun without changing out of your starting outfit. And "Lazy Bones"^*Kill 5 specific people who are not doing their jobs, such as the flirting guard and maid upstairs. The trio then played each other's contracts on the channel; Mike plays Screwy's Revenge, Jane plays "Lazy Bones" and Andy, usually the stealthiest member of the team, plays "All Gone a Bit Mike".
  • One of the Featured Contracts for October 2021 was called "Conan = Shinichi", which references Case Closed protagonist Shinichi Kudo, who assumes the alias Conan Edogowa to protect his friends from a shadowy organisation out to kill him after regressing into a 6-year-old. The preview image was also made to resemble a cover from that series.
• Spotting the Thread: More than a few examples throughout the case.
  • Investigating Zachary's computer reveals he had just bought himself some new Wellington boots, which doesn't make much sense for a man about to kill himself.
  • You can find a jar of poison pills in Mr. Fernsby's office, but they are not the type of poison that was used to kill Zachary. This can be used to accuse Fernsby.
  • Emma is the only one of the main family who doesn't have an alibi. A maid in the kitchen notes that she saw Emma near the greenhouse when sneaking out with Patrick the night before.
• Surprise Incest: Patrick is annoyed at the inbreeding that is common in large rich families like theirs. Emma and Gregory, unfortunately for him, are a case of this, though this fact thankfully never gets out to Gregory or Patrick.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: Once you kill Alexa and retrieve the file, the music suddenly stops playing, and is replaced by a slow violin tune. Going near an exit has a thumping heartbeat play foreshadowing the cutscene that follows where Nothing Is the Same Anymore.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: You can inconvenience the detective by poisoning the macarons in the dining room. Alexa could get poisoned by some whiskey. If the chemistry equipment in the garden is fixed, Emma will do this for you.
  • This is also how Zachary died, as poison was put into his whiskey.
• Uncanny Family Resemblance: The private investigator notes that Emma bears an unusual resemblance to Montgomery, and his picture can actually be scanned. That's because she's his daughter.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Due to the mansion's low NPC population and the fact Grey is jamming outgoing security communications to prevent reinforcements from arriving, this level is probably by far the easiest level to kill every NPC (not counting the final level, where doing so is actually a viable choice anticipated by the developers).
• Villain Ball: Unlike many targets, Alexa is smart enough not to ask her guards to leave when she needs to discuss extremely sensitive private matters with 47 (disguised as the detective). She also deduces 47's identity immediately if he asks about Arthur Edwards, and will even give 47 Edwards' file as a reward for helping solve her brother's murder. So far, so good. However, Alexa then walks out on her balcony to think about what 47 has told her, and her guards make no objection if 47 follows her out there (despite Alexa having just outed him right in front of them), giving him a prime opportunity to throw her off the mansion in the same way she murdered Montgomery. Almost like she's a Death Seeker.

Berlin: "Apex Predator"

With Lucas Grey having committed suicide to protect 47, he contacts Olivia, only to find she's being pursued by several agents from the ICA. Now without his usual resources and no preparation, he must track these ICA Agents down through the crowds of Club Hölle.

---

• Action-Based Mission: The Targets in this mission carry a unique set of gimmicks: all of them are actively hunting for 47, all of them are legitimate hostile threats, they can spot 47's identity regardless of disguise, and you start off not being able to directly identify any of them, even with Instinct. And there's eleven of them (though the player only needs to kill five). Putting 47 on the defensive, the mission is all about determining who's out to get them and killing them before they kill you.
• All Bikers are Hells Angels: Several buildings to the rear of the clubhouse members of a biker gang, who naturally are portrayed as gun-toting, drug-dealing thugs. Said tendency to carry around big murderous weapons means that several of the ICA Agents have disguised themselves as members.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: For this mission, 47 wears "Number 6", the outfit worn by Lucas Grey in the Hitman (2016) cinematics.
  • Getting full mastery gives you a gloved variant of the above.
  • The DLC escalation "Satu Mare Delirium" gives you the "Straitjacket", taken from the intro mission of Codename 47.
  • Completing the challenge "Rave On" unlocks the suit of the same name. It is the same outfit worn by 47 in the secondary starting point, consisting of a black vest, sunglasses, and a dopey hat. It even has a Totally Radical suit description◊.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The level's gimmick of having to uncover your targets only happens if you start on the "Bus Stop" starting location. Picking any other location adds all targets to your map from the start.
• Animal Motif:
  • Rabbits and Sharks. Both of them are painted as graffiti everywhere around the club, masks of rabbits are being worn by certain clubgoers, while the projections in the club display rabbit-themed pictures. The Shark motif is more prominent in the music, clearly being patterned after Jaws, and includes the "Psycho" Strings from the Jaws theme tune. Both animals, rather fittingly, are considered apex predators of their habitats, which goes along with the theme of the level itself; 47 (a man considered by many to be the best assassin in the world) killing others sent to kill him, and outsmarting them at every turn.
• Assassin Outclassin': In this mission, 47 has to find and assassinate several ICA agents that were sent to hunt down Olivia. Their appearance and number is unknown posing an extra challenge for 47 who has to be attentive to pick up the right suspect among the crowd of dancers and bouncers.
• Bowdlerize: The club is based largely on the real world Club Berghain, and while the game replicates the heavy amounts of booze and drugs used by its patrons, the real club is fairly loose about sex and where people can have it. Understandably enough, this aspect was left out.
• Call-Back: The passcode to the safe in Rolf's office is, according to a pair of NPCs "the year the Berlin Wall was torn down"; that being 1989. This is not only a neat historical reference, as it forces players to look this up, but it's also something that 47 and Grey (6) made happen in-universe in the Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman comic. The wall was in the way, and they forced the person in charge (Günter Schabowski) to give the order to tear it down so the Janitor they needed to meet with to remove their behavior implants could come through.
  • Meet with Agent Montgomery while disguised as Rolf and 47 will tell him the ICA has been compromised. Montgomery will retaliate that the ICA can't be compromised, it's not in the business plan. This is a subtle Call-Back to Colorado in the first game - A contract executed for free without a client at the behest of the ICA Board, which was being manipulated by Providence via Erich Soders. Diana and 47 know all this, but Montgomery doesn't, and the shooting starts without it being cleared up.
• Challenge Run:
  • It's completely possible to kill the targets without an earpiece, and while it does have some questionable artistic license in that 47 can somehow hear everyone over the loud music, targets still reveal yourself to you, even without Jiao in your ear.
  • It's possible to kill all 10 targets, either by ambushing the remaining agents when they try to escape, or by knocking out 5 and then finishing them off after completing the mission. Jiao has unique dialogue if you do so.
    Jiao: Expertly done, 47. Expertly fucking done.
• Continuity Nod: Florida Man from Hitman 2 returns as a random clubgoer, and his disguise can be worn again.
• Coolest Club Ever: Club Hölle is a former nuclear power plant that has been transformed into a nightclub, with the exterior covered in murals. It's based on the famous Berghain club, known for its prominence in the techno scene.
• Deadly Gas: Downplayed in that a block of cocaine can be thrown into the dance pit's fans, causing everyone there to immediately get sick. A challenge requires making Chamberlin sick from doing so.
• Easter Egg:
  • Snapping a specific piece of graffiti near the club and calling 1993 at the garage's telephone lets you exit via a UFO Beam!
  • Placing the Gold Idol from the club's bench on an armchair north of the club's exterior causes a hippo to appear from a lake and tell 47 not to trust anyone.
  • Throwing a bird egg at four consecutive graffiti birds holding a frying pan will unlock an exit referencing E.T.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • The targets in the bus stop route don't automatically show up in Instinct, but since no disguise works against them, they always have a dot above them, even if no one if the area should be suspicious of 47. It may not be enough to confirm them as a target – maybe a security guard just knows that no security guards look like 47 – but it's very helpful for picking people out amongst the crowds. For best results, this is most obvious in your suit (where very few people would be suspicious of you). And if there's an enforcer you aren't quite sure about, sometimes it's possible to just knock them out and see if they can be hidden - the game blocks you from shoving unconscious targets into containers.
  • As an additional clue to the targets' identities, several of them^*namely, the rooftop security guard and the ones in the biker hideout carry silenced, highly customized SMGs which stick out like sore thumbs amongst the sawed-off shotguns and cheap assault rifles carried by everyone else.
  • As soon as you complete the default route (Bus Stop), you are able to bypass the level's gimmick of having to uncover your targets manually, as picking any other location adds all targets to your map from the start.
  • The evacuation of the ICA Agents can be prevented by subduing them before killing five agents.
  • Agent Davenport can be eliminated with minimal effort by poisoning his drink — it can be found in a public area just inside the club, and all the nearby NPC's are of the "fake" set-dressing type who won't raise the alarm when they see you tampering with the cup.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Some of the posters around the club were actually some foreshadowing to the in-game "Berlin Easter Egg Hunt" event, which wasn't revealed until March 2021, about 7 weeks after launch.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The scoring system is still present in this level, even though 47 has no handler to judge his performance or rein him in. That said, this can also be taken as 47 "judging" his own performance, staying professional despite the circumstances, and/or as his Hitman with a Heart side showing up.
  • It's possible to infiltrate Agent Tremaine's sniper's nest, creep up behind him, and steal his rifle (using it to kill him with a headshot completes a challenge unlocking a sniper rifle for yourself). However, he will behave as if the rifle is still there, and can still shoot 47 with what appears to be thin air.
• Gimmick Level: This is one of two levels in the trilogy to be structured quite differently, in that the people you're after are not sanctioned targets by the ICA; the targets are ICA Agents sent to kill you and Olivia. The mission is to kill any 5 of them and then exit the level.
• High-Voltage Death: Both Banner and Montgomery can be fried during the light show finale by sabotaging the power supply. Doing so causes Jiao to freak out.
• Just One Man: After you assassinate four of the targets, one of the remaining targets says "He is only one guy!" about 47.
• Kent Brockman News:
  • Interpol is investigating the deaths of Alexa Carlisle, Marcus Stuyvesant, and Carl Ingram, noting that their seemingly unrelated deaths are being treated as one case as they had all already been declared dead months prior.
  • The COVID-19 Pandemic is referenced as being contained in certain countries, while a second wave hits, meaning a second lockdown will ensue. They note that countries still believe it's a hoax, despite the deaths piling up (a clear mockery by the devs to the countries that acted like this in real life).
• Know When to Fold 'Em: After the fifth kill, Jiao orders the remaining agents to drop everything and leave.
• Lost in a Crowd: Club Hölle is extremely packed with random partygoers, to a point where actually navigating through them can be a bit of a hassle. Given the nature of the mission, this works for and against you: the sheer volume of people will make it hard for you to identify and inconspicuously eliminate your targets, but it'll also make it harder for them to do the same to you.
• Mad Lib Thriller Title: "The Lesley Celebration" refers to the meaning of the name "Lesley"; Joy. Whereas Celebration is likely referring to the club.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The name of the level is "Apex Predator", a term used to work out the best animal that has no equal when it comes to hunting in their own environment. Not only does this fit the Animal Motifs the level includes (rabbits and sharks), but also alludes to 47, as he is the peak of human biology according to Ort-Meyer, as well as being the best assassin in the world (something Grey notes in the Legacy cinematic back in 2016).
  • Club Hölle translates from German to English as "Club Hell".
• Mission Control: The closest we get is 47 listening in on Jiao, the ICA's handler for the assassin team after him.
• Missing Mission Control: 47 has no handler whatsoever for this mission, after the previous mission's outcome; Grey is dead to protect 47's cover, Diana has been scurried away by The Constant into hiding, while Olivia is in hiding at 47's request further up the road. It's you versus assassins sent to kill you in this level.
• No-Sell: The ICA agents are well aware of 47's use of disguises, which means that they act as enforcers for every disguise besides the club owner's outfit.
• Obligatory Earpiece Touch: The enemy agents all have this habit when talking on the radio, providing a major clue to their identities.
• Oh, Crap!: You can hear Jiao talking as she loses contact with her agents. She begins to panic as you take more and more of them out.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: If an entire level could be one of these, then Berlin fits. Firstly, because of Dartmoor's ending, there's no briefing cutscene; your "briefing" is a taciturn command to "find Olivia", and a brief phone call later to her has 47 tell her to hide. Second, the level's objective is completely unique by the standards of the game, as 47 must hunt down and identify his targets rather than having them marked on his map. Third, the ICA agents have unique A.I. and patterns, can see through disguises, and are hostile threats no matter where you are in the building, turning the entire game into a defensive cat and mouse game - effectively, YOU'RE the enforcer now, and have to get close enough to suspected targets to check for and compromise disguises, and hunt down anybody you confirm as a target. Lastly, 47 has none of the snobbish sophistication he has in the previous levels, being understandably angry at what went down in Dartmoor, while wearing Grey's jacket out of respect instead of his suit, and identifies his targets with a low scowling growl. All of this adds up to reinforce that this really is 47's Darkest Hour yet.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The code to Rolf's safe is 1989, the year the Berlin Wall was torn down.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: Funnily enough, the real club the level is based on avoids having mirrors and other reflective surfaces to avoid drugged-up patrons from seeing themselves during/after trips. While the level has noticeably less reflective stuff than in other levels, the club still has several mirrors probably for balance reasons.
• Precision F-Strike: You only need to kill five targets, but if you get all eleven, Jiao says, "Expertly done, 47. Expertly fucking done."
• Shout-Out:
  • The music for this level is clearly patterned after Jaws, even incorporating the signature "Psycho" Strings Leitmotif into the music. The level being titled: "Apex Predator", strengthens this reference as Sharks are considered to be apex predators of their climate.
  • The "T-47" challenge, in which the player must complete the mission using a shotgun while wearing the biker disguise, then exit the level on a motorcycle, is an obvious nod to Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator character.
  • The nightclub in Berlin has signs around the back saying "Zutritt Verboten" ("No Entry"); two of which have a graffitied addition of a "no geese" sign, the same ones you encounter in Untitled Goose Game.
  • A sword made from scrap metal can be found beside the canal on the left-hand side of the map. The Assassination challenge for using it to eliminate one of the targets is named "Waaagh!", the Battle Cry of Warhammer 40,000's Orks, who typically use similar cobbled-together weaponry.
• Skeleton Key: Rolf Hirschmuller's disguise grants not just access to the entire map and allows 47 to carry weapons openly, but all of the agents pretend they can’t see through the disguise.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Swan will sidle up to the juice bar and can be dealt with that way. Lowenthal has ordered some takeout that can also be tampered with. Davenport also occasionally drinks from a cup near the juice bar.
• Video Game Caring Potential: It's possible, albeit completely counterintuitive, to not kill Price at the default start of the mission, and you can run past him if you're quick enough.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: If you kill not just all your targets, but every NPC on the map, Jiao’s radio chatter has unique dialogue asking for anybody at all to pick up an earpiece and respond to her.

Chongqing: "End of an Era"

The file on Arthur Edwards from Dartmoor is useless; the Partners had spent a lot of effort into making sure the Constant was untraceable. With the walls closing in on 47 and Olivia, and with the ICA hunting them down remotely, it seems like it's only a matter of time before the two lose. However, 47 hatches a risky play; he figures the path of least resistance is to whistleblow the entire ICA, utterly destroying the organization in the process. To do so, however, he must infiltrate the ICA's primary data facility in China and eliminate its two supervisors to bypass a biometric lock: "Hush", ex-Khandanyang state security turned cyberterrorist for hire, and Imogen Royce, the data analysis head with transhumanist ambitions.

---

• Air-Vent Passageway: The ICA facility has a series of security-locked air vents large enough to sneak through. Similarly, there are a few smaller vents that can be used to hide weapons.
• Ambiguously Gay: The woman who speaks to 47 at the balcony starting location asks if he's seen her old schoolmate, a short-haired girl with a bright green bag. She describes that she was her "rock" when they were at school and is worried that they may have grown apart, to which 47 gives her some reassuring words that her schoolmate must care due to agreeing to meet her in the night in the rain. The woman never specifies her as just being her friend.
• Ambiguous Situation: When 47 wipes his and Diana's profiles, as well as any affiliated contracts from the ICA server, it is unknown whether it also erased the records of the clients of those contracts. Not helping matters is that in the following mission, Vidal mentions targets missing from this database to Diana, with the odd inclusion of Aleksander Kovak (contractor of "The Last Yardbird"), which is either a Series Continuity Error or an intentional decision.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: By default, 47 wears the "Neon City Suit" an outfit consisting of a white shirt and red tie, black pants, and a dark blue raincoat.
  • Getting full mastery unlocks the "Neon City Suit with Gloves", a gloved variant of the default suit.
  • "The Lee Hong Derivation" DLC escalation gives you "The Black Dragon", based on the triad outfits from the first game.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The objective of wiping out the ICA is only necessary on the first playthrough, and it (along with the lengthy escape sequence afterwards) is only present if you choose to start at the train station.
  • Much like Mumbai, there is a sniper rifle and its owner present in the level, thus nullifying the need to bring a sniper rifle into the mission.
  • The masked variant of the Elite Facility Guard disguise, which only appears after the ICA facility goes into lockdown, does not count towards the "Chameleon" challenge, likely as it serves no purpose for the player (everyone is an enforcer if you manage to get the disguise), and it is quite tricky to obtain it anyway, especially since the idea is to avoid them.
• Artistic License – Geography: A sign indicates that the map takes place in the Yuzhong District of Chongqing, the governmental and business heart of the city; however, the map is fairly run-down and clearly not near any major skyscrapers, most of which are clustered on the other side of the water.
• Bigger on the Inside: As explained by Chen Ting during the facility tour, the underground ICA facility and its massive core is contained underneath abandoned buildings that have been marked for demolition, and the entrance to it is a shipping crate. The set itself can even be deconstructed in less than 12 hours if the facility gets compromised.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Junli attempts to convince Hush not to go ahead with his experiments due to the stress it induces, and will abort the resistance experiment before it can reach its maximum power. Taking her out of the equation results in the apathetic Sister Lei amping the power up, which will kill Hush.
• Book Ends:
  • In Codename 47, China was the first place where 47 killed for the ICA. It's also the place where 47 officially destroys the very same organization.
  • Olivia was introduced in 2016 after the ICA tracked her down and laments that "I [Olivia] took every precaution". This mission has the ICA try and track her down once more, and notes they are really good at it. After the mission is over, she also leaves 47 to find Diana for her own sakes, much like how in Colorado, Grey tells her to hide.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: After eight games and 20 years, 47 echoes one of the more popular lines from the World of Assassination trilogy, if not the series, to Olivia in the cutscene prior to the mission:

  I will... leave you to prepare.

