The new Hitman trilogy is 100% made for people with ADHD and you should check ‘em out!
the other day I wrote up this huge rant for a friend on why I consider these games perfectly designed masterpieces that sometimes seem to be specifically made for people whose brains work like mine. Since the last part of the trilogy is about to drop this month, I thought hey, why not make this thing public, cuz I don’t see enough people talking about these absolute pieces of art!!!
Most ppl think the Hitman games are about shooting people, when actually, they are bona fide puzzle games with more in common with point-and-click-adventures than shooters.
The Hitman games are cut into individual levels. Each level is a completely new place with a completely new target that's got something else going on. One level is a huge estate with a fashion show inside, one level is a picturesque Italian coastal town with a genetic laboratory underneath it, etc. the maps are huge and contain hundreds of NPCs.
Strictly speaking, you have only one objective: find the target and eliminate it. That in and of itself is often not very difficult. BUT. the point is that you can approach the objective however you want. You can run in guns blazing, you can sneak over the roofs of the town into their kitchen and poison their food... or you can dress in a flamingo costume and blackmail them with classified information you stole from the original owner of the costume, which makes the target want to kill you, which means they will send their bodyguards away, which gives you an opportunity to get rid of them without any witnesses.
You can make the two targets meet each other, resulting in one killing the other, but not before they had a dramatic confrontation.
There's not much sneaking going on, most stealth is achieved through disguising yourself with every possible available outfit on the map, butler, bug extinguisher, hippie, masseur, surfing instructor, you name it!
of course 47 prepares extensively for all the roles he could potentially take on and excels at perfectly impersonating any and all of his disguises. make him take up the mantle of a drummer and watch him turn into a professional percussionist!
or turn him into a real estate agent and watch him do his best to sell a house!
The true stars of the game are the NPCs, especially the targets.
They will often seem like a stereotype at first, but the more time you spend on a map, the more you follow them around, explore each corridor and listen to NPCs talking about them, the more you will realize that they have rich backgrounds, often even almost sympathetic motivators for their horrible actions. But it is not your job to judge them, you are just here to fulfill a contract. And as the man who hits, your gift and your curse is that you touch people's lives only by ending them.
The maps are meant to be played multiple times, and the better you get to know them, the more they turn into your personal playground. They are 1000 pieces puzzles, and you get rewarded with information (and just plain up hysterically funny dialogues) for exploring, listening to NPCs, experimenting with items and killing methods.
All you HAVE to do is get rid of your targets. how much you meander on your way there, and which way you take is completely up to you.
Now how is that good for people with ADHD? Ofc I can't speak for everyone, only from my own experience. But for me the way in which this game gives you little snippets of information on every corner is absolutely perfect. You get a little puzzle piece here, another two there, and if you are interested in the target’s motivations, you can put them all together in your head to form one full picture - if you want.
If you’re not interested in an aspect of a mission, you don’t have to slog through endless amounts of information or cut scenes, you can just shoot your target in the head and leave.
Probably my favorite thing about the game are mission stories. They are clear routes to eliminating your targets you can take, where the game guides you through the level and tells you exactly what to do to achieve a particularly interesting or scenic route. One of my favorite mission stories is on the first map, in Paris, where you disguise yourself as a supermodel who is secretly a spy in order to get a private meeting with one of your targets.
For me, every new map is a new hyperfixation, and every new map has endless amounts of information hidden away in every nook and cranny that you CAN get lost in - if you want to. You don't have to. But BOY do I want to. Even after I’ve sunken over 200 hours into the first two entries in the trilogies, I still find stuff that I didn’t even know existed! The amount of intricate detail the developers worked into these games is not even comprehendable. On every corner there's something else going on, you stumble upon a gold mine of NPC dialogue on every corridor, and if you wonder: is there a way to approach the target like THAT...? There usually will be.
It's like it's Christmas every five minutes and my brain is firing like a racing motor cuz wherever you turn there's some new stimulation going on. And if you get distracted from what you were currently doing by some other shiny thing, well that’s no problem at all! Where often other games will slap your wrist for getting distracted, the developers put so much love and care into rewarding you for exploring every corner of the map. The game wants you to get creative and think outside of the box.
Every time Steam has some form of sale going on, the first two games are available for reduced prices. If you think any of what I said above sounds interesting, I highly recommend you check em out! I’d honestly say they’re some of the best video games I have ever played.
