"Just turn the crank, and snap the plank And boot the marble right down the chute Now watch it roll and hit the pole And knock the ball in the rub-a-dub tub And flip the man into the pan The trap is set, here comes the net" —Mouse Trap There’s something intensely satisfying about doing a simple thing in a complex, overwrought way. Why just do something, when you can do it spectacularly? This was the appeal of the board game Mouse Trap. Mechanically just as simple as Candyland, the game was mostly popular because of its ridiculous, over engineered gadgetry—the eponymous mouse trap served both as a climactic set piece and central foil. I can’t tell you what the rules of the game were, but I can tell you I loved it. This attitude exists in videogames too, particularly among stealth games. The idea in stealth games is to remain undetected. By avoiding enemies, breaking the geometry of 3D levels and killing quietly, you try to prevent the outbreak of capital-A Action. However, in the Hitman games causing a scene has often been the point. It feels good to meticulously set up an encounter with a target, nab the right disguise, grease the right palms, and then sit back and watch the carnage unfold while you smoke a post-coital cigarette. Good stealth games are at their core puzzles. Hitman, until 2016 at least, has been a prime example of that thought process. It’s not just action and excitement that makes stealth games appealing, though. If stealth fans just wanted that, they wouldn’t play stealth games. It is intoxicating, to be the silent and unseen purveyor of life and death in a digital world—by setting levels in areas populated by civilians and non-combatants, the Hitman games make that role all the more titillating. You are not a ghost or a shadow, a being who inhabits a space separate, unseen, but unable to touch or interact with the physicality of the space you inhabit. You’re a maestro, a puppet-master. The original Hitman games were so empowering because for once, the games actually felt like what they were. The games didn't make direct, postmodernist nods to the audience. Hitman games made no secret of their artifice. Guards repeated patrols, targets had predictable behaviours. Like pieces on a game board—an aesthetic which mobile spin-off Hitman Go carried to its logical conclusion—you were encouraged to observe and slowly master these people's lives and deaths. Fast forward to this year's game, simply titled Hitman. Both in narrative and in naming convention, it purports a return to the roots, to where it all started. Opening with a curious “20 Years Earlier” splash screen, Hitman attempts to tell (or retell, rather) the genesis of Agent 47, from the moment of his recruitment by the shadowy ICA through the early days of his tenure as a wire for hire. Its attention to detail is impressive, as it seeks to capture the iconic features of its predecessors: the red tie, the bald head, the barcode tattoo, and most importantly, the casual mastery of the world around you. Except it fails. Hitman (assuming that from here on out any references to the game are to the 2016 edition) tries hard to turn the player into the puppet master, but instead reveals her to be the puppet, in the most glaring, awkward ways. The linchpin on which Hitman turns is its “opportunities.” This is a system whereby the player can uncover “hints” on creative or high-class ways of carrying out a hit by uncovering clues in the environment. The opportunities system is meant to emulate the real-world experience of intuition, and the type of grotesque creativity innately possessed by 47. Dropped into an enormous, exotic, often-foreign locale with nothing but a handful of items you've managed to smuggle in your suit pockets, it would be necessary to take stock of your surroundings for clues on gaining access to restricted areas, or use your knowledge of a country's politics and society to seek out opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have. But you can't fake creativity. Without requiring of the player actual mastery, videogames try to map subject matter as closely to reality as possible—you don't need to be a champion Formula 1 driver to play Forza Motorsport, and you don't have to be a rock god to enjoy playing Rock Band. But straying away from simulating concrete experiences into trying to play pretend at creativity is arduous. Hitman players, presumably, aren't actual contract killers, and so don't have the same skill set or thought processes as Agent 47. Whereas a hardened field agent would intrinsically know how to make the most of a chaotic mess of information to help accomplish his goals, a player sees in a vast open Marrakesh marketplace only a mass of digitally rendered onlookers. Eavesdropping on conversations to exploit potential weaknesses is a good strategy, but the developers obviously can't assume players will cook that up out of thin air. Simply determining which of the hundreds of digital denizens of Paris or Bangkok actually yield useful information would be impossible. And so, the solution is all-too-common objective marking. Now, all a player has to do is open the game menu, select a predetermined “Opportunity” from a list, and then play “chase the dot” around the game world. Opportunities will reveal themselves organically if the player is in close enough proximity, but otherwise, she is left devoid of context or reason for running around other than “the screen told me to.” For a game that strives to make the player feel omnipotent, reducing the bulk of the mission planning to an awkward game of run and chase clashes with that stated goal. Why am I trying to steal the skeleton key from the desk of a retired Moroccan educator? What purpose will dressing up as a famous fashion model in Paris serve? These questions could be easily answered, but the developers refuse to front load the missions with context for their opportunities, so the player is left guessing and, worse, failing. That is the real sin of Hitman's style: The map hints provide the “what,” but not the “why” or the “how.” This context is important for more than just narrative flavor. Many of the targets and enemies move on predetermined schedules and in patterns, so choosing an Opportunity at random is a risky proposition. It doesn't even properly mirror the actual risk such situations would incur in real life. Unlike an actual hitman, you aren't heading into an area with extensive foreknowledge of the target and area, you're simply flying blind. The developers have opted for leading you around on an invisible leash rather than simply providing you with information and letting the real player make decisions with her real brain. And therein lies the problem. When the problem-solving is simulated and not real, neither the victories nor the defeats feel real either. When I did manage to follow an opportunity through to conclusion, it felt less like a personal triumph and more like I'd just stumbled upon the proper levers to pull in the correct order. But when I failed, it never felt like my failure, since I had no information and couldn't really make up my own mind in the first place. This is the worst kind of artificial difficulty. Once you know the “correct” sequence of events, actually enacting them is trivially easy since the entire game is clockwork already. In an attempt to bestow upon the player a greater sense of “agency” (pun not intended), the game instead does the opposite. The locations of the previous games were “open,” but they were also directed. Players were given intelligence briefings on not just the who, but the where, why, and how, too, and thus could form a game plan before starting. Changing that pattern has a significant impact on the weight of successes and failures, as players are no longer masterminding complex sequences of events, but are instead flailing around until something happens to click—whether you understand why it clicked or not isn't important. The biggest shame of Hitman is that in trying to adjust that classic Mouse Trap-style stealth, it's shifted the player's role from operator of the mechanism to just another game piece inside. No longer an invisible hand operating the wheels and mechanisms of an elaborate death trap, we have been downgraded to mere mice in a maze.

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Patrick Lindsey is a Boston-based game critic who likes to focus on narrative and thematic design. In addition to cohosting the Bullet Points podcast, he also co-edited SHOOTER, an ebook anthology of critical essays on shooting games. Follow him on Twitter @HanFreakinSolo.