Game 23: Black Mesa

Black Mesa is a 2020 remake of the original Half Life, which I enjoyed so much that I'm pretty sure I completed it at least three separate times. Forgive me if this one waxes hard on the nostalgia but I expect it'll dredge up some decades-old memories. Also I believe this may be the first FPS I've written a blog post for - I should probably go back through the old posts and add tags for their genre, come to think of it.

Just from the title screen I can already tell that this is very different

The start game option actually lets you start at the beginning of any campaign chapter that you so choose, I suppose for anyone that just wants to play a specific part of the game, but of course we will begin at the beginning. Our hero, Gordon Freeman, begins on a tram headed to work while a voiceover plays. Other than departing from the train station in the intro screen (I don't remember that) many of the scenes that I recall are here - the train sequence was a clever way to preview what was up ahead in your adventure.

We will be seeing black helicopters again, I assure you.

And the scene just before you get off hints that workplace safety may not be at the level it needs to be at this facility.

You see this as the voiceover talks about what you should do in case of radiation exposure.

Arriving at work, they've spruced up the office quite a bit.

It's fancy but I'm not sure why the top secret Anomalous Materials Lab needs such a cool waiting room.

But they've kept one of the best original features - the wall path lines.

This was an excellent and unobtrusive way to find your way around without needing a game map.

And, well, I've ruined someone's lunch. I was just wandering around and found the break room, turns out you can turn on the microwave and nuke the food inside into oblivion - the other scientists in the room regretfully remark that it was 'You know who's lunch'.

I have no idea if this was in Half Life but I'm delighted either way.

And finally we come to the thing that will let Gordon survive the cataclysmic events to come, the H.E.V. hazard suit.

Gordon Freeman will never again wear anything else.

The game starts up a musical sequence right when you put it on, and the volume is loud enough that you can't hear what the suit's saying for its startup sequence, which is a shame because its should really be the main thing you're listening to and not the music here. I like the Hazard Suit as a plot device - it was a nice way to explain why Gordon wouldn't just die when shot by bullets, for example, and also why you have a HUD displaying your vitals. The voiced dialogue lines from the NPCs in this area are mostly word-for-word what I remember from the original game (except for the ruined microwave lunch), but the voice acting has all been re-done so I'm getting some uncanny valley vibes - I've heard all the words but not the one who spoke them. We meet Eli the scientist, one of the few characters to make it to future games. As he's talking a nearby science cabinet explodes and he rushes over to deal with it.

Some facilities would delay the experiment when this happens but at Black Mesa the show must go on!

Leaving other people to deal with the various problems that crop up, I get to the test chamber and the scientists there declare me to be a highly trained professional (I do have a PhD from MIT, after all), and they let me in so I can use my expertise to push a button followed by pushing a cart a few feet.

I tried refusing to push the cart to see if they'd get mad but waiting too long actually results in your death.

Cart goes in, disaster comes out, you can't explain that!

Being involved in a resonance cascade either teleports you around a bit or gives you trippy visions.

Now that the cascade has wrecked the facility, I start making my way back out to where Eli and the other scientist are. They're relieved to see me and give me an objective - get to the surface and notify people so they can send help. I forgot about this but during this conversation the first monster, a headcrab, fortuitously materializes in one of the nearby enclosed containers, thus rendering it harmless. The not-Eli scientist just goes over and stares at it and starts making the occasional random comment about the crab such as 'What an interesting anterior!' Here's a spot where I think the remake could have taken a moment to have the scientists maybe react a bit more to the interdimensional intrusion of the first extraterrestrial life form the world has ever seen.

He also calls it a "cute" little fellow, which is not a description I'd apply to headcrabs.

In this remake they've added a lot of minor cosmetic details, like computer terminals and beakers and debris that make Black Mesa feel a bit more lived-in than the original. On my way out I've found this toolbox with a discarded wrench, for example.

Maybe I should take it... nah, who'd use a tool as a weapon?