• The Chessmaster: One of the targets, Imogen Royce, fancies herself one. She is pretty good at predicting how people do things.
• Call-Back: The ICA are trying to hack Olivia's Laptop to discover her location, with brute force attacks on her encrypted files and laptop security, which both 47 and Olivia admit that it won't take long for the ICA to crack her encryption and get at the files. This hearkens back to 2016, where the ICA pulls a very similar tactic to find Olivia and The Shadow Client (Grey) and the Freedom Fighters militia, by tracing Olivia's digital footprints and hacking into some of her records. This also helps to reinforce just how powerful the ICA are when it comes to tracking targets down, especially when 47 and Olivia on the receiving end of their attacks.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The ICA facility's RFID locks are colored based on what tier has access. Unrestricted locks are white, tier 1 locks are cyan, tier 2 locks are yellow, and tier 3 locks are red. This is also shown on the disguises found in the level, who drop dongles with tier access.
• Continuity Cavalcade: In the default starting point, 47 has to search through the ICA Files, which brings up results for the 47 and Diana's "Sanctioned Targets", and he finds the following:
  • Most of the mission targets from the previous two games are accounted for, with Wazir Kale being the only one missing. However, there is the odd inclusion of Zoe and Sophia Washington (from Hitman 2's "The Ark Society"), who shouldn't be in this list as neither of them were sanctioned targets of the ICA, something The Constant even mentions to 47 when you escort him to the docks in that same mission.
  • All but one of 2016's Elusive Targets^note "The Wildcard" is missing because of image rights issues are part of the "Sanctioned Targets" list. This makes a great deal of sense as most of these targets were connected in some way to their level, and are oftentimes explicitly hired by (or are guests of) the main targets. The Elusive Targets that didn't reference ongoing events were standalone enough that they could be considered taking place earlier or later in the game's timeline. Some like Nne Obara (The Warlord) had already been referenced outside of their mission. This does create a Series Continuity Error where Etta Davis (The Angel of Death) was strongly implied to have killed the Headmaster in her briefing, yet the following mission has a specific Call-Back to the novels he was writing.
  • Half of the targets from the Patient Zero campaign are included, with only Sister Yulduz and Klaus Lieblied being absent. This is because they both reuse their faces from generic models^note a female civilian in Marrakesh and a Hokkaido guard respectively, and thus never got renders that'd fit the Elusive Target briefing art style. The rest of the campaigns' targets did because they were originally Dummied Out Elusive Targets that were repurposed. This is also why Bradley Paine and Oybek Nabazov are using their original codenames of "The Conditioner" (not "The Vector") and "The Doomsayer" (not "The Source"), as that's what their original codenames were.
  • Hidden among the 2016 Elusive Target cast is Renzo and Orlando Caruso, A.K.A; "The Brothers", both of whom were famously cut from the (2016) games' Elusive Target roster. This is a very odd inclusion, as while Renzo and Orlando are both canon characters in-game, as they are a part of the lore of Silvio Caruso growing up in Sapienza, this Elusive Target mission never ran.
  • Sophia Washington is using her in-game code name of Serena. When Hitman 2 launched, that old name was briefly used but was changed the following patch, presumably to avoid legal complaints from Serena Williams (to which she bears quite a strong resemblance).
  • None of the Hitman 2 Elusive Targets are in the database. While this makes sense for Jimmy Chen (The Stowaway) and Miranda Jamison (The Appraiser) as both are set on the same secretive and remote island, it makes less sense for Mark Faba (The Undying/The Undying Returns), as he was set up to be tied to Robert Knox, not to mention being referenced in the following mission. Even more bafflingly, targets like Dame Barbara Elizabeth Keating (The Politician) and Vincent Murellio (The Revolutionary) were deliberately set in an Ambiguous Time Period and didn't mention any connections to their levels' targets, so their absence from the files here is a bit puzzling.
  • None of this game's Elusive Targets are in the ICA database either, although those were released throughout the first year, so Production Lead Time is in full effect here.
  • None of the targets of the 2016 Bonus Episodes, 2's Special Assignments, 2016's "The Sarejevo Six"^note again possibly omitted due to rights issues with Sony, the Sniper Assassin targets, or "Shadows in the Water" are in the database.
• Continuity Nod: Olivia's laptop has files for Arthur Edwards (The Constant), and four other Providence heralds in the order they were killed; Erich Soders, Yuki Yamazaki, Robert Knox, Marcus Stuyvesant, and Alexa Carlisle.
• Contrived Coincidence: 47 can make one happen to get rid of one of his targets, Royce: first, you fire a guard, which causes him to seek solace with his buddy, Imogen's bodyguard; second, you fire an engineer, who gets angry about it and disables the failsafe she worked on (a failsafe she can only disable because the guard at the door was just fired); third, you fire a different engineer who runs the purge before she leaves (the purge normally has a failsafe which means it can't hurt anyone, but the failsafe was disabled because the 1st engineer was fired.
  • 47 can cut to the chase and kill Royce with the purge by using a vent to access the server room and deactivating the safety mechanism himself, and then taking out the woman in the server room so he can access the purge terminal. Since Royce’s bodyguard trails behind her as she enters the server room, the purge can be initiated just as she enters and she will be the only one killed.
• Crazy Homeless People: Near the stairs leading to the train station is a vagrant camp where a man suffering from amnesia warns about "the machines". Another man describes being attacked by a woman who accused him of stealing her past. These people are most likely former test subjects for Hush's inhuman experiments who were released back into the city afterwards.
• Cyberpunk: The level gives off the atmosphere of a cyberpunk game. Firstly, Chongqing's streets are dark and dirty, with neon signs covering the skyline. Besides, it's rainy, and the neon reflects off the wet surfaces. Secondly, drones are patrolling the streets and 47 will be able to visit very advanced facilities where one of the targets, Hush, is pioneering a way to transmit commands to another human being. 47's main goal is to hack into the ICA database, which looks the part of a sleek underground technical facility. Finally, the level's music, especially the theme that plays inside The Block, is glitchy fast-paced techno.
• Deconstructed Trope: Of NPC Scheduling. Royce's entire work in Chongqing is based around this trope, portraying it in a way that doesn't provide her Medium Awareness, but in ways that realistically let it work In-Universe. She uses algorithms and big data analysis to predict peoples' patterns and movements that future ICA Agents can use on a target to predict what they'll do with flawless accuracy. As the analysts mention around the facility, she's spying on all of them to make all this work, and some even claim that she knows them better than they know themselves, taking this trope to an uncomfortable endpoint. For added irony, this can also be used to kill her, as the experiment she sets up of firing people in a specific order is also one that works as intended, specifically because of the people she's firing are directly related to her (unknowing) in-game routine of going into the Data Core to do check-ups on it, meaning even she's not immune to her own experiment.
• Developer's Foresight: After destroying all of Royce's drones, she will meet Hush on a rooftop bridge. Hall and 47 will eavesdrop on their argument by hacking into their communications, but its possible to head to the passage and encounter the two arguing.
• Disposable Vagrant: Hush uses the homeless population as lab rats for his experiments under the pretense of paying them money.
• Drone of Dread: Sped-up drones appear in the music that plays while inside The Block, adding to the disturbing nature of Hush and his experiments.
• Easter Egg: In Hush's testing area you can find a "Perfect Subject" patient that has a QR code on the back of his head. Scanning it with your phone leads to this image of some of the devs waving.◊
• Easy Level Trick: Provided you can aim with a sniper rifle, one Mission Story has you take down Royce's Drones, which lets you snipe Hush and Royce when they meet up to argue about self-sabotage, and also provides a means of getting SA/SO in under five minutes.
• End of an Era: The level is named as such in reference to 47 dismantling the ICA, therefore ending the organisation he's spent 20 years working with, not to mention changing the status quo for the future. It also highlights many of the targets from the trilogy, and the level itself is a deliberate throwback to the Chinatown missions in Hitman: Codename 47.
• Gimmick Level: For the Camera. You use it to open vents and activate blinds in the ICA hub, and is also necessary to send information to Olivia so they can piggyback on a drone's signal to Royce's comms.
• Irony: The ICA, an extremely secretive organization, operate a data farm underneath one of the most heavily-surveilled cities in the world, something that Hall notes at the start of the mission.
• Ironic Echo:
  • Grey in Colorado in 2016 mentions to Olivia that the ICA are the best of the best at tracking people; 47 in this game has much the same sentiments when talking to her about what to do about the ICA tracking them and hacking into Olivia's laptop, and decides to take them down in response.
  • In the cinematic that plays after this level, Diana talks to Edwards about 47 having one weakness; Diana herself. This is reminiscent of a conversation she has with Erich Soders in the ICA Facility Cutscenes where Soders is concerned that 47 has no "pressure points" or weaknesses to keep them in check.
• The Key Is Behind the Lock:
  • The Board Members' hotel room holds the password combination on an answering machine (0118) that lets you get into his room and grab the P41 form to start the ICA tour, but to get to it, you need to climb into an open window from the other side. To rub salt in the wound, the game does actually tell you the passcode without you needing to visit his room, as a disguised ICA agent is trying to remember the code outside the ICA facility, but until you listen to the answering machine, you won't be informed on the fact that the two passcodes are one in the same.
  • Similar to the above, the ICA facility has dongles littered around that allow you to access parts of the facility, but tier 2 and 3 dongles are considerably harder to get, and can only really be found within rooms that require that specific dongle to begin with.
• Kill the Poor: Hush disdains the poor of the city, and considers them only useful fodder for his experiments, not caring if they die or are traumatized.
• Layered Metropolis: The entirety of the map is actually on a large platform resting on the upper levels of the buildings below. It can be easy to forget, but can come through when alleyways and side paths turn into bridges; when you're suddenly adjacent to the middle or upper levels of buildings instead of their ground floors in spite of not changing elevation, then you know. You can also look over the edge.
• Mad Lib Thriller Title: The names of the below escalations are named in this fashion:
  • The Jinzhen Incident translates as the "Golden Needle" Incident. A Golden Needle is a device that transmits radiofrequency waves underneath your skin, and is named after the conductors looking golden. This is notable as all the targets are scientists working on Hush's "mind control" project that does a very similar thing to the brain.
• Meaningful Name: The level name, "End of an Era", refers to the main goal of the contract; 47 shutting down the ICA by leaking their clients and contracts, outing their existence to the public, and leaving that part of his life behind him for good.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: The scientists working in The Block use homeless people as lab rats for their mind-altering experiments. Sister Lei in particular has no qualms about Hush's deteriorating health, which 47 can take advantage of to kill him.
• No-Sell: At the very end of the mission, when you expose the ICA, and 47 must sneak out of the ICA facility, and no disguise of any kind will work. Similar to Colorado from 2016, this can be avoided after one playthrough of the level, as Olivia will extract the data remotely instead.
• Nostalgia Level: Downplayed. While the map layout and its main mission bear very little similarity to the China missions from Codename 47, the DLC escalation "The Lee Hong Derivation" requires 47 to recreate certain elements from that game - such as taking out the police chief^note Although non-lethally this time, killing both the red and blue lotus (the former with an explosive), sniping a man who happens to be named "Lee Hong" inside a restaurant, and poisoning a target's plus-sized bodyguard.
• NPC Scheduling: Imogen Royce is a master of guessing how people think, and has set up a project for the visiting Board Member that accurately predicts how people act to the millisecond in percentages of likelihood. If you disguise as the Board Member, she'll basically describe her experiment to the player; ICA Agents rely on predictable actions of others, and if she can harness that knowledge, everything would change; not realizing that she's basically talking about how the entire game works.
• One-Hit Polykill: There's a challenge that requires you to kill both Royce and Hush with a single sniper shot. This is easily done by doing the story mission where you shoot down the surveillance drones, which makes the two of them meet where you can snipe them from the same vantage point, and you just need to wait for them to line up. Olivia complements you for eliminating both at once.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The code to enter the derelict apartments is 2552 (which in old digit displays looks like a palindrome). Meanwhile, the password for the ICA facility is 0118.
• Scannable Man: The "Perfect Subject" has a fully functional QR Code on the back of his head, not unlike 47 and his famous barcode.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • One of the data facility guards discusses how the frisk search has never caught anything being smuggled into the facility, yet the frisking system security measure is still being used. This is a nod to Hitman 2, which removed the ability to be frisked if 47 has any weapons or illegal items on him.
  • Imogen Royce is doing research into how people think, as well as setting up a project which accurately predicts how people act to the millisecond. She even describes it in more technical detail to 47 if he disguises as a board member, which essentially boils down to everyone having routines and act in predictable ways, and with time, predictability of a target's routine can be used to an ICA Agents' advantage. Gee...that sounds rather familiar.
• Sinister Surveillance: Olivia describes Chongqing as one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world, with millions of cameras and surveillance devices installed to keep track of the population and make the concept of privacy a thing of the past. In addition, Royce actively spies on her employees and Hush as part of her prediction experiment.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Neither Hush or Royce like each other, primarily due to Royce believing that Hush's secrecy is an attempt to undermine her own project, and has set up drones around his facility. If 47 shoots them down, Royce will immediately believe Hush has destroyed them and set up more around The Block. Shoot those down, and she will summon him to a meeting on the rooftop.
• Tranquil Fury: In the "Agent of Change" cutscene, Edwards reminds Diana, in a rather angry tone, the time when Diana, 47, and Grey tied him to a chair in Hitman 2.
• Transhuman: Both targets, but especially Royce, are avid fans of transhumanism.
• Video Game Caring Potential: The balcony starting location starts with a woman asking 47 if she's seen her friend and 47 replies with "no". If you decide to stick around, you get treated to an extended conversation with her as she talks about how they were planning to go out for drinks and expresses some worries about the state of their friendship, to which 47 will offer some comforting advice in the hopes of keeping them together. There is no benefit to following this conversation other than for listening to 47 be nice to an NPC.
• We Need a Distraction: After accidentally triggering the facility's alarm exposing the ICA, Hall overheats the core, causing a fire to break out and giving 47 an opportunity to escape.
• Wham Episode: 47 takes down the ICA by leaking their entire database to the press, making a massive change to the series' status quo.

Mendoza: "The Farewell"

In the wake of the ICA's destruction, the Constant offers Diana a position as his successor, and the two devise a plan to ensnare 47. After a tip-off from Olivia, 47 discovers she is heading to Viñedo Yates in Argentina, so Diana can inform him of her plan to destroy Providence from the inside out. To do so, however, Don Archibald Yates, the Constant's closest fixer and top candidate, must be eliminated alongside Tamara Vidal, an ex-CIA agent turned Providence Herald.

