Suicides in Hitman

I remember in Hitman 2016, the Hokkaido suicide opportunity really didn’t sit well with me at the time. Getting a guy with bipolar disorder to kill himself? And you do it by switching off an “emotion regulator”. I found that really quite tasteless at the time and still don’t like it very much.

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Interesting argument. In a game were we play as contract killer, a game about killing determined characters, and sometimes even make some collateral damage (when things goes wrong), we also find disturbing the image of a poor soul that decide to take out his life.
I remember the first time I witnessed the suicide of the curator from Hokkaido, and I remember his words before his death, really creeped me out. I am an individual that usually soffer from depressive states, hopefully I don’t have any suicidal tendency for now, but his final words, describing the void he face everyday of his life, makes the whole scene pretty disturbing.
The same with Alexa Carlisle, I already told in other posts that the way she gaze directly on our eyes just before she throw herself down was unsettling for me the first time.
I don’t know why the developers created these very hidden situation when a Npc decide to took his life (notice every suicidal Npc in the game is a male, with the exception of Alexa), I don’t know if it’s just some twisted, dark Easter eggs, or perhaps a hidden detail about the world we living: these character seemed to live theyr life normally at the beginning (take for example, Jeremy Bolt and the yellow shirt guy from Landslide), some shits happens suddenly and ruins theyr life (Bolt is fired, yellow guy lose his girlfriend): they suddenly falling in a very emotive and depressive state, indicating a very sensible soul for both guys, and then, suddenly, without any warning, they kill themselves. It’s unfortunaly similar to the real life: usually a guy comminting suicide decide to make it suddenly and without any warning.
It’s the right thing to display in a video game where we are supposed to entertain ourself? I don’t know the answer, but this open my mind for a bit of reflection.

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We have a saying here, a nu pune la suflet - to not take it so hard / personally. It’s a mature game series, M rating, so you can and should expect all types of horrible things. Once you shut off the game, you should free yourself of all thoughts of it and enjoy the real world :slight_smile:
It’s definitely not worth hurting yourself, mentally and such because of a movie / videogame etc.

Postal 2 comes to mind
Postal2 warning

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Sorry to necrobump.
I just discovered the suicide of Alexa Carlisle and was a bit disturbed, too. It’s good that the topic is being discussed.

I totally agree with you. At the same time, I think it’s important that suicides are addressed in a game like this. It’s absolutely obvious that 47 has a blatant impact on his environment. It’s usually very direct, an opportunity arises and it’s taken, the target is killed. However, the emotional impact is barely addressed.
These suicides show that there are also other ways in which you hurt these people.

This suicide was also a bit tough for me. But I had the feeling that IOI wanted to say what I just wrote.
I used the doctor to destroy the heart. From that moment on, he was uninteresting to me. When I finished the level, I had a non-target kill and was really outraged and confused. So I went back and realized what I was causing with my actions. It may sound stupid, but in this moment I realized that the player has a great responsibility for the people/ npcs around him.

Unfortunately, I don’t know any definite answer to the topic either. But I’m curious to see how this will be handled in the future, including other videogames.

What I’m wondering, is any suicide a requirement for a challenge? I can’t look it up at the moment, unfortunately. That would be very sinister.

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It’s actually the opposite: on Situs Inversus, there is a redacted challenge that require you to stop the curator from committing suicide : all you have to do is using again the chip’s remote before he decide to climb the ledge, he will be happy again and return to his job.
I guess it’s a nice thing. :smiley:

Edit: I could be wrong, but Alexia committing suicide it’s not related to a challenge (not sure about that).

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I wasn’t sure if I should write about my feelings about this topic here, but when I saw the thread came back recently I decided to write my opinion shortly.

When I was a teenager, a friend of mine committed suicide. This may sound weird, but seeing Grey doing that triggered all these feelings, because even when he’s fictional, he is kinda important for me personally. And feelings are feelings, this is how they work. That’s why I always skip this cutscene, I think I never watched it again since last year :see_no_evil:

I know it’s a game where people die, where we, as the player, even kill people. I expect people to die, when I buy a game like Hitman. But suicide is a different thing, it’s difficult to explain. I also have different feelings when it comes to Alexas suicide and Jeremy Bolt for example. When it comes to Alexa, her suicide was kinda weird, almost caricatured. But Bolts suicide on the other side felt different, because his suffering felt more “real”.

I wouldn’t mind a trigger warning and I wish there would be more trigger warnings for such sensible topics in games but also movies and series. I mean, they warn me that people in a movie drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, but they can’t warn me that a woman get’s raped there? Or that they show suicide? It would be just a sentence at the beginning, I don’t think that it would upset people :woman_shrugging:

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I think with Alexa, it was because the pressure just became too much. Her entirely life came to nothing, she killed her older brother for no reason, she’d been convinced by 47 that her younger brother killed himself over it, she’d just lost everything to the Constant, and now 47 was finally here to get her. She probably just figured that she’d go out on her own terms since she was gonna die anyway and no longer had a reason to fight for her life, like that woman in John Wick 2.

As for all the others, I think they’re suicides are made deliberately unrealistic so as to not seem so serious, just like the murders we commit in the game. Neither actually happens like that or looks like that, so it lets them get away with presenting it without being too offensive.

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I never thought about Alexas dead like that :pleading_face: yeah that makes it more “realistic” to me to see it that way. I guess I didn’t thought this through :see_no_evil:

As for the others, I guess with Bolt it feels so bad because I, as the player, feel responsible for his death. I fire him because Royce says it, so there is kind of a huge pressure to do so. Then seeing him struggle with this and looking for his friend who isn’t around, so he has no one to talk and seeing suicide as the only way out, that got me. Of course it was very fast, which felt a bit surprising and unrealistic, but thinking about it at least I can understand his feelings :neutral_face:

This shocked me too, first because she looks like my gran, second her actress is amazing, and third, jump backwards like that is… somehow worse.