I make my way past fires and an errant laser and take an elevator back up - I have to pass my first couple foes unarmed and just avoid them when I reach a surviving security guard. These guards were awesome because they'd help you in a fight, and for some reason they appear to have moved the crowbar because you find it just after the laser hallway in the original, but I'm just past that point and I'm still unarmed, so things are proceeding differently. On the plus side there appear to be these flares lying around which are new, you can grab them and throw them at enemies and set them on fire - and the headcrab zombies are extremely flammable!

I got this one, save your ammo.

My god, there's a headcrab in the microwave!

You know exactly how this went down. The microwave didn't survive either.

There are LOT more zombies in this area than I remember, but my friendly guard guy is a rapid-fire zombie killing machine - they were helpful in the original game but not kill 20 zombies helpful.

Maybe I should give him the suit.

We reach the front desk and he settles in there to try to radio for help, so I'm back on my own.

It's just me and flares for a bit but they work extremely well.

The headcrabs / zombies from Half Life were an example of its brilliant enemy design. Just the headcrabs by themselves were scary because they'd just be crawling along the floor when they'd leap directly for your face, both allowing you enough time to avoid them by sidestepping and scaring the everloving shit out of you the first time it happens. Then the zombies aren't just a discrete enemy - they're scientists who have had their head munched by a headcrab that are now controlling them, and if you kill that zombie by hitting it in the body it will fall and leave the still-living headcrab alive to crawl around and jump at you, so the best way to deal with them is to shoot them in the head(crab) in the first place which kills both the zombie and the headcrab.

So it occurs to me that this change with the flares may be a mistake - even though I've now encountered lots of zombies I haven't had the headcrab part drop off and attack because Officer Friendly is a murderous headshot machine, and burning them with flares also kills the headcrab, so your initial zombie encounter doesn't really showcase one of the cooler things about them. Ah, found it!

Oh look, a tool I can use as a weapon.

Holy moly, they turned up speed on this crowbar - hitting with this thing is about as fast as mining in Minecraft. Surely it wasn't this fast in the original game? It's actually so fast that you can walk right up to a zombie and beat it to death before it has a chance to attack you, and it one-shots headcrabs so you can just kill them as they jump at you. I think they've made this puppy a bit too powerful. Can I... can I beat this game with just the crowbar now? Surely not, right? I do want to compare how all the new weapons feel to the original, so I suppose I shouldn't, but I'll at least try killing every enemy with it and let you know how it goes. Crowbar vs. Headcrab: Super Effective (Enemy dead with no damage done to me) Crowbar vs. Zombie: Super Effective In Half Life there are frequent unbreakable glass panes, which let you see into offices that you don't need to spend time exploring or give you little vignettes to watch where a headcrab takes over a scientist so you see how that works without being able to intervene. This game makes the inexplicable decision to also have these unbreakable glass panes but they're not entirely unbreakable, they're just mostly unbreakable - you can actually make a sizeable hole in them but at some point I guess it 'hardens up' and you can't continue to expand the hole any bigger!

Once the hole gets big enough the structural integrity is improved.

My armory has expanded and I have obtained a pistol, which feels similar to the original. It has an alt-fire mode where you can shoot it faster for additional accuracy, I think that was also in the original as well. I've also run across some new foes! Another very clever enemy design, the ceiling barnacle just lies in wait and tries to draw you upward if you are unwary enough to walk into their hanging tongues, which is another pretty frightening experience once it happens, moreso than just doing damage to a player right away. The second in which you are lifted from the ground and hear the sound of yourself being retracted gives you just enough time to look up and blast the thing before it hurts you if you're quick, and it makes for a great 'Oh shit!' moment in the game.

You can also feed them objects which they'll pull up and then drop when they realize it's not food.

Crowbar vs. Barnacle: Effective (Enemy dies but hit me once) I very much like the new design of the houndeye - these guys run around and emit a sonic shock pulse but other than that they're a pretty standard close-range enemy.

The glowing teal stripes give it an otherworldly feel.

Crowbar vs. Houndeye: Effective I am pleased to report that I have found explosives in the form of grenades. I'll grant that I may not have the best track record with explosives but nevertheless having them is always a joy.

This scientist, who is ostensibly intelligent, unlocked the security room so I could have them.