---

• And Your Reward Is Clothes: 47's default outfit here is the "Black and White Tuxedo Set", a tuxedo that consists of a white closed coat and black pants.
  • Getting full mastery rewards you with the "Black and White Tuxedo Set with Gloves", a gloved variant of the default outfit.
  • "The Gauchito Antiquity" DLC escalation gives you the "Guru suit", based on the outfit worn by Deewana Ji in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The level's exit points are quite limited or require extra steps, like keys, trespassing/avoiding guards, disguise changes or 47's suit, which for a long time made exiting the level a hassle; if you started undercover, the only easily accessible exit was the vineyard gate that's quite a distance away from where the targets usually roam. A patch later added a car on the starting hill as an universal exit point that has no prerequisites to use.
• Artistic License – Physics: Flooding the barrel room with wine and sabotaging a piece of machinery can electrocute anyone who steps in the wine. Alcohol is a covalent compound, not ionic, and as such doesn't conduct electricity.
• Artistic License – Ornithology: Some of the birds you can hear as background noises are chaffinches and great spotted woodpeckers. However, these birds do not live in Argentina.
• Bad Boss: Don will flip out if you sabotage the wine pumps. Being upset is understandable, but his sarcasm-laden freakout is not.
• Banana Peel: While banana peels are common in other levels, Mendoza offers grapevines, which do the same thing.
• Book Ends:
  • The last big sandbox level of the World of Assassination trilogy is very much like Paris, the first big sandbox of Hitman (2016) - 47 dons a tuxedo to infiltrate a social event at sunset.
  • The suit jacket 47 wears in this level (the Black & White Tuxedo Set) is white instead of Black; directly inverse to the one he wears in Paris.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Diana's "THAT is..." target/ notable NPC opener is said by a pair of NPC's looking at Corvo Black, notably adding a pause between the two words to give a similar inflection.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: A man is drinking wine in the wine tasting bar, but keeps getting sick. However, he keeps going back to the wine on a loop, despite knowing it makes him ill. There's no in-game justification for it either, as his suit is not a disguise one can even use, so the player literally has no reason to take advantage of his bouts of sickness (sans knocking him out in case the player wants to perform illegal actions). It might be a sly pun on the phrase "Ad Nauseum" (doing something repeatedly and "getting sick of it").
• Collection Sidequest: You get an achievement for collecting the three vintages: Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, and Malbec. You also get one for scanning all of the QR codes around the vineyard.
• Continuity Cavalcade: This level is filled with continuity nods, and it's bordering on Continuity Porn. The nods towards past events and people turn up in very unexpected places in the level too:
  • To Hitman: Blood Money:
    • The level takes heavy influence from the first sandbox level of Blood Money; "A Vintage Year", as 47 kills a white-suited old man on their South American vineyard during a public event (referring to Don Fernando Delgado), and even notes that this isn't his first visit to a winery ("A Vintage Year" is based around a winery in Chile).
    • The Yates's marriage was in 2006, which is also when Blood Money first released.
    • The phrase "A vintage year" is written on a sticky note as a clue for the wine freezer's vault passcode lock (1945).
    • When going round the party for a second time, Tamara may ask if 47 killed Alvaro D'Alvade (Target of "Curtains Down" in Blood Money).
  • To Hitman: Absolution:
    • 47 narrates the Mission Stories in this level, as there's no handler to do so otherwise, something 47 did in the logs section of Absolution where he'd comment on a target or mission and how it affects him.
    • Pointing a gun (or the camera) at Diana will make her comment about having Déjà vu, a reference to the start of the game where 47 shoots her as per Travis' request for her apparent betrayal of the ICA.
    • When going round the party, Tamara will ask about Blake Dexter to Diana and they will instantly say a Cryptically Unhelpful Answer of that it was a parallel universe.
  • To Hitman (2016):
    • You can run in front of the cameraman and Pam Kingsley in the car park as she's reporting on Vinedo Yates, and it will make them angry. You can do the same thing to Jay Smart and Lindsay Lacouer back in Paris, who were covering the Sanguine Fashion Show.
    • One of the party planner waitresses on the phone will be surprised at the number of orders for the Bare-Knuckle Boxer at the party. This was the drink Viktor Novikov wanted back in Paris's "The Showstopper" mission, one you could make and poison him with.
    • When walking around the party a second time, Vidal may ask if 47 killed Viktor Novikov and Dalia Margolis (the targets from "The Showstopper"), Nicholai Kamarov (The FSB chief whom Grey killed before the events of 2016 that was mounting a case against Novikov; Novikov subsequently hired Grey to kill him so the latter could get his hands on the IAGO Dossier), Dino Bosco (Target of "The Icon"), Craig Black (Primary target of "The Author" in the "Patient Zero" Campaign), and Richard Ekwensi (from "The Ex-Dictator").
    • Helmut Kruger has a reservation on a table at the party. The man himself, sadly, does not appear, but according to Martin Ansdel (level designer for Mendoza) in this Discord conversation, there were plans to get Portman and Kruger to finally meet each other, but they ran out of character budget.
    • One of Don Yates' guards used to work for Silvio Caruso and was aware that he kept hair and skin samples inside his safe.
    • A man near the dance floor admits that he got Richard Ekwensi elected so Providence could use the South African Rhodium Mines he controlled.
    • A pair of party guests talk about the murder mystery of Thornbridge Manor, and how one of them managed to get the author of the "Jack Sparta" novels to write up a dramatised book of events from the PI assigned to the case. The "Jack Sparta" novels are in reference to the "Nick Sparta" novels written by the school headmaster in Marrakesh; Shahin Abdul-Barr Maalouf, albeit with the name changed.
    • The asado chef has a story about inviting multiple celebrities to a barbecue for a series he creates; among them being Craig Black (from "The Author" in the "Patient Zero" campaign), Jordan Cross (from "Club 27") and Viktor Novikov (from "The Showstopper"). They then explain that Novikov in particular didn't like his Hair-Trigger Temper being on display, and attempted to stall the production company for six months until it was all settled out of court. They also hang a lampshade on how all three are now dead.
    • Dexy Barat returns, alongside Heidi Santoro, and both can be found on the upper courtyard of the vineyard talking about why they're there (The Class has a large Argentinian following and Monumental Records, the record label, wants them to be there).
    • One method of killing Don involves using a Branson-MD2 microphone set to a high voltage when they make a dinner speech, the same microphone that could be used to kill Jordan Cross.
    • Don Yates was the business partner of Ken Morgan, the "Club 27" mission's secondary target. He can also be pushed off a balcony by his wife during a confrontation, exactly like how Morgan could be by Jordan Cross.
    • Like with Ken, Yates also gets a phone call from a Mr. West (implied to be the same person) about them killing someone on the street, in this case, some joggers. Given the tone, this may also be what Ken's conversation was about too. In fact, much of the dialogue is surprisingly similar.
    • Yates’s fixer, Corvo Black, was initially mentioned by Ken Morgan in the above phone conversation.
    • In place of Corvo being recommended by Ken to solve Mr West's problem, Yates instead recommends Keith McKenzie in the above phone call. Keith was a very minor NPC that Ken talks to in his routine in "Club 27", with the latter offering Keith a job at the firm after hitting it off. Keith seems to have been made junior partner by the time of this mission too!
    • After Don Yates gives his speech and eat asado, they will mention Ken Morgans' death to a patron at the party, and then Valentina will say that they also adopted Kens' dog, Pickles, when Ken died. Ken has several phone calls related to Pickles in "Club 27" if you overhear him for long enough. Ken will also mention Pickles at gunpoint too.
    • One of the women seen dancing during the ball is Ellinor Westrup, the IAGO model that was Zaydan's Honey Trap girlfriend sent to spy on him from Marrakesh's "A Gilded Cage".
    • Constructing the Bartoli on the workbench downstairs has 47 recite the mantra of "A place for everything, and everything in its place", a line said by both Sean Rose and Dr. Ito from Colorado and Hokkaido respectively.
    • Multiple references to a herald called "Bronson" are made between the party guests, apparently assassinated during the events of the trilogy, with many at the party suspecting 47 to be behind it, given the death was ruled as an accident. Several years later, Word of God confirmed that Bronson is meant to be the Militia's hostage in Colorado's house basement (named William Candler in Contracts Mode), which makes a good deal of sense. The initial reference to this was lost among fans as no person was called that, and even their description was subject to in-universe Wild Mass Guessing.
    • Disguising as a Providence member unlocks the challenge "The Hidden Hand"; in reference to what 47 says in the Colorado's storm shelter when describing Providence.
  • To Hitman 2:
    • After you kill Vidal, one party guest will talk about taking the position of Rupert Pierce, the head of Dynasty Global that was assassinated by Mr. Donovan on the order of Alma Reynard in Hawke's Bay. She mentions how he passed Mr. Donovan in the hallway on the day Rupert died.
    • On the second loop round the party, Tamara will ask if 47 killed Mark Faba ("The Undying"; a disgraced MI6 agent who kept coming back from the dead, despite various confirmed ICA assassination attempts).
    • Orson Mills is mentioned going rogue after the Militia disbanded, and after ETHER interrogates him, he becomes a Providence member. You next see him on the train in the final level.
    • Rico Delgado and Andrea Martinez's assassinations are mentioned, and Hector Delgado is now in charge, now being referred to as "Mad Dog" by the patrons.
    • The asado chef mentions being blindfolded at a party in the middle of the arctic sea, referring to the Isle of Sgàil and "The Ark Society" gathering. Seems that they were in charge of making food for its members, and apparently they had to barbecue while blindfolded, and mentions being blindfolded on the way in and out of the island; the only part of the story which isn't an unreasonable claim as it is a secretive and remote island, and the band on the island were blindfolded specifically for the purpose of keeping it a secret). The asado chef also mentions doing an episode of his TV series in a balloon with Blake Nathanial, a treasure hunter and adventurer from that level.
    • Two party guests are talking about De Waal, ETHER'S CEO, being accidentally killed, and mentions his escape via Providence soldiers not long after the events of Mumbai. De Waall, understandably, gained PTSD from the whole experience. This is in reference to the hostage tape the Militia released before the events of Mumbai that Diana mentions in the briefing for "Chasing A Ghost"; you can even hear Pam give a reading of it on Mumbai's TVs.
    • One party guest discussing the ICA data leak to his friend tells him to hire Agent Stone, and explicitly mentions his nose bandage ("Don't mention the nose!"). Agent Stone was one of the two multiplayer characters from the previous game's Sniper Assassin mode.
    • If the sniping path is followed, Vidal will be in a conversation about how they'd like to die, and mentions that cold history has to happen, and she doesn't fret about the fallout, which has Diana say "It's a dangerous thing, having a conscious" in response, a direct quote from the last line said by Grey in the "Precautions" cinematic.
    • Flowers and another wine keeper are musing about unlocking the 1945 Grand Paladin from the vault at Yate's request. He mentions the story of how Yates got his hands on it, and his description suggests the wine is extremely rare (as in, less than six bottle kind of rare), and they remember seeing logos for "The Ark Society" on the crate when it arrived, but were clueless to the details. Not only is this a reference to "The Ark Society", a doomsday club for the social elite, but said society collected potential art and historical pieces of culture of humankind's accomplishments for when the rapture hits — the implication here is that the Society has the remaining bottles back on the island.
    • Two men near the asado pit discuss the deaths of Zoe and Sophia Washington from "The Ark Society", and how their father Byron Washington correctly believes they were killed in a plot to obtain the Constant. Blake Nathaniel is mentioned as a potential candidate for Chairman alongside Eddie Engelhorn, who was Janus' original pick.
  • To Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman:
    • When conversing with Tamara Vidal on the subject of Corvo Black, Diana will remark how they never took any of his contracts due to being a "nasty piece of work", and admits that her fellow colleagues were not as picky. While it's been implied in the games for a while now that ICA Handlers pick contracts based on more than just professional intuition, and often take out contracts they themselves may be invested in personally (even if it's not for personal gain); this is the first time the games have actually acknowledged this fact. This was first explicitly shown in issue 6 of the comic, where Robyn Gore chooses Diana's first contract to be a handler on: a hit on Franklin Marchand and Brickolage Technologies. Robyn knew Diana would take the contract as a similar company (Blue Seed Pharmaceuticals) ruined her life, and so would want to exact personal revenge.
    • Disguising as Aron Ford Jr. (The lawyer outside the party) and then meeting with Don Yates to give him his case file filled with research done on Diana has 47 give a cliff notes introduction of their bio, in that she was orphaned when she was young and tried to fight back against Blue Seed pharmaceuticals with various exploits, and notes that her rap sheet is "quite extensive". He will then also rattle off two of the hits from the past two games (Whittleton Creek, then either Dubai, Sapienza, or Bangkok). Ford Jr. will also discuss all of the contracts against Providence (the aforementioned ones alongside Marrakesh, Hokkaido, Miami, Isle of Sgail, and Dartmoor).
    • In the cutscene after the mission, Diana repeats similar sentiments from one of the last pages of the comic, about how she saw him as a blank page, and that she could use him however she saw fit. Here, Diana says she saw him as a blank slate and told herself that that's what you needed, and that people are not meant to be controlled, essentially bookending her statement from the comic.
  • Miscellaneous:
    • Disguising as the Wine expert and finishing the tour has 47 note that the security in the Barrel room prevents access to some of the more precious wines on display and that you'd have to be "the Sparrow" to get in. The Sparrow is the codename of Kalvin Ritter, who was a thief so notorious that the ICA made a training simulation based on one of his handoff events that functions as the tutorial for this and the past two games.
    • On the first loop around the party, Tamara will recall all the Providence-affiliated targets, as well as Greys' Militia heads, that 47 killed in the trilogy, and notes Yates won't be happy about Ken Morgan's death.
    • When going round the party for a second time, Tamara will ask if 47 killed Lord Winston Beldingford (Target of "Beldingford Manor" in Contracts).
    • Once Tamara is eliminated, Diana will proceed to engage in friendly conversations with the other guests. One of them is Dolores Powell, an ex-ICA handler who was forced to leave after a disastrous contract. Her agent (Jaguar) thought it would be a good idea to try a 47-esque kill during a hit at a Christmas party, but managed to kill everyone but the target! This is a reference to Overachievers, a side story made in 2017 that is all about this exact event from the viewpoint of ICA Cleaners.
• Cosmopolitan Council: Completing the tour has all the heralds meet up in a secret Bond-esque basement to talk about outing Diana, given all the trouble she's caused for them.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: During the tour of the wine facility, Vidal can be locked inside an industrial freezer, fall into a distillery tank, get pushed into a grape crusher, or crushed underneath a grape presser. The last one actually leaves nothing left of her beyond a pile of blood.
• Cutting Off the Branches:
  • One of Diana's conversations with Vidal confirms that 47 canonically passed "The Final Test" using the ejector seat opportunity.
  • An NPC conversation someone has with a person who was present in the Sceptre during the first mission mentions seeing a body bag, implying that whatever methods 47 used to kill Ingrm and Stuyvesant, the body of at least one of them was found by guards at some point, which rules out both of them getting eliminated by falling off the edge of a balcony (e.g. sabotaging their parachutes when they escape, or the combination of Ingram leaning on an unstable ledge talking to 47 as The Vulture and Stuyvesant getting kicked off after becoming his bodyguard).
  • NPC chatter reveals that the private detective solved the murder mystery in Dartmoor's "Death in the Family." Whichever method used to kill Alexa didn't involve taking his place. Ironic, considering the game actively tries to make you play detective.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • When playing the mission for the first time or by selecting the Winery Viewpoint as the start location, briefcases and sniper rifles cannot be brought in, likely to prevent Yates from being killed at the very start of the level. That being said, it is still possible to shoot Yates from a distance.
  • Similarly, if Vidal is killed before meeting Diana, she will respawn after the meeting.
  • If Don Yates is eliminated before meeting Diana, the dialogue will be slightly altered to say that one step ahead of her. This is notable as it's extremely difficult to pull off this kill as you cannot leave the hill Diana is on, otherwise the conversation cannot be triggered again.
  • One of the winery workers makes a comment about Valentina being a vegan. If the asado is served, Valentina's seat is the only one missing a cut of meat.
  • You can kill Don Yates after Diana stabs him by ignoring the prompt to finish the job and running off.
  • Diana has dialogue for being shot, where she begs 47 to stop, and being held at gunpoint, which she will call "Déjà vu". There is also unused dialog for being woken up and poisoned with emetic weapons.
  • The torches for the asado pit will ignite any oil or gas it comes into contact with.
  • If you assassinate Tamara Vidal, flood the distillery, and then change back into your suit, and go to Diana as she observes Yates chew his staff out, they have a unique conversation with 47 about the accident being a "waste of wine".
• Dramatic Shattering: When Vidal is shot dead during the secret meeting, the force of the shot will slam her into the 1945 Grand Paladin wine bottle, breaking it.
• Drink-Based Characterization: Diana's wine of choice is Cabernet Sauvignon. Has fruity undertones that underscore her femininity. She's also elegant for Wine Is Classy, and given that she has people killed, probably works for A Glass of Chianti.
• Easter Egg:
  • Almost none of the themed suits will let Diana and 47 tango. Turns out their words of "Dress Appropriately" were not for laughs.
  • Killing all of Yates' guards causes him to run to the shrine and pray.
• Easy Level Trick: Knocking out and impersonating Aaron Ford Jr., an attorney at Yates' law firm who can be encountered right at the start of the level, allows you to saunter right into the Amoral Attorney's villa with free run of the place and no Enforcers in sight. For bonus points, you can easily corner Yates in a private meeting after taking out a single guard, Aaron walks into a secluded spot for easy pacification, and he even carries a briefcase you can use to sneak a weapon past the frisk checkpoint!
• Eiffel Tower Effect: Invoked by 47. As part of his character fabrication, Tobias Rieper has a no-followers social media account where he posts extremely dull, stereotypical pictures of world landmarks (implied to be doctored stock photos) in the countries he's visiting, "from the Sphinx to the Easter Island statues". He doesn't appear in any of them.
• Et Tu, Brute?:
  • 47 can provide Yates' wife with evidence that he destroyed her diplomatic career to preserve his perfect win record. This enrages her enough to murder him.
  • At the end of the mission, Diana betrays 47, poisoning him with a neurotoxin. It turns out to be a repeat of Hitman: Blood Money, as Diana gets 47 in a position where he can strike at the next mission's target.
• Foreshadowing: At the end of 47’s rendezvous with Diana at the beginning of the mission, she puts her hand on his briefly, there’s an ever-so-brief flash of red and grey before you get control again, then the cutscene ends and returns to gameplay. That flash of red and grey is a hint at the reveal at the end of the mission that Diana’s touch was laced with neurotoxin; said flash is the same you get when taking damage.
• Gaucho: Several of them are seen as security detail around the vineyard and the outskirts of the villa. 47 can disguise as one, allowing him access to most areas besides the villa.
• I Know You Know I Know: 47 can greet a well-dressed Diana, as well as Vidal at the party using his Tobias Rieper alias. Vidal is immediately suspicious and checks in with security to verify his identity. After two more encounters, Vidal will accompany 47 to a now-guarded cinema room, revealing she knows who he is as 47 continues to play coy.
• Internal Reveal: The partners' identities get discussed, and at least one group is disappointed by the grandiose conspiracy, expecting "kings and presidents", but instead, it's old-money scions subtly ruling the world from the shadows. One even notes that the Stuyvesants' main income the year prior was insurance, not anything fancy as they otherwise expected.
• Interface Spoiler: The Yates' bedroom has a letter opener on the desk that can't be picked up. Diana uses it in the "Closing Statement" Mission Story to stab Yates.
• Ironic Echo: During the "Closing Statement" Mission Story, Yates points out how Edwards must be out of his mind to allow Diana to join Providence given all the grief that she and 47 caused them, proclaims that "this woman will be our downfall" and orders his men to kill her. Yates will still do some Evil Gloating before the deed though, giving 47 time to position himself in the room to handle Yates' guards...
  Diana: By the way, you were right about one thing.
  Yates: Yeah? I'm all ears.
  Diana: [Stabs Yates] This woman will be your downfall!
• Just Between You and Me: If 47 follows the right storyline, then at one point, Yates will imprison Diana in a room with him and several guards. He will then confront Diana, gloat about his victory, and ask why Edwards even considered her as a potential new Constant. 47 is positioned in the same room, ready to use this opening to kill Yates. For bonus points, Diana will indulge in some gloating of her own about her plans to tear down Providence brick by brick after she stabs Yates and 47 kills the guards, presuming 47 doesn't just kill everyone.
• Meaningful Name: "The Farewell" has a dual meaning; not only does it refer to Don Yates' stepping down from Morgan Yates and Kohn and retiring, but also being the swansong level of the trilogy, where the great majority of storylines are resolved or paid homage to in the level.
• Misplaced Accent: Downplayed. While several of the civilians and guards do have Hispanic accents, they all speak with the Mexican or Colombian Spanish dialects used in Hitman 2, rather than Rioplatense Spanish dialects. According to IO Interactive, this was done because of time and budget constraints in addition to problems caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• My Greatest Failure: 47 is truly sorry for killing Diana's parents, which he croaks out when being poisoned. Diana even gives him a minor The Reason You Suck speech to keep up appearances, as well as to tell him how she truly feels about the whole situation.
• Mythology Gag: If you annoy Pam Kingsley by doing the above camera antics, she'll mention that photobombers "think the whole world is their playground". Similar sentences were used as slogans to advertise past entries, such as "Make the World Your Weapon" (the subtitle for Hitman 2) and "Enter a World of Assassination" (a marketing term associated with Hitman (2016) that gave rise to the trilogy's full title).
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: Several of the partygoer models are re-used from the previous game's sniping mission in Austria's "The Last Yardbird".
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In one of the storylines, Yates will actually murder the secondary target, Vidal, for you when she balks at the idea of disobeying Edwards and murdering Diana out of spite.
• Non-Player Companion: This mission gives you an NPC ally: Diana, who behaves unlike any other character in the whole game. You may freely kill in their presence and it will not affect your Silent Assassin rating. If you go on the distillery tour, Diana helps you kill Videl by turning on radios to divert attention, feigning a bad photo experience on the grape crusher, helps you kill Don by stabbing him first, and 47 will finish the job. Given she is your handler, this makes sense.
• No OSHA Compliance: The winery is full of blatant safety violations, with large areas where someone could easily fall in and be killed, a grape crusher that tourists are encouraged to stand under, and a freezer kept at deadly temperatures that is noted as having no handle on the inside. Many of these issues are brought up with the tour guide who essentially comments that they haven't had an accident yet, so there's no reason to worry.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The passcode to the safe in Yates' basement is 2006, in reference to the year he got married, while the passcode to the vault with one of the only known bottles of 1945 Grand Paladin wine in the world in it is 1945, amazingly enough.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The story of the 1945 Grand Paladin wine is inspired by the 1945 Romanée-Conti; the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold. 47's (and the Sommelier's) description of the wine is a cribbing of one of the paragraphs from this Bloomberg article.
• Self-Deprecation: When trying to guess the contracts Diana was behind, Tamara will ask about Blake Dexter, and they will instantly quip that that was a parallel universe.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • Aleksander Kovak (the Leader of the Yardbirds and contractor of the Sniper Assassin level "The Last Yardbirds") is mentioned by Vidal as a potential target prior to Mendoza (which Diana confirms). This is a little odd as Aleksander Kovak was the one that contracted the ICA to kill his former partners; he was never one of the targets. Even stranger is that this plot point had already been resolved right at the start of Hitman 2, as a news report in Hawkes Bay (the first mission in that game) had already confirmed that Kovak had been sent to trial after foolishly converting the sum of the Shamal Casino score into bitcoin.
  • Kens' dog, Pickles, is mentioned in a conversation between a party guest and Valentina, the latter mentions that Don Yates and her adopted them after Ken died. Problem is, the game had already heavily implied that Pickles had died during the events of "Club 27", and there are a series of phonecalls where he talks to his dogsitter and the surgeon after Pickles swallows a flashlight.
  • In Hawkes Bay, one of the Militia's assassinations mentioned by the mercs digging a hole was a CEO called Vera San Martin. A man north of the asado pit rings her office, and successfully gets into a phone call with her, with no mention of her assassination.
• Ship Tease: You could cut the tension between 47 and Diana in this mission with a grape knife. The two exchange longing looks in the cutscenes, she actively helps you kill the targets, and it all culminates with a tango at the end of the mission.
• Shout-Out:
  • The sign outside Don Archibald Yates' villa reads "No Admittance Except on Party Business".
  • The song that plays during the tango is titled "They Would Always Have Mendoza".
• Sommelier Speak: Much of the variations of this trope can be heard in the wine tasting room. 47 will even comment on some wine if he picks some up in that room too.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Confronting Tamara Vidal in the theatre room, which can potentially wound up as a shootout, has the harmonious "Ave verum corpus" play in the background.
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: Don't be fooled by the level's bright weather and golden color scheme — it features some of the creepiest elimination methods in the entire World of Assassination trilogy, from the very bloody usage of wine-making equipment, to one target's sudden execution on the orders of the other, to Don clinging onto life after being stabbed in the gut by Diana.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Tamara Vidal is looking for a glass of Pinot Noir that can be tampered with. Don Yates is hosting his triumph with a bottle of Grand Paladin 1945 and the glass is waiting to be tampered with. Either one of them will sit and eat asado^note a traditional Argentine barbecue if the pit is lit.
• Violation of Common Sense: One way to deal with Vidal is to essentially harass Diana and her by talking with the former three times once they join the party, which may not come naturally to a player used to avoiding NPCs, not to mention the fact that 47 is supposed to be even more undercover than usual here.
• What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?: The waiter at the tasting bar remarks that Vidal's wine of choice is Pinot Noir, and considers such a thing to be barbaric.
• What the Hell, Hero?: If 47 locks Corvo Black or Gabriel Vargas in the freezer with Vidal Diana can briefly admonish 47, thinking she taught him better. Whether this is because she considers it immoral or unprofessional is unclear.
• Wine Is Classy: A way of killing Tamara Vidal is poisoning her wine by serving her a Pinot Noir. Several wine experts are also in the wine tasting room too, giving off this effect.

