6. Hidden Valley/At The Gates - Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
The Hitman games always felt like a heaving mass of A.I. programming and player experimentation just barely holding together - a notion that broke every now and then when missions would go awry for no reason, character animations would freak out, or in the case of both these two Japanese-themed levels, the size of the environment resulted in endless "You've been detected!" prompts. IO Interactive would go on to iterate on how the various NPCs could detect you around the areas, but in Silent Assassin it seemed to be based on proximity, speed of movement and what you were wearing. Factor that into navigating a multi-floor fortress, and that meant navigating enemies in tiny corridors that would skewer you with swords even when you'd walked past them, could detect bodies no matter where they were stashed, would hide and disguise themselves above you - and all-round just made keeping a low profile impossible. The detection system in these old Hitman titles was always pretty broken, but these two levels in particular highlighted that it was always teetering on a knife's edge between "Okay, carry on" and full-on base-wide "HERE'S HERE. KILL HIM NOW" at any second.