As you would expect from a modern remake this is unquestionably a much better looking game. I don't remember if this is a variant of the puzzle from the original but this this iteration I need to go through a freezer room and to do that I needed to find some hot water valves to raise the temperature enough to open the door.

Looks misty and cold in there.

On the other side, one of these gangly alien electricity-shooting dudes. In later Half Life games we'll learn that they're tragically slaves of the Combine, but in this one they're just another monster that's trying to murder you.

Lightning first, ask questions later.

Crowbar vs. Gangly Alien Electricity-shooting dude: Super Effective One thing they didn't do when modernizing the game was change it to the modern era - they leave it set in the original 'modern' of when the Half Life was released, so the computer monitors here are still bulky CRTs, and other artifacts of the time can be found lying around.

Such as this VHS cassette and player. Yes the crowbar is getting a bit messy.

Also a rotary phone! What's going on with the keyboard?

Half Life featured an unusual movement you had to perform on occasion called the 'jump-crouch', which you had to perform in order to reach any sort of constrained space that was not on the floor, such as this one.

Gordon Freeman does not merely 'climb in' to such obstacles.

This was a maneuver that entailed the unusual combination of first jumping with spacebar followed quickly by ctrl to crouch (And I don't think just holding ctrl and hitting space to crouch-jump would work), and among Half Life's many excellent innovations, it was completely unnecessary - thankfully it was not often required in a frantic situation. I'm happy to report that Black Mesa has done away with that "feature" and now simply jumping at the bloody air duct above will get you into it. One of the other things that was great about Half Life is that the enemies would battle each other, even some aliens seems to hate other aliens, such as this Headcrab vs. Tentacle Dog battle that you walk in on.

The headcrabs don't stand much of a chance against things with no head. How exactly did they evolve anyway?

Of course, once the battle is over, the survivors come after you.

Did that thing always spit a whole shotgun blast worth of acid? Yikes!

There's a nice variety to the game - you're not constantly in combat, it's a mix of puzzle solving, battles and the occasional parkour section.

I think I cut my teeth on FPS parkour in this room, I was much worse at it then than now.

The game is also pretty forgiving, I fell near the end here and it only set me back a few crates. Though the original game had a quicksave / quick load feature (as does this one, same hotkeys) so you could always just save between jumps if you needed to. Because of this Half Life was not a difficult game, you can save / reload at any point so it's easy to retry anything that gives you trouble. So there I was, wandering forward, thinking things were a bit too easy, when I saw a houndeye spawn in the room ahead of me. I rushed in, hoping to crowbar it to death before it could hit me (and I did!), but then additional houndeyes popped in, there were explosive barrels, pandemonium ensued. It was violent, chaotic, over in seconds, and hurt like hell.

I should have died and am only alive because I had something like 80 suit armor.

The player damage system is a relic of an older era of FPS games when you maintained your health / armor by obtaining pickups. These come in the form of health kits and suit batteries that you can find lying around as well as medical / suit charger stations that are attached to the walls, so taking a lot of damage in one encounter can hurt your chances in the next because it can take awhile to find enough pickups to charge your armor back to full. I found another guard helper, he asked me for assistance with his friend that just had a headcrab attack him. I believe if you don't successfully save him here you can't get into this area (he unlocks the door after being saved) and obtain one of my favorite weapons in the game.

Glad I could help.

After that he turns into another enemy murder machine buddy so I find it hard to believe that one zombie would have taken him down.

This sign at the beginning was not exaggerating.

In any case: Hello beautiful, I have missed you.

The shotgun in Half Life is damn good.

I suspect it was this shotgun in particular that kindled my love for the weapon (in games). For many enemies it's a one-shot kill out to medium ranges, and if that doesn't do the trick its alt-fire shoots two shells at once for twice the damage and it fires relatively quickly. The shotgun just gets the job done and makes the job fun. I think they have added some dialogue in certain parts, the guard now following me around is making comments about the route we're taking, and near this water/electricity-filled room he mentions that he'll wait outside while I check out the vent in the back, thus providing a hint about how to proceed forward.

This is a room that players are understandably reluctant to enter, but you must.