Carpathian Mountains: "Untouchable"

Following Diana's poisoning of 47, the Agent must learn to accept his past and make his way through the Constant's heavily guarded train to bring an end to Providence.

---

• And the Adventure Continues: After wiping out Providence, 47 walks off to a Romanian sunrise. One year later, he agrees to Diana's offer to resume operations. 47 gives the faintest hint of a smile on his face as he and Diana resolve to stop anyone looking to fill Providence & the ICA's vacancy.
  47: I choose this path because I can. There will always be people like them. So there will always be people like us..
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The DLC escalation "The Proloff Parable" gives you "The White Shadow", based on the outfit worn by Hayamato's ninjas in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin.
• Armor Is Useless: Downplayed. Unlike the bulletproof vests worn by regular CICADA guards, which are purely cosmetic, the heavy armor suits worn by the Heavily Armored Mooks can actually soak a decent amount of bullets and even resist multiple headshots, though they are still fairly easy to gun down with sustained full auto fire or a couple shotgun blasts.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: You start the mission off half naked in surgical attire, and progressing stealthily through the train pretty much requires using guard disguises. However, when you reach the final series of cars, you can pick up a nice suit so when you finally confront the Big Bad, 47 can be in something resembling his iconic attire.
• Bittersweet Ending: 47 and Diana both survive, take down Providence, neutralise the Constant, and continue working together. However, Grey, the closest thing 47 will ever have to family, is killed; 47 and Diana betray and expose the ICA (again) as well, losing their support and creating many enemies.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: As of the July 2021 patch, beating the level unlocks the ICA19 Goldballer, a golden recolor of 47's famous weapon.
• Book Ends:
  • The first game in the series; Codename 47, starts with 47 waking up on a table in surgical attire and ends with him having acquired a Nice Suit and making his escape into the world to embark upon a new career. This final mission begins with 47 waking up half-naked as a test subject in the back of a moving train, and escaping in a nice suit (and an artic parka over the top) to end his career as a professional assassin, and start a new one as a freelance assassin. For bonus points, they both take place in Romania.
  • The outfit that 47 puts on when leaving the train is the same fur-lined parka he wears when arriving at the ICA Training Facility in Hitman (2016)'s prologue.
  • The ending prologue has Diana give 47 the name of "Agent 47", a year after this game's events, 47 outright dismisses the "Agent 47" moniker and claims "that's not who I am anymore".
  • In 2016's final mission, the Constant first made contact with Diana on a train. In this mission, 47 confronts The Constant on a train.
  • The E3 2015 trailer and the final cutscene both show 47 running in the middle of a snowy forest. 47's outfit in the final cutscene is reminiscent of what he wore in that trailer.
  • The E3 2015 trailer's last words are Diana saying "Good to have you back, 47". 47's last words echo this sentiment and says "It's good to be back" to Diana.
  • The Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman comic starts with showing the death of Diana's parents and reveals 6 and 47 were the ones responsible, and this level starts in much the same way, only 47 has to embrace those memories in order to proceed.
• Breakable Weapons: Every tool is a rusted variant of the regular kind seen in the other levels; they break upon being used once, with the only lethal melee weapon available being an icicle, which functions as a knife but breaks upon being used.
• Burn Baby Burn: After dismantling Providence, Diana throws both her membership pin and the case file on her parents' deaths into the fireplace.
• Continuity Cavalcade: An interactive version. 47's memories are shown to us, revealing that Novikov was killed by the falling stage lights, Soders was killed by the operating table going berserk (whether or not this was caused by Dr. Laurant while he was high on drugs, or 47 overriding it after disabling the KAI AI is left unclear), while Diana's parents were blown up by 47, with the young Diana getting blown back.
• Continuity Nod:
  • To Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman:
    • The memories section of the level recreates the comic panels of Diana's parents being killed by a car bomb, much the same as in the "Untouchable" cinematic, only this time you are forced to pull the trigger.
    • Reading the doctor's notes in the following carriages cubicle after waking up reveals the amnesia serum to be based on a prototype found and used at "The Institute for Human Betterment" in the 1980s. 47 was forced to take the very serum this new one's based on to forget about Subject 6.
    • When The Constant meets with a sedated 47, in a brief window of consciousness, he tells 47 that "Forgetting's not so bad, after all, you've done it before". This scene alludes to a similar scene where Janus observes a sedated 47 in Issue 3 of the comic, in which they gave the original order to Ort-Meyer to use a memory-altering serum on him and the clones on behalf of The Partners.
    • When 47 and The Constant meet up, they try convincing 47 to take the serum. He replies with a cold: "No. Never again", as he had already taken the serum described above as doesn't want to do it again.
  • Diana makes Agent 47 his name in 2016 as he was only known as "Number 47" by Ort-Meyer, Diana in this level's hallucinations mentions "You [47] never even had a name... until I gave you one".
  • The train the mission takes place on is rumored to have once been Janus's mobile headquarters during the Cold War.
  • Diana poisoning 47 in order for him to slip by and get to the Constant brings to mind Hitman: Blood Money, as she does the exact same thing there.
  • Orson Mills, Alma Reynard's Butt-Monkey boyfriend, returns as a Providence bodyguard.
  • The train is on a loop throughout Europe, but one of its stops is Sarajevo, Bosnia (although, more specifically a boot camp ran by CICADA, of which the elite guards on the train come from). This is the first mention of Sarajevo in the trilogy, which is likely an indirect allusion to the Sarajevo Six, a bunch of PS4-exclusive contracts for the 2016 game that had 47 kill off each member of a CICADA mercenary group that came from the same camp this train is headed for.
• Cool Train: The Mortar. Named after the preferred transport of Baba Yaga, it's a Soviet-era mobile KGB Black Site, now owned by Providence, that runs on a constant loop through several of the former Warsaw-pact nations, from Zagreb to Irkutsk.
• Cutting Off the Branches: At the start of the level, 47's memories show that Viktor Novikov was canonically assassinated by having the stage chandelier being dropped on top of him, while Erich Soders was canonically killed by someone (either Dr. Laurant while high or 47) sabotaging his surgical table, something previously alluded to prior in Hawke's Bay by Pam in a news broadcast as attributed to "Human Error".
• Developer's Foresight: Losing the rusty crowbar in the first portion of the train is impossible as it will always respawn in the same room, in order to prevent narrative and gameplay softlocking where the player cannot proceed.
• Downer Ending: A Easter Egg Ending. If 47 chooses to take the serum, he will collapse to the ground. Some time later, 47 wakes up in a padded room with his mind wiped, with Edwards greeting him in much the same way that Ort-Meyer did in the first game. Going with this ending means that the twenty years 47 has spent cutting down crime lord after unscrupulous business leader and leaving upheaved nations in his wake, in an effort to simply break free of his bondage, ends up being for naught.
• Dramatic Shattering: If Edwards is shot, the mirror he's standing in front of will shatter.
• Elite Mooks: The Constant has a full squad of a dozen Heavily Armored Mooks guarding the area just immediately before the forward cars where the executive offices and his private train car are. Other guards earlier in the train will mention that they're a specially trained Commando squad and are the ones who killed Lucas Grey. They resist headshots and are much tougher than any other enemy that has appeared in the "World of Assassination" trilogy^note It takes a good 21 rounds of SMG fire or 17 rounds from the compact pistol to kill one, compared to just 6 smg rounds or 5 compact pistol shots for a regular enemy, though not quite in the same league as, say, the Praetorians from Absolution or any of the main bosses from the earlier games.
• Everyone Is Armed: All but ten people on the train (the two doctors at the beginning, the office workers near the top of the train, and The Constant) happen to be bodyguards, some sort of Elite Mook, or otherwise deadly with a weapon.
• Exposed to the Elements: 47 starts off the mission wearing just his suit pants on a train passing through a snowy mountain, which has no bearing on his abilities.
• Failure Is the Only Option: You are frozen in place when you are forced to kill Diana's parents. You can press any button you want, but only the action button will work, meaning you cannot proceed without pressing the bomb trigger.
• Fate Worse than Death: Edwards explicitly states that death will not rattle him, which 47 can verify - and find to be true. But if 47 injects the memory serum into Edwards rather than killing him, ensuring that he completely loses everything, Edwards briefly breaks his calm demeanor and panics.
• Ghost Train: While the train itself isn't haunted, it uses a series of decommissioned rail lines and doesn't appear to have a conductor, making it one in theory. It was also once a KGB black site, adding to the creepiness.
• Gone Horribly Right: Diana's ploy to get 47 in a position where he is in striking range of Edwards for the first time since 2 by informing him that she herself is 47's only vulnerability works well, considering that it lands 47 on the same train as the former Constant. It can work too well, though, if 47 injects himself with the memory erasure serum.
• Here We Go Again!: If 47 grabs the memory serum and waits about a minute, you will get the option to make 47 inject himself with it. If you do so, you get a recreation of the opening cutscene of Hitman: Codename 47 only with Edwards' voice replacing Ort-Meyer's.
• Heroic BSoD: 47 goes through a short one at the start of the mission, as hallucinations of Diana berates him for being nothing more than the weapon Providence wanted him to be, only for Lucas to break him out of it and Diana's voice to tell 47 to embrace the past.
• His Story Repeats Itself: As part of 47's memories, you are forced to kill Diana's parents again, something he did right at the start of Birth of the Hitman.
• Improvised Weapon: 47 can create a suppressed version of the HWK21 Pale (used by the rank-and-file guards at the beginning of the mission) using just a spray paint can. This variant can be unlocked after finishing the mission.
• Interface Spoiler: The actual world location name in the game's menu; Romania, is a massive story spoiler as one of the locations seen in the previous game was the country in question, and one could work out a lot of the story beats by merely mentioning it.
• Locomotive Level: 47 wakes up in a lab in Romania, which turns out to be the rearmost carriage of an old Soviet mobile black site that once belonged to Janus, the previous Constant and target in Hitman 2. 47 must make his way all the way to the front to confront the target.
• Made of Iron: The Providence Commando Leader has the same extremely high durability as his men, including being able to resist multiple headshots, despite not wearing a protective helmet himself and also not visually being quite as heavily armored either.
• Meaningful Name: The name of the level is in reference to the Arc Words of "No-one's Untouchable" Diana uses as a mantra for being a force for change in a corrupt world — indeed, those words are said right at the end of the final cinematic.
• Multiple Endings: Upon reaching the target the player is given three options, although the first two have essentially the same outcome and the third is an Easter Egg:
  • 47 simply kills Arthur Edwards by pistol, garrote, shotgun, whatever. (A silenced ICA19 Black Lily pistol is available in the wardrobe in the front of the cabin, for the convenience of traditionalists.) He then applies the brakes on the train, hops off, and walks off into the Romanian tundra. A year later, he reunites with Diana and starts working with her again.
  • 47 injects Edwards with the same memory-wipe serum he intended to reset 47's mind with. While Edwards survives the encounter, without his memories he's effectively been neutered, and without an antidote (as Grey stole the vial from ETHER back in Hitman 2), he's been assigned a Fate Worse than Death. 47 then breaks out of the train and the ending plays out like usual.
  • 47 takes the syringe, but refrains from using it. After a minute or so, Edward points out the "benefits" of not having free will, and 47 injects himself with the serum. Some time later, 47 wakes up to Edwards's voice in a cell inside a certain Romanian asylum.
• Mythology Gag: As mentioned under Book Ends, the final cutscene has multiple references to the E3 2015 trailer, namely the last pieces of dialogue being similar, and the outfit 47 wears in both the trailer and in-game are very similar.
• Tempting Fate:
  • A pair of Elite Mooks are talking about 47, and one of them doubts that 47 is a strong fighter because he does "too much sneaking around and too much dressing up" and bets he could beat him in a fistfight, resulting in the other mook asking if he wants to put that to the test. Given that the level allows non-target kills...
  • Despite otherwise Facing Death With Dignity, Edwards cannot help but taunt 47 by saying "At least I die knowing who I am". You then have the option of injecting Edwards with the memory-erasing serum instead of killing him. This prompts the only instance in the entire trilogy where he actually gets nervous.
• Pacifist Run: It is possible to make your way through the level without killing anyone…including your actual target.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The code to enter the second door of the train is 1979, handily shown on a poster nearby.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: As everyone on board the train are Providence members, the mission allows 47 to eliminate non-targets without any score repercussions, as their deaths would further damage the organization. 47 can also avenge Lucas Grey by eliminating the Elite Mooks responsible for his suicide.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: From Diana, of all people, in 47's hallucination:

