Hitman Contracts opens up with in-game cinematics portraying a bleeding, injured Agent 47 sitting in a hotel room, taking painkillers. He's hallucinating, drifting in and out of consciousness. Level developer Rasmus Hoenjengaard explained to IGN during our visit to Eidos that our silent assassin is feeling metaphoric stabs of pain from his past acts, his countless murders and assassinations. Neatly, the flashbacks of pain and memory serve as perfect springboards for IO to launch players into a litany of missions.

While the title might suggest that this new iteration is a series of unrelated stories, they're not. The myriad of missions are part of Agent 47's memories, which serve to give players a disturbing look at the mind of an assassin, but they're also connected because they lead up to the present. They all point to his painful existence in the hotel room, a new starting point from which the story then progresses. What happens next? IO wants to keep it a secret, so we're left with a little anticipation and excitement for the story to be fleshed out. Quite nice.