One clever things the original developers did was to often show you a foe before you have to face it yourself. I'd forgotten about the Auto Turrets which are very quick on the draw, you first encounter one along with a poor scientist being chased by some headcrabs into its field of fire.

Turrets don't discriminate between the sinners and the saints.

Crowbar vs. Automatic Machinegun Turret: More effective than you might assume.

There's a switch nearby to turn it off but you can just pummel it to death in exchange for a few bullet holes.

I was briefly up to having two guards following me around, and the pair of them cleared out an entire office cubicle area of zombies followed by gangly electroids. They were doing so well I figured I didn't really need to help them out with a measly ceiling barnacle.

I was wrong and one of the boys in blue became dinner while his friend turned his back on the incompetent fool that walked into a tongue.

The other guard foolishly walked into a turret's line of fire shortly thereafter. Easy come, easy go - this is about how well the guard AI worked in the original, to be fair. Finding a large walk-in freezer, I save a scientist who assumed it'd be safe to hide here, and was sadly wrong.

She laments that there's nowhere safe from these horrors.

I find myself wishing I could do more for these survivors, I guess in Half Life's era just having neutral / friendly NPCs running around was innovative, but I'd love to be able to bring them to nearby safe rooms or take other measures to help ensure their survival rather than just smacking whatever nasty happens to be nearby and then walking onward, leaving them to fend for themselves. You already see several instances of nasties killing poor scientists on the way here so surely you're leaving many of these people to die by moving on.

Crowbar vs. Tentacle Dog: Super effective!

I guess we need a big old freezer for the food, but I'm a little disconcerted that there just seems to be a huge slab of meat hung up in here. It just seems out of place in the top-secret Black Mesa research facility.

We're gonna need a butcher with a security clearance.

Actually, it occurs to me that it doesn't seem like this freezer actually connects to, say, a kitchen or cafeteria - the entrance to it just leads to an office hallway. So if you work in one of those offices, every so often you're gonna see the cook and a team of helpers lugging a whole ass frozen cow past your office to wherever the kitchen is in the morning to defrost it for lunch. Oh, hey, I did find the cafeteria. It is actually fairly close so there's only two or three offices you need to pass by with the whole cow.

Bet there isn't much competition for those offices.

Cafeteria menu looks decent, reasonable prices here. Could use a salad bar.

I think I'll pass on the questionable drinks.

In an odd similarity to the Crimson Diamond, most of the time you're wandering around in the game to no music, just the sound of your footsteps and ambient noise. It gives the experience an eerie quality since there's no music to occupy the soundspace - until there is, and then you know that since there's music then something's about to go down. I sort of take for granted that in most games there's an ever-present music track, and I definitely feel its absence if it isn't there. I found a free-standing auto turret that you can disable by crowbar, explosives, or by gently pushing them over onto their side, and I think you could do this in Half Life but here I'm definitely able to pick them up and carry them around while they're still live and they'll shoot enemies for you, giving you plausible deniability.

I didn't shoot that alien.

Speaking of plausible deniability, several of the scientists / guards have mentioned that they heard the military was on their way to save us.

They're half right.

Ah, the military. It's 20 years later and I still don't know why they want to kill everyone in Black Mesa. But maybe that's all right, Gordon Freeman isn't really in a position to know that, is he? Someone somewhere made a decision that all this had to be covered up with extreme prejudice, and that apparently entails the violent deaths of absolutely everyone in the facility.

There's no final confrontation with the man who gave the order who feels the need to insist tell you it was all necessary. There are no tape recorders left lying around with various bits and pieces of people taking the time to record a discussion about the weird goop in the janitor's closet. No ghosts re-enacting their deaths with an unlikely amount of exposition about what's going on around them. I'm just a guy in a hazmat suit and all I know is that the military came in here and shot one of us, I have no idea why, I am not going to find out why while I am trapped in here, and isn't that really the more likely scenario? Speaking of the military guys, I remember that these foes in particular were hailed as a leap forward in enemy AI at the time, so in the next fight with three of them I took a moment to not kill them and watch them do their thing. They don't seem to particularly react to being shot at but they do intentionally pop in and out of cover while engaging you, and they'll talk to each other and announce to their squad (and you, helpfully) when they're throwing grenades - that definitely felt like a step up in an era when most FPS foes simply moved toward you or stood wherever they happened to be in the open and shot at you.