  Still clinging on to your self-image? Agent 47, the apex predator. Always hiding behind the headlines. Was perfection its own justification, or a willful distraction? A wall built contract by contract to shield you from the uncomfortable truth: you're exactly the tool they bred you to be. Quite a piece of work you are. How could you possibly function on your own? You never ever even had a name. Until I gave you one.

• Rousing Speech: A hallucination of Lucas then explains that the neurotoxin she dosed 47 with is forcing his fears into the forefront and that Diana simply did so to get 47 a chance to eliminate the Constant where he feels most safe. Diana then tells him to embrace the past, which is represented by him detonating the Burnwood family car before he wakes up.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: When Edwards attempts to convince 47 to take the memory-erasing serum again, 47 bluntly refuses.
  Edwards: I trust you know what this is... why not simply take it? Embrace who you were always meant to be?
  47: No. Never again.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The whole mission takes place onboard a train populated by Providence operatives, meaning there's really only one way forward towards the main target and far fewer options when it comes to movement. It's the most linear mission in the World of Assassination trilogy, relatively speaking. A sub-objective also gives you carte blanche to eliminate anyone onboard, lethally. It is equally viable to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge through the carriages for Lucas Grey's death, and also completely possible to stealth your way through it using disguises and environmental tricks, and even a straight shootout is equally viable, in keeping with the trend from the older games of having a big action climax when finally confronting the Big Bad.

Ambrose Island: "Shadows in the Water"

An Interquel mission set in the two-month gap between "Another Life" and "The Ark Society" in Hitman 2. While 47, Diana, Olivia, and Grey prepare for the Ark Society's gathering, a complication arises. One of Grey's fixers, Noel Crest, has gone rogue from the militia after being told by Grey to stop all activities to harm Providence. Crest has turned Grey's militia into a ruthless heist crew, and has teamed up with a pirate gang operating from Ambrose Island; a remote island in the Andaman Sea shipping lane. Crest wants to access to an ETHER satellite containing priceless information. However, this would tip off Providence in the process and compromise 47 and company's plans on the Isle of Sgàil. By happenstance, the leader of the pirate gang, Sinhi "Akka" Venthan, already has an ICA contract out on her head, and Diana decides to use this as a cover story while their true objective remains hidden.

47's mission is to go the pirates' hideout on Ambrose Island to kill Crest, Akka, and prevent the Militia or the pirates from accessing the satellite; either by destroying the servers or by acquiring two keycards needed to use the sattellite. Grey, due to his knowledge of Crest, becomes your handler.

---

• And Your Reward Is Clothes: By default, 47 lands on the island wearing the "Guerrilla Wetsuit", which is essentially a jungle-themed patterned reskin of the Tactical Wetsuit from Hawkes Bay from Hitman 2. Getting to Mastery Level 20 in the level unlocks it to your inventory to take anywhere.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The two Fetch Quest givers will respond to 47 regardless of disguise.
• Balance Buff: The Mastery level 20 item unlock for the level is a Molotov Cocktail. When it first released, this granted an accident kill if certain radius' were respected and if it was thrown properly. However, the weapon was also quite buggy, being able to kill through walls, using dart guns to get an extra Molotov, while the radius' for triggering an accident kill were really tricky to get down. The following patch had IOI remove the accident kill and explosive properties, now only setting people on fire. The change was motivated not by balance, oddly enough, but because they found it to be a bit unbelievable that throwing a Molotov Cocktail at someone could count as an accident kill, now putting it in the same territory as the remote explosives.
• Call-Back: Given this acts as an Interquel between "Another Life" and "The Ark Society" in Hitman 2, there are multiple callbacks to various Hitman and Hitman 2 levels:
  • Noel Crest was previously mentioned in both "The Showstopper" (as a fixer for Sir Humphrey Titus Rutherford) and "Freedom Fighters" (as an unseen member of the Militia).
  • To "World of Tomorrow", as the heart of the mission revolves around a piece of technology from the ETHER corporation, while Silvio Caruso and his engineered virus are mentioned to be stored in ETHER's database, indeed Crest's plan was to use the Virus on Providence, something that makes Grey quite unsettled when 47 discovers this.
  • Torres Piombo, the hippie from Sapienza, makes a return alongside his friend Gregory Yeager from "Three-Headed Serpent".
  • One of Akka's hostages is Agent Smith, having been captured once more during another Interpol operation.
  • Orson Mills appears as one of Crest's soldiers, carrying the disk needed to access the satellite. He mentions the death of Alma carried out by 47 in Nightcall, and also mentions his plans for his attacks in Brussels not going ahead, the mission Alma and Grey wanted him to do.
  • The briefing has the quote "It's a dangerous thing, having a conscience" scrawled over the first few frames of the briefing, which was said by Grey to Diana as the last words in the "Precautions" cutscene.
  • The Delgado cartel is mentioned in Noel Crest’s bio. He is now allied with Akka and her syndicate of pirates because of the cartel’s destruction.
  • The Isle of Sgàil is seen in the Briefing, with Zoe's bounty hunters moving crates and getting things ready, as well as him being in Colorado, as Noel Crest talks to Grey's militia and takes command, against Grey's wishes.
  • Grey namedrops Romania in the briefing as to when he told the Militia to stand down on attacking Providence, alluding to his and 47's meeting at The Institute for Human Betterment in the "Homecoming" cinematic, presumably making the call after that meeting concluded.
  • Wazir Kale is mentioned by Grey, with Ambrose Island being one of his ports of call.
  • One of Dawood Rangan's DVDs, Mumbai Hero, can be seen in one of the huts next to Farah's bar, with a pair of NPCs talking about it, pining over a career in Bollywood.
  • Pam Kingsley's news report from Whittleton Creek on the murder of Wazir Kale can be seen on a few of the TVs around the level, done to reinforce where this mission takes place in the timeline.
  • Chiron, the shipping company Lance Hsu is associated with, first appeared as the branding of various cargo boxes in "The Pen and the Sword" and "Chasing a Ghost".
  • Many of 47's voice lines in the Slappers mini-game are taken from all over the trilogy, cribbed from either cutscenes or times when 47 speaks to people.
  • During a conversation with another civilian, Farah mentions that the island gets it name from one of its colonizers, Thomas Ambrose Carlisle, an ancestor of Alexa Carlisle whose tombstone can be seen in "Death in the Family".
• Call-Forward: When talking to a guard, Orson contemplates raiding a place in West Flanders as it has "a lotta cash flowing through it", which the following mission in the timeline (The Ark Society) confirms Orson goes ahead with, as The Constant talks to Mikhail about it in a phonecall, after which he was ensnared by Providence.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • One of the secondary objectives involves neutralizing a stolen ETHER satellite uplink. 47 can steal both the keycards required to access the unit, disable the safety mechanism and cause an electrical overload... or just riddle the device with bullets.
  • There is a vent in the prison ruins conveniently above the satellite uplink. If you, say, throw an explosive down there, and detonate it, you'll destroy the server uplink without needing to visit the caves.
• Developer's Foresight: Obtaining the uplink access keys nullifies the need to destroy the control unit, as it becomes a worthless paperweight, but it can still be destroyed anyway. Grey will call 47 a show-off if he does this but congratulates him for being thorough.
  Grey: Such a show-off. But, there's no harm in being thorough.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Crest is mentioned by name in militia conversations during "Freedom Fighters" in 2016, but isn't in the level.
• Everyone Is Armed: Since the island is an outpost for both Crest's militia and Akka's pirate gang, a good chunk of the island is armed, including Crest himself.
• Fetch Quest: Two appear.
  • Gregory Yeager (the PhD student) will ask 47 to acquire a pair of toxic specimens for him. Completing the quest will net an emetic grenade, a vial of poison, and a key to the ruins.
  • Farah will ask 47 to find a coconut, retrieve a stolen cigar box, and ultimately to investigate rumors of a prisoner being held by the militia. Completing the quest will trigger a meeting between the two targets.
• Interquel: Chronologically, the level is set in the two month gap established in "Precautions" between Hitman 2’s Whittleton Creek and Isle of Sgàil missions, but the level was released over 18 months after the release of Hitman 3.
• Item Crafting: Placed around the map are various objects that can be used for crafting, such as fuses and vodka bottles, which can make a handmade explosive and a Molotov Cocktail respectively.
• Kent Brockman News: Pam can be seen on a few of the TVs around the island, delivering the news of Wazir Kale's death, as she did on the TVs found in Whittleton Creek.
• Maneki Neko: Several golden Maneki Neko statues appear throughout the map. Shooting them in a specific order, then using the fishing rod will summon a giant one from the sea as an Easter Egg, rewarding 47 with some fish.
• Molotov Cocktail: You can find these on the island, and can be unlocked at Mastery Level 20. If thrown correctly, it will set people on fire, but will void Silent Assassin (though it did used to grant an accident kill, see Balance Buff).
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Grey initially assumes Crest's goal is extortion in the briefing, but the laptop near the uplink reveals that his plan was to use ETHER's DNA targeting virus to wipe out all of Providence and the Partners, which seems to rattle him quite a bit.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: The level partially reuses assets from both Mumbai (notably the shipping containers), and most of the locals are Indian, as well as the boats being reused from Bangkok. It also takes cues from Santa Fortuna (the foliage, trees, and plants everywhere are partially taken from that level), with some parts coming from Haven Island.
• Plot Device: The server needs to be either destroyed, or keycards must be obtained to deny access so the milita is locked out of contacting the ETHER satellite, which would complicate the trio's plans on taking down The Constant and Providence in The Ark Society. As with Golden Handshake's data rack, it too has the internal name of "Mcguffin", and once again, it fails to fit the TV Tropes definition (the server is unique and relevant to moving the story along, it can't be replaced with anything else as only that specific server can access the ETHER satellite, and its value, once again, is not of concern for the trio).
• Renegade Splinter Faction: Under Noel Crest, the militia members on the island have retooled themselves into a dangerous heist group, having gone rogue from Grey's command to launch even bolder, more reckless attacks on Providence front companies for their own profit. While Grey isn't exactly happy with this, his more pressing concern is that their brazen activity threatens to undermine his own movements against The Constant.
• Rope Bridge: One spans the chasm between the Colonial Ruins and the Shrine. 47 can sabotage a small section of planks, causing whoever to step over it to plummet to their doom.
• Ruthless Modern Pirates: What Ambrose Island partially comprises of.
• Serious Business: The Slappers game. Noel uses it as a way to pass the time with the locals, but also seemingly to find new heisting crewmates for his operations.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As Grey points out in the briefing, one of the problems of Diana and 47 fulfilling Providence's contracts to hunt down the militia, is that Grey had very few people he could turn to for reliable support in helping to run it. Him teaming up with Noel Crest, someone even Grey admits was a bad apple, but was the only move he could make at the time, and he doesn't sound entirely surprised Crest usurped him.
• Tropical Island Adventure: As you'd expect from a pirate's nest in the Andaman Sea.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: When doing certain actions in the militia-controlled parts of the island, Grey will talk to 47 about this trope, and how it applies to the militia as a whole. Grey goes to great pains to point out that the militia are going for the same goal they are, and that not every fixer he hired is as arrogant and backstabbing as Crest is.

Elusive Target Arcade

Escalation-style contracts that feature Elusive Targets, but with extra, and unique, complications.

