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I never get tired of Hitman: Blood Money's inventiveness

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In this classic feature, Jim Rossignol took a long bath in Blood Money and declared it an excellent puzzle game as well as a stealth one.
We’re digging into the PC Gamer archives to publish pieces from years gone by. This article was originally published in 2007.
There’s something on my mind. This being a Hitman retrospective, you might think that thing would be murder, but actually it’s puzzles. You see, it seems to me that each level of a Hitman game is essentially a giant, evolving puzzle.
This is a game less about the act of taking a life, or the grisly excitement of electronically simulated violence, and more about not causing a commotion in a volatile situation. Murdering a porn baron and his son in their palace, killing a gang of thugs on their Mississippi steamer—these are not your average deathmatch escapades. 
Often, all you’ll have is a garotte and a syringe—but then quiet strangulation or poisoning is always better than a shotgun. Bombs have their place, but I’d rather use a silenced pistol. Keep things quiet, and the puzzle unravels. Cause upset, and this Rubik’s Deathtrap becomes ever more convoluted, until there’s no way out.
There are only so many times you can make a wrong move in Agent 47’s world, and you can’t expect to be able to kill all the guards. But making a wrong move is often the best thing you can do: you see exactly how things come apart, and often collapse your house of cards into a quagmire of slapstick slaughter. Hitman is a game in which the replay isn’t simply a denouncement of your failure, but the gradual, careful examination of the possibilities, the parameters of your perfect kill.

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