Editorials
The Halloween DLC For ‘Hitman 2’ Shows its Developer Should Make a Horror Game
Halloween always seems like an easy time to do content generation for games-as-service developers. Just throw some candles around your game world, give the characters spooky costumes, introduce a zombie mode, and you’re good to go for that month’s update. The Mills Reverie, a new escalation mission for Hitman 2, does indeed drop pumpkins in Hawkes Bay, their first level, but manages to blend the tone into their core game better than most Halloween-themed events.
One of my favorite gaming surprises of last year was Hitman 2. I didn’t have any experience with the franchise, but the newest installment grabbed me with its combination of open options and clockwork worlds. Each stage feels so vibrant and alive, giving you a multitude of tools to complete your objectives. Do you just try to sneak your way in and kill the racer, or do you knock out the mascot and steal his costume to get close to her? You have so many ways to play that you could spend weeks just replaying one mission to get everything out of it.
Not only is each level so replayable, but IO Interactive also supports the game by adding new missions on a monthly basis, like this month’s free Mills Reverie escalation mission. Escalations are a series of three missions that add increasingly difficult tasks to your normal assassination. For example, maybe in the first run you have to kill someone with a gun, then in the second one, you have to kill someone with a gun AND always be holding a gun. It’s a fun way to mix things up and force you to play in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to try.
The Mills Reverie takes this idea and runs with it, transforming Hitman 2 into a slasher movie with you as the villain. You’re not given any backstory, but the name and the objective descriptions imply that you are stalking your target, Orson Mills, through his nightmares. You start the level waking up on a bed mysteriously placed in the middle of a moonlit beach dressed like a scarecrow with a pumpkin for a head, tasked with committing strange acts against Mills. The Hawkes Bay level is also dressed for the occasion, covered with pumpkins, gravestones and an ominous circle of weeping angel statues.
Forcing you into this menacing costume changes up the traditional gameplay options of Hitman 2, taking deception out of your arsenal and requiring you to get through via stealth or brute force. This is a refreshing change of pace, creating a satisfying experience that makes you feel like a slasher. Popping in an out of bushes in the middle of the night to take out unsuspecting guards with a weapon simply called the “spooky bat” is just as fun as it sounds. Upon completion of the mission, you unlock a set of “bat shuriken” (legally distinct from a Batarang) for use in the rest of the game.
I was honestly surprised at how well the Halloween theme melded with the existing structure of Hitman 2. The franchise always had a morally gray tone to it by casting you as an assassin, so it’s not a big leap to put you in the shoes of a slasher. From what I’ve played, Hitman has never had a great overall story, but does a fantastic job writing character interactions and mission objectives on the small scale within each level. Here, the strange dream logic of the objectives presented create a wonderfully eerie mood. The runtime of this DLC isn’t very long, each of the three runs can be completed in about 15 minutes, so I won’t spoil the twists and turns the escalation takes, but they certainly give you quite the nightmare to enact on poor Mills.
If you’ve never tried out the new Hitman franchise, you can download Hawkes Bay as part of their free “Starter Pack” with this escalation mission included. IOI recently said that their next project would be an all-new property, their first non-Hitman game since Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days in 2010, so trying this out will be a great way to see what the studio is all about before they start their latest journey. While they haven’t shared any details about what this new game could be, I think it would be great if they expanded on the ideas they explored in this escalation mission and made a horror game. Especially with the power of next-generation consoles, they could build surreal, clockwork worlds for players to wreak havoc in.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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