Elusive Target Arcade

---

• Arbitrary Mission Restriction: "The Blusterous" has the unique kill complication of disallowing poison kills, albeit optionally enforced. This is notable, as all three targets specifically have a routine for drinking (Vincente, Joanne) or eating (Wen Ts'ai) that was deliberately added as a good way to kill them silently. This complication makes it considerably trickier than other targets in the arcade.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Completing track 7 of the arcade rewards you with The Ruby Rude Track Suit, a garish pink, black and white tracksuit with geometric shapes and Animesque faces printed on the back, turning 47 into a Fashion-Victim Villain.
  • Completing track 8 of the arcade rewards you with The Neon Ninja Suit, an outfit that turns 47 into a Highly-Visible Ninja, with neon strings in certain places that glow in the dark.
  • Completing track 9 of the arcade rewards you with The Lucky Ducky Suit, a yellow hoodie with a large red duck in front of the garment. This is notably similar to the real-life "Red Duck with Heavy Hoody" item found on IOI's official merch store.
• Balance Buff: When this mode first released, players complained about the "Hide all bodies" complication breaking the mode's replayability and freedom of approach, as it forced Complacent Gaming Syndrome of using emetic-themed items, like the Sieker 1, to kill targets. The March 3rd, 2022 server-side patch changed all complications on all but one contract, which removed this restriction.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!:
  • Completing track 1 of the arcade rewards you with the Krugermeier 2-2 Dark; a black, tactical-themed version of the Krugermeier weapon from 2016 and 2, with a ribbed barrel and iron sights.
  • Completing track 2 of the arcade rewards you with the Sieger AR552 Tactical; a unique weapon only previously found in the armory in Mendoza.
  • Completing track 3 of the arcade rewards you with The Striker V3, a chrome variant of "The Striker" from the Hitman (2016) GOTY Access Pass.
  • Completing track 4 of the arcade rewards you with "The Ducky Gun", a very yellow reskin of the Custom 5mm concealable gun from 2016. When you shoot, you hear duck sounds!
  • Completing track 5 of the arcade rewards you with The White Ruby Rude 300 Sniper Rifle, a colorful reskin of the Sieger 300 Ghost from the 2016 GOTY Edition with identical stats to match.
  • Completing track 6 of the arcade rewards you with The Iridescent Katana, a reskin of the regular color that shines different colors when light hits it.
  • Completing track 10 of the arcade rewards you with... a Banana.
  • Completing track 11 grants you access to the Nitroglycerin; a unique explosive formerly exclusive to being found in Colorado.
• The Bus Came Back: Basically why this mode exists. Players had requested for years for Elusive Targets to be permanently added into the game; and not only does this solve the problem, it twists the contracts to be unique to their original time-limited runs by introducing mostly optional complications. As for the returning targets:
  • Returning from Hitman (2016) are:
    • The Pharmacist returns for "The Clichés", The Identity Thief returns for "The Deceits".
    • The Forger, The Blackmailer, and The Food Critic return for "The Clutches".
    • The Surgeons return for "The Dyads".
    • The Papparazzo returns for "The Nebulae".
    • The Bad Boy returns for "The Bombastic".
    • The Sensation returns for "The Malefactors".
  • Returning from Hitman 2 are:
    • The Prince and The Angel of Death return for "The Deceits".
    • The Gunrunner returns for "The Nebulae".
• Contractual Boss Immunity: The targets of "The Epicures" can't be lethally poisoned.
• Gratuitous French: Many of the names are French words being used as titles, such as Faux Pas (False Step), Déjà vu ("expressing the feeling that one has lived through the present situation before"), Provocateur (to provoke people) and Carte Blanche ("blank card", or more figuratively, "acting in discretion with power").
• Meaningful Name: The arcade titles usually describe the contract conditions, the targets of the contract, and/or their occupations and shared personalities:
  • "The Codices" are referring to a book or ancient manuscript; The final target requires you to collect a book.
  • "The Clichés", which usually means an expected repeat of an idea or work (often seen as overdone), has two targets that are inversions of this in a meta sense, as both Nila Torvik and Richard Foreman haven't been re-run since 2016 and Hitman 2 respectively, and even The Deceivers has only been re-run once before right at the start of this games' life.
  • "The Deceits" all feature people deceiving others; Father Candelaria (The Prince) deceives the church and his followers in the hopes of becoming pope, Brendan Connor is a conman and identity thief that is also his codename, Etta Davis is pretending to be a helpless old lady while moonlighting as a murderer, while Ji Hu is infamous for causing trouble in so many nations that every services' agencies have put a joint contract out on him.
  • "The Detours" all feature a side objective or complication innate to the contract; a detour from the main mission, as it were. Dame Barbara Keating asks you to kill the real Keating, and not her doppelganger, Jimmy Chen has a voice recorder you must acquire, and Miranda Jamison has a book you must obtain.
  • "The Entrepreneurs" means "a business owner who makes money via initiative, personal drive and risk". Two of the targets featured make money in different ways (Miranda makes money selling art, while Dame Barbara Keating is a New Zealand tycoon, and former Minister of Trade and Foreign Affairs that was caught funnelling charity donations to her account).
  • "The Vitae" means "Life", and all the targets are all leading eccentric careers. Terrance is leading a life of laziness, Alison leads a life of a con artist, and Philo leads the life of a serial killer-turned-murderer-of-spouses.
  • "The Faux Pas" means "False Step" in French, and is usually used in the context of a blunder or embarrassing accident; the contract is all about causing accidents.
  • "The Dyads" is named after the term Dyads in sociology, essentially meaning a group of two people; all the targets in this contract are duos (The Deceivers, The Procurers, and The Surgeons).
  • "The Diabolicals" is referring to the particularly nasty targets featured here; The Serial Killer (who has killed people simply to grade how they die), The Heartbreaker (A wedding planner who attempts to usurp someone in a relationship after killing their significant other) and The Entertainer (The ironically named "Mr Giggles" who has No Sense of Humor who poisons subordinates, hosts illegal circuses that torture animals, and has a weird pattern all over his face).
  • "The Illusory" features targets that need identifying by the player; Dylan Narvaez from his twin Gonzales, Dame Barbara Keating from her doppelganger, and Owen Wagner from his friend "White Cap".
  • "The Infiltrators" features targets that all infiltrate the levels main areas; Kieren Hudson trying to get behind the scenes in Paris, Jimmy Chen who has infiltrated the Ark Societys' wait staff, and Kody Haynes, who impersonates a wildlife inspector to get into Dartmoor manor to steal a painting.
  • "The Bombastic" refers to the complication of killing all people with explosions.
  • "The Blusterous" has the meaning of "Loud and aggressive"; two of the targets; Wen Ts'ai and Vincente Murillo, are quite loud and very aggressive in their times in the level (Vincente in broadcasts around Santa Fortuna, Ts'ai when complaining about his food to a waiter).
  • "The Tregatours" refers to the targets in the contracts all being adept at deception (Foreman is deceiving a US airbase by pretending to be a US air general, Moretta is a conwoman, while Connors was an darknet identity thief); "Tregatour" meaning "trickster".
  • "The Thespians" means "Actor"; all the targets are acting in some manner (Walter is a fashion model, Mr. Giggles is a circus ringleader, and Jimmy Chen was a failed actor).
  • "The Phantoms" refers to the targets; Owen Wagner, Ji-Hu, and The Censor, all being unidentified at the start of the mission.
  • "The Malefactors" has the meaning of doing some past crime; all the targets are guilty of this (Smythe killed people, but then became a Reclusive Artist to authorities, Argus framed his friend to avoid prison, and Bowden runs an illegal boxing operation, and has killed during these events).
  • "The Epicures" has the meaning of people being tricky about taste. The targets all work with food (Santos, Ts'ai, Roe and Burke).
  • "The Baneful" means harmful to others: all the targets featured here have hurt communities (Torvik), or killed multiple people (Moretta and Newcombe).
  • "The Authoritarians" features targets who are connected to dictatorships (the Ekwensis are dictators in exile, Adeze Oijofor is an East African warlord, and Pertti Järnefelt was a Waffen-SS member).
  • "The Aesthetes" means to have appreciation for art; all the targets here have the theme of being related to art in some manner (Jamison unveiling an art piece for Blake Nathanial, Moxon is an antiques trader, and Haynes is trying to steal a painting from Carlisle Manor).
• Obvious Rule Patch: Stage 2 of "The Faux Pas" has you killing Terrance Chesterfield in an accident. However, unlike his run as an Elusive Target, there's only one starting point; the Club Entrance. This was likely done to specifically counter players using the disco ball exploit to kill him quickly, and the game now enforces the gameplay loop intended by the developers.
• Serial Escalation: Each arcade contract has either three or five levels; each containing a specific line of Elusive Targets with complications, such as "you must not pacify more than once" or "you can only have one disguise change".

Downloadable Content

The Undying Pack

Miami: "The Ouroboros"

• And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating: Buying the DLC grants you access to five different cosmetics for the Freelancer safehouse, all themed around The Undying and Kronstadt Industries.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Buying the DLC unlocks the "Kronstadt Mini Flash Robo XOI-2900", the "Kronstadt IOI-1998X Surround Earphones", and the "Kronstadt Explosive Pen", all of which are either minor reskins or remodels of the original set of Undying-themed items with a white coat of paint; the Lil' Flashy, the Earphones (which, despite the connection to Faba, actually wasn't originally an unlockable in 2, only being an in-level item in later 2 levels), and the Explosive Pen (which also got an unlockable variant for Elusive Target Arcade a year prior).
• Casting Gag: As with the original mission, Sean Bean returns to provide his voice and likeness for "The Undying" and "The Undying Returns".
• Meaningful Name: The Ouroboros is an ancient symbol where a serpent eats his own tail, meant to signify life, death and rebirth. Given the contract has you kill Mark Faba, a guy who seems to be impossible to kill off (to the point of being the only Elusive Target to have two technically separate contracts rather than simply being rerun), this is a very suitable name.
• Mythology Gag: The "Kronstadt IOI-1998X Surround Earphones" are named after IO Interactive, and the "1998" refers to the company being created.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: As mentioned below, the stage completion requirements are quite odd difficulty-wise. Stage 1 is relatively easy (kill Faba with the pen in the laboratory, which he often stares at), Stage 2 is completely freeform, so it can be as easy or as hard as the player desires, and Stage 3 is the hardest of the stages (don't get spotted and do not change disguises).
• Serial Escalation: This Elusive Target Arcade contract is one of the simplest out there, though the final level may be a bit of a challenge in a suit:
  1. Kill Mark Faba with the Kronstadt Pen...
  2. ..then kill Mark Faba (now with a eyepatch) in any way you want...
  3. ...and finally kill Mark Faba without changing out of your starting disguise, and without getting spotted; essentially, a mandatory Silent Assassin Suit Only run.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: This Elusive Target Arcade contract is the only one that is paid for, and also is one of the rare few ETA contracts where objectives are actually enforced and not optional after the March 3rd 2022 patch. Yet it is also the only ETA contract that features a stage where there are no complications and the player can kill Mark Faba in any way they see fit.
• Virtual Paper Doll: The DLC gives you the Ephemeral Suit with Eye Patch, an exact replica of the suit Faba wears in The Undying Returns. On a related note, a free, non-eyepatch variant can be unlocked by completing the re-run of that mission, which ran at the same time around its release.

Deluxe Pack

Six escalations, one for each level, released as part of the Deluxe Edition of the game (and its associated DLC).

In General

---

• Art Evolution:
  • The unlockable "Formal Hunting Attire" outfit is merely inspired by the outfit it's referencing, as nobody in Hitman: Contracts actually wears this kind of hunting attire, instead wearing red waistcoats or other clothing. It was likely changed because it'd look too similar to the waiters outfit.
  • The Straitjacket is based on the Asylum Patient outfit 47 wears in Codename 47, Contracts and seen in the Birth of the Hitman comic (the latter two are retellings), but asides from the color (which varies between white and blue in the above entries), it doesn't really look anything like the hospital gown the games and comics otherwise portray.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Every pack comes with at least one stylized weapon and they are frequently ostentatious:
  • "The Asmodeus Waltz" comes with the Dak Gold Covert, a golden SMG that matches the suit gotten from the escalation.
  • "The Percival Passage" unlocks the Bartoli Hunting Shotgun Deluxe, a traditional-looking shotgun used for hunting animals.
  • "The Satu Mare Delirium" unlocks the Taunton Dart Gun, a sedative dart gun apparently made by Ort-Meyer himself.
  • "The Lee Hong Derivation" unlocks The Golden Dragon, a sniper rifle with a golden dragon head on it and old-fashioned scope and body, and is a perfect recreation of the sniper rifle one can unlock in Hitman: Sniper.
  • "The Gauchito Antiquity" unlocks the Guru's Pen Emetic Syringe, and the Guru's Emetic Grenade, both based on the Emetic Syringe and Emetic Grenade unlocks found in the game.
  • "The Proloff Parable" unlocks the White Sieger 300, a redesigned Sieger 300 Ghost, as well as the White Katana, a redesigned Katana you can unlock in Hokkaido.
• Call-Back: The outfits you unlock in each escalation are based on outfits worn by targets and people in the past Hitman games:
  • "The Devil's Own" is based on the same golden devil costume worn by the corrupt CIA Agent in "A Dance with the Devil"; Anthony Martinez in Hitman: Blood Money.
  • The "Formal Hunting Attire" is based on the same fox-hunting attire worn by the hunters at Beldingford Manor in Contracts.
  • "The Straitjacket" is loosely based on the Asylum Patient outfit worn by 47 in the tutorial for Hitman: Codename 47 game.
  • "The Black Dragon" is based on the Red Dragon Triad Member outfit, also from Codename 47.
  • The "Guru Suit" is based on the outfit worn by Deewana Ji, a death cult leader 47 kills in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin.
  • "The White Shadow" ninja outfit is an almost perfect recreation of the same getup worn by the Ninjas that Masahiro Hayamoto hires for security in Silent Assassin.
• Mad Lib Thriller Title: All the missions are named in this fashion, as per Escalation tradition:
  • "The Asmodeus Waltz" refers to "Asmodeus", the king of demons from the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit, while "Waltz" refers to a specific type of dance. The name, when put together, is referring to the mission "A Dance with the Devil" from Blood Money.
  • "The Satu Mare Delirium" refers to the Satu Mare asylum, the facility 47 escapes from at the start of Codename 47 (and by extension Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman which recreates that gameplay).
  • "The Lee Hong Derivation" refers to Lee Hong, one of the main targets in Codename 47. The "Derivation" part is referring to the objectives, which are derived from two missions from that game; "The Massacre at Cheung Chau Fish Restaurant", and "The Seafood Massacre".
  • "The Gauchito Antiquity" refers to a religious figure in Argentinian folklore. Antiquity means "from the past".
• Serial Escalation: Like most other Escalations, the requirements to complete each level get harder with each repeat in some way, see each folder for the breakdown.
• Shaped Like Itself: The Golden Briefcases' description is literally just "a golden briefcase".
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: With the exception of "The Asmodeus Waltz" (which is essentially a regular escalation), the rest of the escalations are structured quite a bit differently to anything else found in the main game. Berlin and Carpathians' escalations in particular are structured to begin where the previous stage ended. Although they are considerably more straightforward than the below-mentioned Seven Deadly Sins escalations, as these act more like sidequests, rather than game modes with a gimmick.

Seven Deadly Sins

A set of seven content packs themed around the Seven Deadly Sins.

In General

---

• And Your Reward Is Clothes: As mentioned under Costume Porn, the suits in these packs are intentionally designed to be over-the-top in some way, usually with a metal finish, or otherwise unusual texturing techniques not seen with other suits.
  • The Greed pack gives you the "Rapacious Suit", an over-the-top gold suit adorned with wavy patterns.
  • The Pride pack gives you the "Narcissus Suit", a similarly over-the-top silver suit with inlaid mirrors and an eye motif.
  • The Sloth pack gives you the "Lotophagic Suit", a blue suit that looks like it's covered in snail mucus, and has a loose shirt and tie.
  • The Lust pack gives you the "Scarlet Suit", an ornately designed red suit, with 47 wearing a black turtleneck underneath, red fingerless driving gloves, and a pair of aviator sunglasses.
  • The Gluttony pack gives you the "Profligacy Suit", a black and copper-trimmed suit complete with elegant cape with a fork and spoon in a crossed sword motif.
  • The Envy pack gives you the "Odium Suit", a green tracksuit with jagged black and white stripes that look similar to a cat scratch.
  • The Wrath pack gives you the "Temper Suit", a brown trench coat with a fur-patterned black shirt, as well as sunglasses.
• Animal Motifs: Each pack is represented by an animal, usually the one that is mythologically relevant:
  • Greed has a very large frog, in reference to the mythology surrounding the fact that Toads want to spend time in both water and on land.
  • Pride has a peacock, as peacocks are usually depicted as showoffs with pretty feathers.
  • Sloth has a snail, as snails are not known for being particularly fast.
  • Lust has a serpent, although this one is downplayed, as while the serpent is present in the items and suit (as well as the reveal trailer), the person talking in the previous packs was a statue of the animal, whereas here it is a woman, albeit one who wears a serpent-patterned dress and sporting a snake tattoo.
  • Gluttony has a pig - a pig so fat it can't move.
  • Envy has a cat - although interestingly, this isn't an animal usually associated with this particular sin (Dogs and goats are, usually).
  • Wrath has a bear, although like Lust, it can be hard to see this motif on the suit. The flash grenade does make this clearer, and in the secret rooms where 47 can gather weapons, there is bear taxidermy.
• Arrange Mode: Like all other escalations, this is the core gameplay; many aspects of a level have been moved about or changed to be harder for the player. Specific examples are in each folder.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Every pack comes with at least one stylized weapon and they are frequently ostentatious:
  • Appropriately enough, the Greed pack contains a decorated golden suit and cane, and a new type of coin. One of the prizes 47 can gain from the frog is the ICA Goldballer, a gold-plated gun. This gun was later released as an unlockable during Lust.
  • The Pride pack has a silver suit adorned with mirrors, a silver sniper rifle with a peacock motif, and an elegant silver pirate saber.
  • The Lust pack comes with a snake-draped crossbow and a silver ring that looks expensive but is actually a remote explosive.
  • The Gluttony pack has a gold-trimmed shotgun.
  • The Envy pack has a modified Jaeger 7 sniper rifle with inlaid jade grip, as well as a knife called The Cat's Claw.
  • The Wrath pack has a Shashiska assault rifle with a wooden finish, as well as a bear-themed flashbang device.
• Color Motif: There is a thematic color representing each of the different sins, and the edges of the screen will be washed in that color. It will become more pronounced when completing one of the Escalation's steps;
  • "The Greed Enumeration" renders Dubai's already mostly golden color scheme into a combination of dull grays and excessive yellows. The screen's edges will wash in gold.
  • "The Pride Profusion" has Chongqing washed in a silver and purple shade.
  • "The Sloth Depletion" doesn't have the color washes of the other two when it comes to light sources, but the edges of the screen are washed in steel blue.
  • "The Lust Assignation" has Berlin washed in tones of red and pink.
  • "Gluttony Gobble", similar to Sloth, has a color wash at the beginning of the map in a copper and orange rust wash.
  • "The Envy Contention" has a green filter.
  • "The Wrath Termination" has a brown filter, with a blood color wash on the sides of the screen.
• The Corruption: The premise of the escalations are that they are dream manifestations of 47's consciousness triggered by the neurotoxin Diana gives 47 at the end of Mendoza going haywire, and are influenced by his trust of Diana being utterly shattered due to her betrayal. This is supported by the fact that Diana is attempting to wake 47 up in the intro for the first few escalations in the pack, but repeatedly gets cut off (or in the case of Greed, turns into a corrupted manifestation of Diana who only cares about money and coins, and actually suggests 47's friends are this trope, not her). The voices in 47's head are all trying to corrupt 47 to act differently (or to prove he's the best).
• Costume Porn: The suits that each Sin represents are very extravagant, oftentimes being very shiny and metal-like in design. Sloth, however, given the name, has more of a Stylistic Suck to its appearance, being based on snail mucus.
• Gun Porn: Many of the packs have very ornate-looking items:
  • Greed offers a gold cane.
  • Pride offers an elegant silver saber and peacock-motifed silver sniper rifle.
  • Sloth offers "The Goldbrick"; a Snail sedative proximity mine.
  • Lust offers a silver ring and an elegant crossbow.
  • Gluttony offers a gold-plated sawn-off shotgun.
  • Envy has a jagged knife and jade-plated sniper rifle.
  • Wrath has an ornate bear figurine and a wood-finished assault rifle.
• Mad Lib Thriller Title: All the missions are named in this fashion, as per Escalation tradition:
  • "The Greed Enumeration" is named for the constant collection of coins, which you are encouraged to get from your targets.
  • "The Pride Profusion" refers to the abundance of pride one gets from completing tricky tasks (in this case, killing people with unusual weaponry). Shame also comes into it too, as the Peacock will berate 47 for choosing the easier path.
  • "The Sloth Depletion" is named after the vitality meter used in the escalation; where you have to act slowly, and must think carefully as to how you complete it without losing all of your vitality.
  • "The Lust Assignation" is named after a type of secret appointment, typically made by lovers, which fits perfectly for Lust, because that's precisely what she's trying to do.
  • "The Gluttony Gobble" is named after voracious eating; in this level, you feed the pig the food it wants.
  • "The Envy Contention" is named after Envy the cat being envious of 47's role as being the best assassin. This level features racing against another person; "The Rival", to be the best assassin.
  • "The Wrath Termination" is named after the act of killing the Inducers storming the manor with traps and lethal weaponry.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: With the sole exception of Greed, the levels tend to reuse assets and music from all over the trilogy. Justified for Lust, as the level is a deliberate Call-Back to "The Ark Society", with the dance floor being designed like one of the rooms in that level.
• Recycled Soundtrack: The music from Hitman 2 is mostly reused in this game mode as the music for each level, albeit altered to fit the theme more; the exceptions being Greed and Pride, as those use that levels' base music:
  • Sloth uses "Three-Headed Serpents"'s music.
  • Lust uses "The Ark Society"'s music.
  • Gluttony uses "The Finish Line"'s music.
  • Envy uses "The Last Resort"'s music (and by extension, the level exit theme from "The Finish Line").
  • Wrath uses "Chasing A Ghost"'s music.
• Serial Escalation: Like most other Escalations, the requirements to complete each level get harder with each repeat in some way, see each folder for the breakdown (Lust being only one tier means it is the only exception, even among escalations as a whole).
• Seven Deadly Sins: Each content pack is themed around one of these.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: All the escalations in this pack are structured very differently to anything else in the main game and are quite a bit more experimental in their design, and especially lean on the Gimmick Level trope far more compared to other locations. Each one has examples of this trope underneath their folder.