They are by no means all that smart but it makes for a fun fight.

Crowbar vs. 3 Soldiers armed with submachineguns: Somewhat effective, they shot me up a bit. The soldiers all carry a submachinegun which is a perfectly serviceable workhorse weapon that shares its ammo with the pistol, but my personal joy is it's alt-fire which is the underbarrel grenade launcher. Sadly I haven't found any ammo for that yet.

I'm having a blast fighting the soldiers, they really are fun.

One more elevator upward and Gordon Freeman finally reaches the surface for the first time... only to be driven right back underground as he emerges into some military portion of the facility.

It doesn't pay to stay here too long, I ran for it.

Back in the complex, you run into another scientist who gives you the new plan: He believes that the team in the Lambda complex is our only hope against the catastrophe. Gordon's new mission is to make it there and find what's left of them.

If you missed the shotgun earlier there's another on the computer terminal here.

Also, I didn't comment on the grenade earlier since I didn't use them when I first got them, but I've tried them now and they're pretty bad. They fly in an oddly slow, unintuitive arc, and the explosion is small with a significant delay meaning you need to be pretty precise with them and they're best against non-moving targets like turrets. This is probably how the grenades originally were, I don't recall them ever being a particularly impressive option. I've found a tunnel with a rail cart, and this is the first part of the game that I don't recall.

Have I forgotten this entirely or has this been added in the remake?

It's relatively short so it may well have just slipped my mind. I squished a few monsters which has always been mandatory if you get in a moving vehicle in an FPS. That brings us to this room. Who do I report radiation exposures to again?

I really should have paid more attention to the train announcer.

Just beyond lies something I will never, ever forget. The Claws.

More frightening than their appearance is the incessant sound of them smashing the walls.

Crowbar vs. Claws: No. I don't know if these are the appendages of some huge unseen monster or if they're three blind snake buddies having fun, but in my first playthrough I think I died here more than anywhere else because I had no idea what to do. I caught on quickly enough that I couldn't kill them and that they were blind so making sound was what was causing them to attack me and I had to sneak around them (which is terrifying when it's the first time you're doing something like that in a game, Half Life really scared a younger me). What I didn't realize was that you had to create sound somewhere you weren't in order to distract them so you could move them away from the doors you have to get through - and here's where those grenades suddenly become incredibly useful. The claws are fortuitously situated in a jet propulsion test chamber, so you need to circumvent them to get into other areas of the facility to turn on power and giant cooling fan so that you can switch on the engine and cook the bastards.

Many of the rooms here are open and huge and give quite a sense of scale to the facility.

After riding the air current up and out of the fan chamber, my luck turns for the worse when the elevator I was riding broke and dumped me in the radioactive goop, forcing me to climb out covered in the green stuff.

I am really gonna have to figure out who the radiation guy is.

Along the way we find a new toy - remote detonation packs. Between the short throwing distance and full control over the timing of the detonation, they'll generally blow up the thing you want blown up.

Unfortunately the room will require cleaning.

Now that we've turned on all the things, all it takes to be rid of the Claws is hitting the 'on' button.

It smells all the sweeter because you earned it.

Back on track to get to the Lamba complex, we traverse more pipes and sludge pools. There's even a glowing green radioactive waterfall... you know, we're making a LOT of toxic waste here at Black Mesa, a really excessive amount.

I suppose a couple extra barrels of toxic waste isn't really making the problem worse.

This can't be good for the planet, and that's before we caused an interdimensional incident. Speaking of which, we've run into the nastiest thing that's come over to our side so far - I think they're called Gargants. They're incredibly tough and require a lot of explosives to kill, and the military squad that's fighting it doesn't stand a chance.

I'll grant that the original game did not have him make an entrance that looked this good.

Crowbar vs. Gargant: No. I might have the firepower to kill it myself but since I don't have to I'm running by while he slaughters the soldiers. I picked up a revolver, it's the closest thing in the game so far to a long-range sniper weapon because it's alt-fire is to.... aim down the sights, which you can't do with any other weapon. It fires slow and hits real hard. To proceed forward I need to turn the power on here, again.

