What’s it like to play Hitman: Blood Money in 2026? (on Linux)

Sat Oct 10 2026 (E: 2026 Oct 31)

Warning: Hitman: Blood Money is a video game that is rated M by the ESRB (= PEGI 18); therefore, the contents of this page are similarly for mature audiences.

I started playing the game because the main character looks like my boss (the most so in Hitman: Absolution). No compensation was received for writing this review.

Hitman: Blood Money follows Agent 47, an international contract killer assigned work throughout the world. Election season in the United States is approaching, leading to more of his contracts taking place in the US. Concurrently, his employer the International Contract Agency (ICA) encounters hostile competition.

Without spoiling the story, the themes I thought were cool are:

• the legal system failing to deliver justice
• a discrepancy between actual events and media reporting
• government agencies collaborating with shadow organizations to serve personal interests

I thought the game could be better without:

• a plot device lifted from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet

It possible to interpret Agent 47’s killings to have a moral angle to them but I disagree. He is primarily motivated by money, and his victims’ activities don’t always warrant being brutally killed by a hitman.

I found the game to be completely playable if I simply brought no weapons most of the time and conservatively used sedatives and poison. What is the easiest way to play the game is also both the highest rated (‘Silent Asassin’) and best paying.

# Nothing special to do on WINE

✅ The game is playable with minor problems.

• High frame rates (>60 fps) cause collision errors.
• The HUD does not scale with resolution.
• If forcing windowed mode through Wine Desktop, the HUD will clip off the screen.

Hitman: Blood Money (2006) natively runs on Windows. To get it working on Linux, the only thing I had to do to get the game working on Wine was:

1. Initialize a wine prefix: WINEPREFIX=~/prefix/hitman-blood-money winecfg

2. Set the operating system version to Windows 7 (a version of Windows that runs programs from the 2000s).

3. WINEPREFIX=~/prefix/hitman-blood-money winetricks to install d3dx9 redistributable.

4. Drop the game in the prefix folder: ~/prefix/hitman-blood-money/drive_c/GOG Games/

5. Launch ~/prefix/hitman-blood-money/drive_c/GOG Games/Hitman Blood Money/HitmanBloodMoney.exe.

I initially tried the Lutris installer which does not result in a functioning game (unresponsive black box that had to be SIGTERM’d with htop).

However, running the game at 144 frames per second causes collision problems, making the narrow escape path at the end of the first mission intraversible. Therefore, the game should be run with the equivalent of the environment variable DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60 (limit frame rate to 60).

# The tutorial is WAY more violent than the next chapters

So the start of the game leaves the wrong impression on how to play the game.

In the tutorial, the player kills about 14-19 people as stealth and combat mechanics are introduced. However, violence makes the game much harder than it has to be for the following reasons:

• gunshots can be heard by NPCs in the game world
• wounded NPCs bleed and leave bloodstains, which raises suspicion
• off-target kills incur penalties
  • the in-game explanation is that ICA needs to run damage control

The first two missions check against this because getting caught after a body has been found results in nearly all of the guards running in at once. (The fights in the tutorial are compartmentalized.)

Then if all the gunfights don’t force the player to reload a save, the game scores the player low at the results screen, and the player’s notoriety increases. Notoriety affects newspaper reports following an assassination. At values greater than 20, there will be a police sketch that becomes more accurate at higher scalar values, and NPCs will start to recognize Agent 47 based on the newspapers in-game. Despite every incentive to negate notoriety, it is an interesting feature.

# A world where the legal system fails to deliver justice

Virtually all targets in Hitman: Blood Money have a morally suspect attribute to them. The newspaper reports following the first few missions represent some failure in the legal system.

1. Joseph Clarence (tutorial), despite a disaster with a ferris wheel at his amusement park, his charges (possibly of negligence) were all dropped after paying his way out.
   • a side story on the newspaper reports that the police tore down a child’s lemonade stand¹ that wasn’t to code with regulations, to the benefit of a local convenience store owner.

2. Alvaro D’alvade (level 2) — the plaintiff (an underage girl)² of his case was intimidated from testifying in court and later found dead, her death ruled a suicide³ (kind of a meme these days).

Even though the targets typically have shady business, their actions as documented in-game don’t necessarily warrant death. Unless I missed details from the in-game reports, the lesser ‘moralized’ contracts are:

• You Better Watch Out
  • Lorne De Havilland – a pornographer that is blackmailing a senator running for re-election; ‘porn companies’ are a mixed bag in that some operate legitimately⁴ and some turn out to be an exploitation ring.⁵
  • Chad Bingham Jr. – the senator’s son; the client of the contract is heavily implied to be the father; in that case, father kills son because the latter became a political liability.

• House of Cards
  • Hendrik Schmutz – described to be a white supremacist; he was going to sell DNA samples and lab reports which are not illegal by themselves.
    • his views are possibly more nuanced since he is doing business with APEX (fictional company: Arabian Pharmaceutical Exports).

# A curveball for the turn-by-turn navigation generation

Hitman: Blood Money follows 2000s era game design which has a distinct playing experience from newer, streamlined games: the player is given a map and has to figure out where to go and how to accomplish the objectives. Depending on who you are, you can either appreciate it or and lose patience. I definitely appreciate it.

This game is the first in a long time I’ve encountered a ‘musical cold-hot cue’ where the soundtrack shifts or reaches the crescendo as the player approaches the objective.⁶ As the game does not give explicit waypoints or instructions on navigating the levels, it is a great example of how games communicate through audio and visuals and challenge the player’s capability to infer.

Hitman: Blood Money is less of an ‘escape from reality’ and more of a reminder of it. The main character is cold and merciless as expected of a hitman. But within the game, he can be a deadpan character. Despite the nature of Agent 47’s profession, the game has pockets of memorable humor should the player find them.

The time commitment of each level of the game is around 15 minutes to 1 hour depending. For example, there would be moderately complex maps such as Flatline then maps as simple as a two-story suburban house like New Life. The missions do not get progressively difficult; instead, there are easy missions in between the harder ones.

I started playing this game on October 6th and completed a first playthrough on October 19th. Generally, I had played 1 mission per day. Overall, I had fun with the game, and I find it completely playable even for those unfamiliar with the stealth game genre.