Black Mesa (2020)

Getting back in to this as my playthrough was paused for a holiday. The reworked Xen is beautiful but it doesn't half go on too long. Just beat Gonarch's Lair (again, about 2x as long as it needed to be) and am about to start Interloper which, from what people say online...goes on way too long 😅

Hoping I don't run out of steam before I finish it as so far it's been very very good.

This is incredible! It was probably a bad idea to start playing a remake of a game I literally just replayed, but I was curious and I am very pleasantly surprised so far. I was expecting a thorough jazzing up of the original game, but so far it's more like a modern reimagining.

I also didn't really didn't expect the opening levels to give Doom 3 vibes, but so far I'm on board. Hard to believe this is a fan-made game, and, except for maybe id, it's hard to imagine anyone but Valve saying "yeah this is cool, go ahead and sell it on our store".

Just finished playing through Black Mesa for the first time. I forgot just how much there was to Half-Life. Everytime I revisit the franchise, one of the all time greats, I typically play HL2. But I really should have been going back further. There is something different and special about the original.

Like a lot of old games, there are flaws that stem from it coming from a time before game design philosophy was really a thing. Even in this remastered format, and in some places I suspect its flawed BECAUSE of the remastered format. Signposting is inconsistent. You will often wonder around blindly, and sometimes solutions to puzzles just seems arbitrary. There are a lot of blind switches to be pushed with little to no information about what they might do, only for you to find an open door or a green light turned on that you had no real idea of its existent when you toggled the switch, which is pretty poor design.

But Black Mesa begins to immediately feel like a world in itself from the first iconic moment on the tram. And as you move through the facility, that sense only grows as you intermittently meet with scientists and security guards. None of them say anything particularly important, none of them are given names, and only a few of them actually follow you and help you out. But those moments combined with the scale and consistency of Black Mesa itself makes Half Life, a linear game from the late 90's, feel more immersive, open and interactive than 99% of open world games, modern or otherwise. That sense if lost in the final act, when the player is taken to an alien world outside of Black Mesa. Crowbar Collective has certainly improved this part of the game, but the solitary nature of Zen means that it pales in comparison to the rest of the game, and it goes on for at least an hour too long for its own good.

Generally speaking, Black Mesa is a truly incredible way to revisit the classic game, and serves as a reminder as to why Half-Life 1 is perhaps the most important and influential FPS game in all of the genre's history. Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein were pioneers, but Half-Life took that and did something truly special with it, something that gave FPS clarity and purpose, and did things that transcended even that genre, taking steps to prove that video games can not only have an equal impact as other storytelling mediums, but can also do things that those mediums can't.

Well, I think I'll have to quit this one early due to technical issues. After running perfectly fine the game now renders at an unplayable low FPS. It's not an problem with my (admittedly) crappy laptop, but an issue reported by many users. Essentially the devs made the decision of prioritising looks over frames in these particular levels and the end result is terrible and, as I said, almost unplayable.

Now I'm considering whether to jump directly to Half Life 2 or start Half Life 1.