I’m not generally a video game achievement chaser, with two exceptions: the Half-Life 2 “Flushed” achievement for killing someone with a toilet, and any stealth game that has a combined achievement for never killing anyone and never being detected. I’ve been midway through several of these kinds of playthroughs for years. Will I ever finish them? I doubt it, but I’ll never stop trying.
I love stealth games: their thoughtful pace, their attention to their environment, all those key codes and alternate routes being loudly shouted by NPCs in public places. The holy grail of stealth game runs, to me, is getting in and out as if you were never there. Many modern stealth games push you toward these kinds of runs: For Dishonored and Dishonored 2, there are the “Ghost” and “Clean Hands” achievements for never being detected and never killing anyone. Deus Ex: Human Revolution has “Pacifist” for not killing anyone, and “Foxiest of the Hounds” for never setting off any alarms. And then there’s the gold standard of any Hitman run: the “Suit Only/Silent Assassin,” or SASO, run, for only killing targets, hiding all bodies, and never getting spotted, all without donning a disguise.
I’m midway through this kind of run in every game I mentioned above. As I type this, my Corvo Attano is perched on a lamppost on his way to kidnap Anton Sokolov, and my Emily Kaldwin is just outside the Clockwork Mansion, gearing up to evade all those automatons. Lord knows where I left Adam Jensen– probably in a vent. I’ve SASOed Hitman’s Paris and Sapienza with ease, but I’ve never done it in other missions. I’ve played all these games for dozens of hours (Steam tells me I have 125 hours in DX:HR, and that’s not including the Director’s Cut that makes the boss fights more possible with a stealth build), and many of those hours have been spent painstakingly save-scumming my way through a level.
There’s a pleasure in games like Dishonored and Hitman in blowing your cover and just going full chaos (Hitman Freelancer lends itself especially well to this, since you only get one shot anyway), but you can’t do that in a perfect stealth run. Instead, you have to move slowly and methodically and stressfully. In Dishonored 2, a game I hadn’t spent much time in before attempting a perfect stealth run, it took me hours to complete the first mission. I’d dart from a corner to behind a box, save, then dart to a light fixture and save again. I remember one hallway in the Addermire Institute where I kept getting spotted by two guards, the familiar zinging strings of the alerted sound playing over and over as I reloaded. I had to eschew many of the fun side objectives and exploration in pursuit of a single-minded goal, one that doesn’t matter at all but that I want so badly.
Some of these games add the complication that characters you pacify can be discovered or die after you’ve left an area. I’ve thought I’ve aced a level, only for Dishonored’s ending stat screen to make me realize a hastily-hidden body got eaten by rats, or someone woke up a Hitman character I’d left in a hallway I thought no one came down. The stress of the perfect run never ends until you know, 100%, that you’re in the clear. And then you have to do it all over again in another level, and another, until you’ve turned a 10-hour game into a 30-hour one.
All told, it’s not actually a very fun way to play. But still! It feels so good to work so hard at a level, to learn its layout so intimately, to make little encounters so much more convoluted or complicated when you can’t use many of the tools a game offers you. I get to see a new side of all the craft that goes into every piece of a stealth game’s level design, exploring exactly how NPCs or objects are placed. I remember that cursed hallway in Dishonored 2’s Addermire Institute much better than I remember the level’s actual target, because it was a site of such drama, one that was personal to me and my playthrough. Who can be disappointed in Deus Ex’s boss fights when I have my own boss fight in the form of a guy who won’t walk away from an elevator? Leaving a level in my Hitman suit becomes a whole new game when I can’t just beeline for the exit. These full stealth runs might be stealth games at their worst–the save-scumming, the long stretches of sitting still–but they’re also stealth games at their best, full of tension and creativity.
Maybe I’ll get you one day, achievements, but more likely I’ll just keep sighing at your descriptions on my screen, imagining who I could be if I were a little more patient, or had slightly better reflexes, or didn’t entirely forget how to play a video game if I put it down for more than a week. The perfect stealth dream lives, even if I will never live it.
