He may be a stealthy assassin, but for longtime action fans, Agent 47 is every bit as iconic as Master Chief. The sleek black suit….the chiseled, hairless head…the emotionless gaze masking layers of menace.

They all scream Hitman — but not to the characters around him. To them, 47 could very well be a high-powered businessman or a well-groomed valet (who just happens to wear black gloves)…if the player decides to lay low. How people perceive him — and often, whether they see him at all — is entirely up to you.

That notion of choice isn’t just a small bullet point in Hitman: Absolution’s features list. For series developer IO Interactive, choice is the absolute core of what every Hitman game has always — and will always — be about. Do you play stealthily, avoiding potential foes while sneaking up on your target undetected? Or do you charge into every room spewing bullets? “We want the player to have access to all of 47’s highly trained skills and to use them however they choose,” explains game director Tore Blystad. “We expect that every player will have a different experience while playing Absolution, and will use the abilities in different ways and different times. Our challenge is to create a game that can cater to all of those situations.”

Coming from some studios, that kind of blanket statement about striving for player freedom would be like saying, “We want our game to be fun.” Of course they do. But again, the Hitman games have a history of offering scenarios with multiple solutions, and with Absolution, IO seems 100% committed to continuing — even expanding —that open-ended play style. To prove their point, they proceed to show us an all-new Absolution demo not once, but twice, employing a very different play style in each runthrough. Prepare to be convinced…

THE QUIET APPROACH

In IO’s first Absolution demo (at 2011’s E3 show), 47 was in a dark, abandoned library, on the run from the Chicago police. The hunter was very much the hunted. This time, the setup’s nothing like that. We’re still in Chicago, but at an orphanage run by nuns, and our contract is to find and recover a girl named Victoria — why, we’re not sure.

What we do know is that Victoria’s being hunted by another party: a ruthless gang of mercenaries led by Wade — a vile, trash-talking thug with David Carradine-ish hair and a cruel voice. How bad are these guys? As the scene opens, two of Wade’s men put a final bullet in a wounded nun trying to crawl away from them, down a hallway stained with blood. The place reeks of carnage, and as we’ll soon see, this poor woman isn’t the only caretaker they’ve killed.

For their first runthrough, our demo guide takes a stealthy approach — what he jokingly calls being a “sloppy professional” (as opposed to a true professional who’d earn the Hitman series’ trademark Silent Assassin rating — more on that in a bit). After the two mercs walk back down the hallway, 47 pulls himself up through a window and slowly follows them.

Crouch-walking with an agility that looks exactly like how our hero should move (and considerably better than the animations in Hitman: Blood Money), he makes his way into a sleeping room where several thugs are torturing a security guard. When 47 ducks behind a crib and chairs, we get another look at the cover system — an addition that may raise eyebrows among Hitman traditionalists, but is pretty much a must in modern stealth games. To avoid a three-on-one fight, our sly agent picks up a toy robot and chucks it in another room; while one of the mercs seeks the source of the disturbance, 47 sneaks past all three.

Now inside a kids’ bedroom, the assassin chokes out a merc and hides his body in a closet — then climbs in alongside the unconscious thug when another baddie enters the room. In a funny bit of overlap, we hear Hitman’s muffled breathing while, outside the closet, said baddie proceeds to paint the adjacent wall liquid yellow. How do you know what he’s doing? Instinct mode, the new Arkham Asylum–like feature that lets you see through walls/doors to get a sense of who’s nearby and where they’re headed.

It’s a bit eyerolling, imagining that an assassin’s well-honed instincts could give him the same kind of info as Batman’s high-tech gadgetry, but it does seem well-suited to a Hitman game — especially as it’s used next. As 47 heads down a flight of stairs, our demo guide taps the Instinct button, sees a burning trail indicating that another thug is coming, then dashes behind a wall on the landing, where we wait as, a moment later, the goon descends the stairs and walks past him. Having all but exhausted his Instinct meter — which builds slowly so you can’t spam it constantly — 47 has just enough Instinct left to see that around 10 thugs are lurking in a large room near the bottom of the stairs. Forget about fighting them: 47 crawls into a vent and goes around them, entering the pharmacy. While thugs greedily pillage the orphanage’s drug stocks, you stab an unsuspecting stooge with a syringe, steal his outfit (including his carnival mask, something all the mercs are wearing), hide his body in a storage bin, and thus disguised, walk safely past a few of his comrades.

Instinct proves valuable one last time: to keep from being discovered, our demo guide triggers it right as he walks past another thug, which makes 47 do a head-scratching motion that conceals his face. A moment later, he walks into a safe spot — one of a few places in each level where you can hang out for as long as you want and study the environment (under the guise of looking at some face-obscuring brochures, in this case).

Another minute passes, and then the first demo’s over. Did our guide earn a Silent Assassin rating? Not even close. As in previous Hitman games, achieving this coveted rating for a given level involves more than a little use of stealth. IO’s still tweaking the Silent Assassin requirements in Hitman: Absolution, but this much they’ve settled on: you can’t kill anyone or even be detected, you can’t assume a disguise, and you must destroy any evidence of your presence (like, say, a video camera that snags footage of you). Better luck next time!