Hitman Absolution: Black Suit, Blacker Comedy

The pitch dark world of Agent 47 is one of the series’ hallmarks. The universe in which 47 resides is a floor drain lined with scum, a polluted pit of the worst humanity has to offer. 47 is the man with the bleach.

It’s hardly surprising a series exclusively focused on the sport of hunting and executing facsimiles of human beings would be so sinister. It always has been. It’s a game where the slaughterfication of someone else is your objective, not a side effect. Death is an end, not a means.

It’s interesting, however, that behind the stern jowls of its bald, besuited lead – and amongst all the brooding seriousness that surrounds him – there was always a certain blackly comic element to proceedings. Take Hitman: Blood Money, for instance. There’s something Looney Tunes-esque about dropping a piano on somebody from above, or gunning a target down in a chicken suit. Grim, sure, but too absurd not to rate a giggle. 47 may be a humourless shell in a grimy world but that’s not to say his actions can’t be funny, albeit in a macabre kind of way.