I've still got a stack of games I want to finish that I started over Christmas, but I've been preoccupied recently by Hitman Freelancer.
Freelancer is a new game mode that layers onto the existing Hitman: World of Assassination, itself a rebranding of Hitmen 1–3, which came out between 2016 and last year. (Wait, I just checked, and Hitman 3 came out in 2021! What is time?)
Freelancer adds a roguelike (or roguelite? I can never remember the difference) mode to Hitman gameplay. A gameplay loop that is designed to be (hopefully) enjoyably repeated, with atypically punishing (though often not as much as it appears) failure states. In Hitman's case, that means you can't save and load in missions arbitarily, you can lose equipment by failing missions (or entire runs), and the elements of the missions vary procedurally.
This is fantastic for Hitman. It's genuinely transformed the game for the better, and it was good to start with. There were always some odd filigrees to the Hitman design space that I felt they circled round actually paying off.
The maps are big and intricate, and set up with lots of elements that are 'redundant' in the context of the core story missions -- areas that are underused, interaction points or equipment that's sort of by-the-by.
Through play, you unlock a ton of different equipment, but almost none of it is better than what you begin the game with. The game is also scored around being silent, sneaky, and evasive, which makes loud weaponry seem fairly pointless. (In practice, you could play that way and it could feel pleasantly transgressive, but it felt like working against the design intention even though they were literally giving you these weapons).
They've done various other game modes over the years which have nibbled at this. The Elusive Target model is very cool, though its appeal waned for me. In ETs, there's a real-time-limited special contract on a target. You can save during the mission; if you fail, that's it; if you complete any objective, you're 'locked in' to that run. But it must have been quite dev-intensive to do new ones, since they all required some unique design. And the level of failure penalty ('you have permanently failed this') encouraged and extremely cautious play style, which isn't actually that fun.
Other game modes also touched on these elements, but Freelancer feels like it finally makes it all make sense. They've retroactively made the game that fills out the design space they had already built.
I'm also not sure they could have, like, skipped right to this. Part of the success of Hitman comes from the intricacy of its maps and their little clockwork tessellations. Also the breadth and number of them. By taking the somewhat unusual step of updating the maps from each game to bring them into the next one (so Hitman 3, until it was all merged, would let you play Hitman and Hitman 2 maps if you owned them), they've given themselves a surprisingly large stable of very broad and deep maps that support a lot of replay. I think, if you sat down to design Hitman Freelancer as the baseline, you just couldn't make those same design decisions first time around. At least not sensibly.