Dubai: "The Greed Enumeration"

• Arrange Mode: The only large-scale differences between this and the main level is the deep voices everyone has, as well as the elevator shafts being open instead of closed.
• Developer's Foresight: Interestingly, you are able to knock out and take the coins of targets early if you pacify them, regardless of if they've been revealed to you yet, likely to avoid an Unintentionally Unwinnable situation where you could be soft-locked and have to start over.
• Easy Level Trick: The security rooms' footage box on the first floor is easy to access and sabotage as an elevator shaft runs through it; the shaft that's closest to Zana Kazem complaining. The room also contains a crowbar (which can be concealed when climbing, unlike the Greedy Cane) and a Penthouse Keycard (which can open many of the doors in the upper floors of the building).
• Easy-Mode Mockery: It is possible to end each level after the first target, but the frog will berate you for it.
• Loyal Phlebotinum: The coins collected in each previous level carry over into the next.
• Money Multiplier: Greed grants the player coins for each target killed, escalating with each target slain. The player can also carry these coins into later missions (the game also expects the player to have at least 3 coins per stage, regardless of how few you pick up). Also, it is possible to feed the coins to a golden frog in order to gain items to make the escalation easier.
• Money Spider: Your targets are this to you essentially, as they drop coins if you knock them out or kill them.
• Mythology Gag: The Greed pack's announcer lampshades how some of the earlier titles (Blood Money in particular) used to revolve around making money over more personal stories.
  Greed: Don't you long for the old days? Before things got personal, when it was all about seeing all those numbers grow in your bank account?
• Serial Escalation: The requirements to complete each level get harder with each repeat, however, you can spend coins you get by killing people on weapons given to you via the frog:
  1. Kill Teresa Salas and Hanako Katos with a neck snap, and Lars Blocker with a thrown weapon, such as a saber, all the while in a restricted loadout (you start with only the Devils' Cane).
  2. Kill Namimah Wahba using thrown weapon, Kelly To by drowning her, and Taqqee Koroma and Lalit Mandal must be eliminated by using an axe). You cannot change out of the Rapacious Suit.
  3. Kill Usama Tahir in any fashion while killing Keiji Kono, Carl Thorn, Tommy Marevick, Yoshi Morita with a pistol. Any actions that are illegal will fail the level, and you cannot change out of the Rapacious Suit.
• Two-Headed Coin: The Greedy Little Coin has two "heads" on it; namely the sigil used on the Silverballer and Goldballer.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: This mission grants the player coins for each target killed, escalating with each target slain. The player can also carry these coins into each level of the escalation. Also, it is possible to feed the coins to a golden frog in order to gain items to make the escalation easier.
• Violation of Common Sense: Stage 3 asks you to kill two targets with a pistol; there are no silenced pistols on the map, and essentially asks the player to shoot the person in the head, then hide their body quickly before a guard comes running in.

Chongqing: "The Pride Profusion"

• Achievement Mockery: Beating "Humility" nets you the challenge associated with it, as a form of Medal of Dishonor, as anyone who checks your challenge records will know that you (purposefully or not) beat the escalation this way.
• Announcer Chatter: There's quite a lot of it, as Pride will react to your past performance in past stages, what weapons you choose, among other things.
• Arrange Mode: This escalation gives you specific targets that require killing with specific equipment. Other than that, the map is very light on changes, other than the large amount of Announcer Chatter.
• Developer's Foresight: This escalation has a surprising amount of dialog for Pride to use if 47 does specific things, much of which won't be heard unless the player deliberately ignores Pride:
  • If 47 kills the civilian in stage 1, Pride will berate the player (either by saying it was "unnecessary", or by mocking them).
  • Like with The Greed Enumeration, the game remembers what you did in the previous stage. The intro lines and Announcer Chatter for Pride will be different depending on prior performance in past stages (such as choosing "Hubris" or "Humility" in various combinations of stage selection, all which elicit unique reactions). Pride narrating what weapon to choose will also be unique as it follows the same criteria.
• Easy Level Trick: The second and third Pride stages for "Hubris" have strict requirements, but these restrictions are applied when 47 chooses the weapon from the peacock, and not applied retroactively. Furthermore, the targets aren't spawned until the weapons are chosen, which means the player can safely ignore the peacock, clear out the location, and come back to get the targets much easier.
• Easy-Mode Mockery:
  • This escalation gives the player two choices: the "Humility" path or the "Hubris" path, the former easier than the latter. Pride will insult and actively berate 47 if they constantly pick the easier option. This also extends to the gameplay; It's very easy to achieve Silent Assassin in all three stages of "Humility", but it comes at the cost of being really boring and safe, by Pride's own admission. Stage 3 has 47 killing 4 targets with a saber, and getting the rating amounts to busywork involving 47 repeatedly using a photocopier and dumping their body into an elevator shaft nearby, all of which are right next to each other. Ironically, finding the peacock and exiting the level on each stage of "Humility" is harder than the actual "Humility" path gameplay.
  • If the first stage bonus objective of hiding all bodies is not completed in "Hubris", Pride will also berate the player.
• Irony:
  • Despite the Pride pack giving you new weapons to play with, you're actually discouraged by Pride from choosing them in this escalation, as Pride considers kills made with them boring, bland and lacking creativity. Could also be considered Self-Deprecation in some respects too.
  • Player perceptions of the Fiber Wire (used in Stage 3 of "Hubris") is that it's Boring, but Practical; not bad, but outclassed by other kill methods. Pride meanwhile, seems to find it a worthy item to let you test your skill in "Hubris" and doesn't consider it boring.
• Schmuck Bait: There's a civilian you can kill by throwing them off the walkway in stage 1, which Pride asks you to ignore. Going through with it does actually provide unique dialog, with Pride not being impressed.
• Serial Escalation: This mission is unique in that the weapons chosen by the player gives 47 different targets; and the requirements to complete each level get harder. As such, you have to complete this mission twice over to kill all the targets possible:
  • If the Easy "Humility" path is taken:
  1. Kill both Geming Qiao and Yingtai Tang in an Explosion...
  2. ...Kill Virgilio Nelms, Hui Hou, Filiberto Newbold, and Lavern Cancel with "The Majestic" sniper rifle...
  3. ..and kill Da Yin, Abe Freeborn, Salvador Moline, and Tomas Perren with "The Proud Swashbuckler" sword.
  • If the Hard "Hubris" path is taken:
  1. Kill Lavern Cancel and Sam Brownlee with the Tanto sword...
  2. ..Poison Meilin Du, Sherman Marcoux, and Hung Smithers with three separate Antique Lethal Syringe
  3. ..and finally, kill Sharoon Reed, Harry Peters, and Leslie Huguley using the Fiber Wire Classic, all without pacifying anyone else and only eliminating the targets...in the ICA facility.
• Studio Audience: The Pride escalation is structured to have one. There is applause for every kill, and the paparazzi can be heard taking your picture.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: This mission gives the player two different ways to handle the assignment; Hubris (hard) and Humility (Easy). Both tracks have different targets and execution methods, and Pride hints that one will be more challenging than the other.
• Violation of Common Sense: The harder "Hubris" path assumes the player is aware of various gameplay tricks. In Level 2's "Hubris" path, Meilin Du is facing a barred window while he's checking on a test subject, and the immediate option players have is throwing objects to attract his attention, which does work, but that tends to attract unwanted attention, and their back will always be blocked by the wall. Instead, the game expects you to stand in front of the window briefly before the detection meter fills up, which attracts only his attention (instead of both scientists), and his back will always be turned away.
• What the Hell, Player?: Pride will insult you if you go against their better wishes, such as choosing the "Humility" path, or by killing the civilian at the start of the first stage.

Dartmoor: "The Sloth Depletion"

• Anti-Frustration Feature: The Jogger runs around the entire map, and killing her restores about 60% vitality. Even in Stage 3 (which is set mostly indoors), there's a sniper rifle you can get from a snail monument that spawns on the balcony where you start nearby, and that allows you to take out the jogger silently without needing to waste vitality going outside.
• Arrange Mode: This is where the packs finally start adding unique props and NPC's and try to change the levels up to provide a different experience to the base level. There is trash everywhere, providing cover in some cases. The skybox is more grim and cloudy, and there is a jogger who can be killed for more vitality.
• Casting Gag: Sloth is voiced by Richard Stemp, who voices Terrance Chesterfield; A.K.A "The Liability" Elusive Target, which came out as part of the Season of Sloth; the same month this mission did.
• Serial Escalation: For this level, you must kill specific people. while paying attention to the vitality meter:
  1. Kill Layton Rose with any thrown weapon), Leonard Parsons (in an accident) and Ray Wright...
  2. ..then kill Oliver Dickens with any thrown weapon, Flynn Sharp and Jude Graham in separate accidents, and Jane Moss can be killed in any way....
  3. ...and finally kill Mr. Fernsby in an accident, kill Aron Ford Jr. in a falling accident, kill Lawrence Hunt in an accidental death, Mary Moore with any thrown weapon, and Ben Stone using any method.
• Sprint Meter: Sloth provides a vitality bar that will drain when 47 does any action other than staying still, and moving when the meter is at 0 will harm him. This meter turns off when the stages are complete.
• Stylistic Suck: The Sloth pack plays with this - its escalation is quite complex as it requires you to manage a vitality meter efficiently, but its items are designed to look lazy in-universe and out. The suit has some detail (3D snail mucus running down the suit jacket), but it's also a very loose fit for 47, while the "Slapdash SMG" is just a reskin of a concealable Hitman 2 SMG but in worse condition. The third item of the pack (A sedative poison mine disguised as a ceramic snail) is ornate but also described as "the bane of any garden sale", whatever that means.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: This mission provides a vitality bar that will drain when 47 does any action other than staying still, and moving when the meter is at 0 will harm him. This meter turns off when the stages are complete.

Berlin: "The Lust Assignation"

• Anti-Frustration Features: Keys spawn fairly close to Safe's, and they both have specific spawn points around the map that can be learned with enough time and restarts that allow you to see all possible outcomes.
• Collect-a-Thon Platformer: This mission involves finding keys to open safes dotted around the map that contain secret admirer letters, which hold clues as to determine who Lusts' secret admirer is.
• Femme Fatale: Lust certainly exemplifies both forms of her sin: She lusts for her secret admirer, but the six other hopefuls do not need to stay alive; in fact, she's perfectly happy if they're killed, exemplifying bloodlust in addition to sexual lust.
• Interchangeable Anti Matter Keys: The keys for the safes are not picky on which safe you use them on. Any key found anywhere on the map will work on any safe found anywhere on the map.
• Marathon Level: If the player goes for collecting all six clues, they'll need to go all around the map to find the safes and keys, which can take upwards of about 30 - 45 minutes.
• Mythology Gag: Lust is clearly based on Zoe and Sophia Washington; they too have a habit of calling people "pet", and emulating their other vocal patterns. Which makes sense, given the whole level is a deliberate homage to The Ark Society.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: Most of the assets and "Pretender" NPC's are taken from "The Ark Society", not to mention the music is also reused here too.
• Only Smart People May Pass: Completing the Lust mission requires the player to piece together clues to find Lust's secret admirer. Said clues are hidden in safes that require keys to be found around the map:
  • The first will mention if the admirer smokes or not.
  • The second will mention if the admirer dances or not.
  • The third will mention whether the admirer drinks whiskey, wine, or champagne. Since the wine can be white wine, determining whether or not the admirer drinks champagne requires looking at the glasses; Champagne is in flutes, white wine uses wine glasses.
  • The fourth will mention whether the admirer is a man or a woman.
  • The fifth will mention if the admirer has a beard (if a man) or whether or not the admirer wears furs (if a woman).
  • The sixth will mention hair color, or a hairstyle, clothing type, and clothing colors (such as a white bowtie).
• Pink Is Erotic: The entire escalation is decorated in pink and red color hues.
• Random Number God: The locations of the Keys and Safes are randomly placed around the map with each run. They do use specific spawn points, however, so it is learnable. Similarly, the gender, hair color, and clothing of the secret admirer is also random each run.
• Running Gag: The oiled-up, mostly naked dancer atop the balcony looking over the mosh pit returns for this level, but instead of dancing and jumping about to techno music as in "Apex Predator", they are now doing some swaying motions and is looking up at the ceiling, as if they've been sedated by the change to classical music.
• Scenery Porn: Unlike Greed (which was drenched in golden hues and a sickly Gold color) and Sloth (which was deliberately filled with junk from various places to give off an unkempt vibe), this level's interior is redesigned pretty heavily to resemble a high-class establishment, notably Hitman 2's "The Ark Society", and looks quite stunning as a result of having party lights, candles and fancy decor everywhere.
• Serial Escalation: Notably, this level does not feature any kind of escalating level structure, essentially being a Marathon Level where you find clues in safes around the map to identify the Secret Admirer for Lust.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • This mission is the only escalation to have one stage, rather than the 3-level or 5-level escalations seen in the rest of the trilogy. It is, however, the longest escalation by time to complete by quite a wide margin if you go for all the clues.
  • This mission requires 47 to gather clues about a secret admirer to Lust. Once 3 clues are obtained, Lust provides a bouquet for 47 to give to the lucky man or woman.
  • Based on the general design philosophy of being one large Fetch Quest, it's one of the few missions 47 partakes in, in which killing is completely optional, something Lust lampshades.

Chongqing: "The Gluttony Gobble"

• Anti-Frustration Features: Interestingly, targets that are killed with the wrong equipment are still considered valid. Gluttony will berate you for using the wrong tools, but no other punishment is given to the player.
• Arrange Mode: Many of the security camera's are actually not present here, they only exist in the upper and lower parts of The Block and ICA Facility. New pig-themed guards either replace or join old guard groups, and even props in the level have been moved about, either to make things harder or to add new cover.
• Big Eater: Invoked with Gluttony's unique item: a 4-pack of "Bubble Queen" gum. Anyone who sees it will eat it: They're full of sedatives. Further, the world is awash with loads of food, with more dishes of food that can be poisoned, and props full of pizza boxes, bread rolls, sausage links, cheese wheels, noodle bowls, and crates and crates of beer.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Gluttony will berate the player if they kill a person with the wrong equipment, and it's very easy to go into autopilot and choose the first bladed instrument of death in your inventory, instead of choosing the specific tool for the job.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Gluttony will mock 47 if he doesn't give extra food to the pig (grapes for the appetizer, meat for the main course, and bananas for the dessert).
• Gasshole: Gluttony constantly burps and apologises afterward when you're playing.
• Large Ham: Fittingly enough, Gluttony. Upon the pig receiving the food it wants, he enthusiastically asks for more with a loud, booming voice that causes the screen to shake.
• Lethal Joke Item: The Bubble Queen gum from Gluttony follows the sedative rules, meaning if someone who was knocked out by it is found, it doesn't count as a found body. As the item is also silent (no explosion like the snail mine from Sloth), it is extremely easy to knock out anyone, without needing to hide behind someone like using a sedative syringe. It's quite simple to kill Yuki Yamazaki by emptying the sauna, tossing the pack in, letting her consume it, and pass out, allowing the sauna to kill her.
• Serial Escalation: For this level, you go after specific guards with pig masks on, which corresponds to what food they'll drop when the right weapon is used to kill them:
  1. Obtain two fish and two grapevines...
  2. ..Obtain two meatbones and two fish...
  3. ...and finally Obtain two bananas and two fish.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Not unusual for the series, but Gluttony provides a unique, already-tampered with item with the Bubble Queen gum, which will immediately knock out an enemy after they pick it up and eat it.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Gluttony mission, unlike the other missions, has no specific targets and instead requires 47 to kill specific guards (marked by wearing colored pig masks) with specific weapons to make them drop a piece of food. However, these people are considered targets (so they can be killed without penalty, and must be dead before stuffing them in lockers), even if the food they drop isn't requested by the pig.

Mendoza: "The Envy Contention"

• Arbitrary Mission Restriction: The game doesn't let you kill the Rival, otherwise it's an instant mission failure.
• A Day in the Limelight: While Helen West returning as a cameo is a logical pick (as she was of some focus in "Another Life" as she talks to Janus), Derek McInnis is a bit more out there, as he's not exactly a well known character, especially compared to the other cameos in this mission. Even Maxwell Rutter (who does the winners' announcement in Miami) has more focus in Miami than Derek does!
• Always Someone Better: The cat repeatedly taunts 47 that he isn't the best assassin and that there's someone else who's much better; The Rival.
• The Bus Came Back: This mission advertises itself as bringing back multiple past NPC's from this game and the previous game:
  • Hector Delgado (Brother of Rico Delgado in "Three-Headed Serpent")
  • Emma Carlisle (Alexa's daughter-in-law and Zachary's killer in "Death in the Family")
  • Derek McInnis (One of the PALLAS engineers in "The Finish Line")
  • Sister Lei (The scientist Hush confides with in "End of an Era")
  • Maxwell Rutter (The organiser of the Global Innovation Race in "The Finish Line")
  • Kharan Dhar (The Kashmirian, seen in the Chawls in "Chasing a Ghost")
  • Helen West (The baker and serial killer in "Another Life")
• Call-Back: Every target is a character who appeared in a previous mission in either this game or Hitman 2. Rather curiously, nobody from the first game is in this level as a target.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Simply put, the Rival just walks into restricted areas with no problem, whereas you need to take disguises to get to the places he's allowed to go.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: All the targets have this as an optional complication; indeed in order to get 5 star-Silent Assassin, you have to do specific kills (Kill Derek in the grape press, for example).
• Player Versus Environment: This is basically Ghost Mode from Hitman 2, but against an AI character; "The Rival", which had you race against an enemy player to kill a randomised target. This is similar, in that you are racing against an AI NPC to prove you are the best assassin.
• Serial Escalation: The number of targets you have to kill to beat the rival increases each level:
  1. Level 1 has you kill Hector Delgado (optionally in an accident)
  2. Level 2 has you kill Emma Carlisle (optionally with poison), Sister Lei (optionally with the grape crusher), and Derek Mclnnis (optionally by using a knife).
  3. Level 3 has you kill Maxwell Rutter (optionally with a sniper rifle), Kharan Dhar (optionally with electrocution) and Helen West (optionally with an explosion).
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Envy mission tasks 47 with killing a target before the AI can. It's essentially a repeat of Hitman 2's Ghost Mode, but against the computer instead of another player.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The cat states this about the rival once all targets are killed: The rival is no longer useful and 47 is required to kill him before he flees the stage.

Dartmoor: "The Wrath Termination"

• Action-Based Mission: The Wrath mission has 47 up against increasingly harder-to-take down guards and soldiers; in a survival situation protecting his own sedated body on the upper floor of Thornbridge Manor. You are given a small bit of time to prepare for a wave of enemies to show up at Dartmoor Manor by preparing ambushes and lethal traps. The level encourages use of both melee combat and traps, as guns are limited with small ammo counts and often require multiple resources to get.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • There is a radio at the top of Carlisle manor in Wrath that lets you call in the wave of guards early. This is only really useful if you want to speedrun the level, or are on one of the first rounds that are usually slower-paced, and so setting up traps isn't a priority.
  • Since each wave only begins once every inhibitor is down, its possible to get prep time by knocking out the inhibitors and killing them after.
• Call-Back: The starting point of each stage is in Alexa's padded soundproof room, which was designed to resemble the asylum room in Hitman: Codename 47 as well as the Easter Egg ending in Carpathian Mountains.
• Continuity Nod: The inhibitors seen are the biker gang from Berlin (in stage 1), the Delgado Cartel sicarios (in stage 2), and the Providence soldiers, including Orson Mills (in stage 3).
• Elite Mook: The inhibitors. They can soak up bullets with ease, and even headshots aren't guaranteed to take them out.
• Easy Level Trick: The levels' NPC pathing is pretty consistent, so if you get the routines down of at least two or three of the Inhibitor groups down, the level becomes easier to handle.
• Large Ham: The bear-woman announcing the waves has a bombastic and dramatic voice.
• Lethal Joke Item: Like the rubber ducks before it found in the main game, you can obtain a cute bear figurine that doubles as a flashbang device.
• No Item Use for You: Guns can't be picked up from inhibitors, so the player has to use traps and melee weapons. Stage 2 and 3 have some weapon unlocks, although they have limited rounds of ammo.
• Player Versus Environment: Like with "The Envy Contention", 47 is up against soldiers and guards that get harder to defeat as time goes on, and must protect his sedated self sitting in Alexa's soundproof room.
• Serial Escalation: The requirements to complete each level get harder with each repeat, in this mission, you must kill a number of Inhibitors before they get to the sedated 47 on the top floor of the manor, and there are three waves per level:
  1. Kill the two Inhibitors in Wave 1, kill all three Inhibitors in Wave 2, and Kill all four Inhibitors in Wave 3...
  2. ...Kill the four Inhibitors in Wave 1, kill all five Inhibitors in Wave 2, and Kill all six Inhibitors in Wave 3...
  3. ...and finally, kill the four Inhibitors in Wave 1, kill all six Inhibitors in Wave 2, and kill all seven Inhibitors in Wave 3.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Wrath mission has 47 up against increasingly harder-to-take down guards and soldiers; in a survival situation protecting his own sedated body on the upper floor of Dartmoor Manor. You are given a small bit of time to prepare for a wave of enemies to show up at Dartmoor Manor by preparing ambushes and lethal traps. The level encourages use of both melee combat and traps, as guns are limited with small ammo counts and often require multiple resources to get.

Other

Berlin: "Berlin Egg Hunt"

Club Hölle has started its Easter party, "Ostern", with club-goers wearing bunny masks for an Easter Holiday party like no other. This level is not a location in of itself, rather, it was initially released as part of some seasonal Temporary Online Content for Berlin as part of the 2021 Easter holidays, which features an easter-themed redesign of the main Berlin level. It was made permanently available the following year on April 7th, 2022.

---

• Alice Allusion: One of the first objectives is to "Follow the White Rabbit".
• Ambiguous Time Period: While we obviously know what date it takes place on (30th March, which is the easter period), and the ravers around the club mention the biker gang moving out, as well as the location of the club to soon be moving, we don't know how long after the main campaign this takes place.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Beating the escalation gives the "Raver suit", a yellow neon hoodie covered by a long coat. Minus the mask, this is the suit you wear throughout the escalation.
  • Killing the white rabbit with the hidden ICA19 F/A Ducky Edition pistol nets you the outfit used in the escalation, which includes the bunny mask.
• Animal Motif: Rabbits; as per the main mission, but it's put on more of a focus here. They can be seen spray painted all over the walls, with patrons wearing bunny masks, and the people you have to kill are also rabbit-themed, not to mention the Alice Allusion as one of the first objectives. The rabbit theme itself may be a subtle allusion to 47's fondness for the animal (Ort-Meyer notes that he had a fondness for them; something the comics later corroborates).
• Ascended Extra: This is a continuation of a concept started by "The Mills Reverie", a Halloween-themed escalation for Hawke's Bay in Hitman 2 that had you terrorising Orson Mills in his sleep. The gameplay has expanded to include custom NPCs wearing masks, egg throwables with specific poison effects, and has been made less linear.
• Easter Special: The escalation is rabbit-themed, featuring ravers wearing bunny masks, the entrance having rabbit-shaped wooden stands in the style of the Providence pins, as well as some oversized eggs that emit a weird sound, and gameplay-centric eggs; poisonous eggs that can sedate, kill, knock down, pacify, or make people throw up.
• Follow the White Rabbit: How the escalation starts; you follow a man dressed up in a white rabbit costume to Club Hölle. The final objective of the last tier is to kill the white rabbit.
• Foreshadowing: This escalation was foreshadowed in the main level, as posters can be found in the outside areas of the club that reads "Club Hölle Ostern: 30.03", which reflects the real date the event was released; 30th March 2021.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: A tree blocks off the route to the petrol station, and on a related note, the biker gang has moved out, and the club itself is shut as it's at capacity; only the outdoor areas remain open.
• Shaped Like Itself: While the other eggs describe their effects, the description for the yellow egg is "This egg is an egg".
• Serial Escalation: Like most other Escalations, the requirements to complete each level get harder with each repeat:
  1. Follow the white rabbit into the club, pacifying guards if need be with special eggs, and killing a blue rabbit...
  2. ...then kill the blue and pink rabbit...
  3. ...then kill the red rabbit and white rabbit.
• Technicolor Toxin: Lethal poison eggs are colored red (with spots all over the shell), Emetic Poison eggs are denoted the color green (with a wavy jagged pattern on the shell), Sedative poison eggs are denoted the blue color (with a smooth wavy pattern on the shell). Yellow eggs act as muffins and knock someone down (with small spots in a V-shaped pattern on the shell), while the Bird's Egg acts like a rusty crowbar and pacifies and shatters after use.

Dartmoor: "Dartmoor Garden Show"

47 heads to Thornbridge Manor, which is hosting the Dartmoor Garden Show competition, to kill three of the four competitors, alongside two of the three judges. The client, one of the competitors, and the judge in favor of that exhibit must not be eliminated.

---

• Ambiguous Time Period: According to the guards, the house is closed while the garden show is going on, and the owners are out of town. The gravestones in the cemetery suggest this takes place after the main campaign is over as Alexa's grave is fully decorated, but not much else is said in-game.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • The suit you receive for completing the escalation is the Summer Sightseeing Suit, a getup consisting of a black shirt, sunglasses, watch, and a white jumper around 47's neck. It's largely based on Ajit Krish's attire from Hitman 2's "A Silver Tongue" mission, which itself bears similarities to Silvio Caruso's outfit from 2016.
  • Completing the "Been there, done that" challenge unlocks the Florida Fit with Gloves; a previously Miami-exclusive Elusive Target suit unlock for "The Undying", which for legal reasons regarding Voice and Image rights pertaining to Sean Bean, cannot re-run. This marks the second Elusive Target suit that can be obtained from outside the Elusive Target itself (the other being from Mumbai's "The Divine Descendance" escalation, which unlocks the Imperial Classic with Gloves, and that too was done for similarly technical reasons).
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Completing the "Seasonal Pruning" challenge (kill three targets with a garden fork, garden shears and the shredder) rewards you with "The Floral Baller", an intricately designed Silverballer reskin with flowers engraved on the barrel and suppressor.
• Caring Gardener: The entire point of the garden show is for the gardeners to show off their garden exhibits, so some level of this is required.
• The Cameo: Cornelia Stuyvesant, Lucy Phillips, and Sebastian Sato are walking around the garden show giving comments about the garden pieces on display. At the 3rd stage, two of them become targets and one of them becomes a VIP.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Alexa Carlisle's tombstone is completed and can be found covered in several flowers.
  • Cornelia tells Yazdani that his Middle Eastern-themed display "brings back bad memories", referring to the events of Dubai.
• Easter Egg:
  • The pineapple and sponge easter egg from Miami's Bayside aquarium can be found in the water fountain in the Marrakesh exhibit.
  • One of the guards and staff can be seen kissing out of sight of others. Kill either one of them, and they will mourn over their body.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: There are potential electrocution traps of various kinds all over the place (notably most are missing electrical elements needed to cause an accident), Cornelia and Ken actively stand near water which they can drown in, Evelyn, Gulshan, and Lucy can be poisoned, and there are hanging baskets in Ken's exhibit one can invoke Death from Above. There's a lot of accident kills one can do here is where we're getting at.
• Oh, Crap!: The gardeners are wary of the frogs that have escaped the greenhouse as they are poisonous.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Manon Beaulieu's exhibit is named "Sans Pareil", which means "having no equal" in French.
  • Evelyn Crane's exhibit is called "God Save the Green", a pun on "God Save the Queen"; the title of England's national anthem.
  • Gulshan Yazdani's exhibit is called "The Gate of Paradise", which may be in reference to the real-life Gate of Paradise in Florence, Italy.
  • Ken Takeuchi's garden is called "Enshu's Pavillion", which refers to 15th-century Japanese gardener and artist Kobori Enshū.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: The escalation reuses a bunch of in-game assets from all over the trilogy. It's a Justified Trope to some degree as the entire point of each exhibit in the garden show is to encapsulate the look and feel of each country, and that would of course require reusing assets from past locations. Marrakesh, for example, has a fountain outside the Shisha den, which is also used as the centerpiece of the Marrakesh exhibit. The English exhibit meanwhile, reuses the music piped into the Swedish Consulate, while also using the flower arches from the gardens of Caruso Manor. The level music is taken directly from Whittleton Creek (the loudspeaker music is from the garden party in that level also).
• Removing the Rival: The escalation revolves around eliminating three of the four competitors while keeping one of them, the escalation's client, alive. In addition, 47 must also take out two of the opposing judges.
• Serial Escalation:
  1. Kill one of the competitors (randomized between Manon Beaulieu, Gulshan Yazdani, Ken Takeuchi, or Evelyn Crane), and do not harm the client (one of the four competitors)...
  2. ...and then kill the other two competitors...
  3. ...and finally kill two of the judges (randomized between Lucy Phillips, Sebastian Sato, or Cornelia Stuyvesant).
• Scenery Porn: It is amazing how much detail there is in this level, with certain countries being represented within garden exhibits, and they all look stunning. The lighting being changed to be much more sunny, and in general, just looks like a lovely summer's day in England (something which Sebastian Sato didn't want, amusingly). IOI Clemens on IOI insider even admitted to walking around the exhibits because of how nice it all looked, and encouraged players to do the same when it was released.
• The Peeping Tom: A challenge called "Voyeur" asks you to snap a photo of the maid and bodyguard while they kiss.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • This is the only escalation in the series to be accessible within Contracts Mode, essentially acting as a user-generated Bonus Mission of sorts.
  • You are able to skip the escalation entirely once you've played through it once, with a separate starting location; "Deterministic Mode", unlocking at that point. Deterministic mode keeps the same missions as the base game, but removes the specific targets, allowing 47 to kill any one of the four targets in stage 1, killing two of the targets in Stage 2, and killing any two of the judges in stage 3.

Berlin: "The Halliwell Fable"

Club Hölle is home to three little piggies and you must hunt them down...

---

• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The suit you receive for completing the escalation is the The Big Bad Wolf Suit, a dapper suit with a blue-striped tie, white gloves, and a wolf mask.
• Literary Allusion Title: The escalation is named, and themed around, the Three Little Piggies, originally written by James Halliwell-Phillipps.
• Inspiration Nod: The items you choose on each level represent some aspect of the three houses made by the Three Little Pigs; Driftwood (the stick house), a brick (the brick house), and a feather duster (the straw house, which is as "light as feathers" when the wolf blows it down).
  • Much like how the Berlin Egg Hunt is filled with references to Alice in Wonderland, each level represents a separate story that features a Big Bad Wolf;
    • Level 1 is based on Little Red Riding Hood (the wolf hunts in the woods searching for Riding Hood).
    • Level 2 is based on The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats (The wolf attempts to coax seven little goats out of their home and disguises each time in an attempt to fool them; in-game it's the piggies who are disguised and the player are forced to stay in their suit).
    • Level 3 is based on the Three Little Piggies (though here, the piggies are armed to the teeth with shotguns).
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: The masks the piggies are wearing are reused from the Gluttony Seven Deadly Sins escalation.
• Serial Escalation: Each level of this escalation provides a different puzzle to the one before it:
  1. Pick a melee weapon (brick, driftwood, feather duster) and find and kill the three little piggies hiding in the woods...
  2. ...then find and kill the three little piggies in the club...
  3. ...and finally, kill three angry piggies in the biker club.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: This escalation is very similar to the Seven Deadly Sins' escalation Pride (Level 3 even asks you only shoot the piggies), and has some custom props and specific mechanics exclusive to it (Level 1 is one massive chase to find the piggies, for example).

---