Which company makes a five-foot wide power meter? This isn't even a large room!

And I'm glad I didn't try to kill the Gargant earlier because you can kill it with a machine once the machine works.

Good thing he chased me into the static discharge room.

I hope on another railway cart after this and I meet a guard who tells me that the team in the Lambda complex needs me to launch a rocket so they can use the satellite in it to fix all this. Sure, why not? Tell them I'm on it! The railway cart needs some help to get through the flooded and blocked tunnels ahead, so we forge onward through them alternately riding the cart and hopping off to clear the way.

I've got a shotgun-related present for whatever is lurking up ahead.

This game (and the original) certainly are fond of electrified water, I think this is the third or fourth time I've needed to deal with it.

It is beautiful and deadly, and this time you need to go swimming.

Crowbar vs. Tentacle Dog revisited: I don't know how I killed the Tentacle Dog back in the freezer without taking damage, because I tried it again and it went terribly - the damn thing has a whirlwind melee attack that throws you far away from it and at close range you can eat multiple hits from its acid attack, there's a good chance you'll die trying it. Maybe freezer dog was sluggish from the cold. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that if you died in Half Life by default you would start at the beginning of whatever section you loaded into. Black Mesa goes one better and puts in invisible checkpoints where you will respawn if you die, and because of this I'm not quicksaving / quickloading nearly as much as in the original.

For example....

I climbed up a long latter to find the above laser traps which activate turrets if triggered. Edging carefully forward to get a better view of what I was up against I managed to walk into the first laser, causing me to panic as the turrets started up so I ran out to knock one over and thus let two others shoot me up, so I increased panicking and ran back to the ladder but didn't grab it and fell to my death. Thankfully I respawned near the bottom of the ladder to simply try again and will try not to embarrass myself this time. I have located the rocket!

Putting your next task on the safety sign is pretty clever.

Missile is prepped and ready to go, we ride onward. I think the soldiers have figured out my identity and I think I'm getting on their nerves.

That's just mean.

But not for long. I am saddened to report that the rail cart, our faithful companion, has met a violent, fiery end at the hands of a squad of soldiers armed with a rocket launcher.

I wrought a terrible, righteous vengeance upon them for this injustice!

Making my way outside, I catch two soldiers in conversation.... about me, and how terrible I am for having killed so many Marines.

I didn't want to kill you guys! You shot first! And you're still killing the scientists here!

This is the rocket launch pad, so I fight my way through the marines and get into the control chamber. Some of them are still on the launch pad when this beauty takes to the skies.

Lamba, we have liftoff!

Back underground, some of these old basements are flooded... and some aquatic wildlife has found it's way in. These alien shark things utterly terrified me the first time through, if there was one in a body of water, getting in the water with it was the absolute last resort for me. I'd spend half an hour looking for a way around it and, failing that, would try to briefly hop in to lure them up near the surface and then hop back out and try to kill them from dry land.

The stuff of nightmares.

Crowbar vs. Terrifying Alien Shark: I really expected this to go badly and it sure did in Half Life, but Black Mesa's super crowbar can cause them to rapidly go through their 'This hurts!' animation and you can actually beat one to death without taking damage if you're lucky and don't get chomped.

Shortly after encountering them I find the crossbow, which is an actual silenced sniper-type weapon that also handily works underwater, unlike the guns. Its alt-fire employs a scope so you can much more easily hit distant targets. The military has had enough of sending regular soldiers after Freeman so they've called in the specialists - assassins!

These required more screenshot attempts than any other foe.

These lithe red-eyed figures are very fast, they jump around and hide and love to pop out behind you and tap you with a pair of silenced pistols. Crowbar vs. Assassin: Hit and miss, sometimes you can run up and catch one and they die fast, other times they'll get away jump up to a platform somewhere and continue shooting while you continue chasing them. I was still collecting data on that by chasing one of them into a room when someone hit me on the back of the head and Gordon Freeman is out cold.

I've been captured by the military!

The two marines start dragging me to an interrogation, but on the way they decide that they'd rather just kill me and be done with it (Oh sure, you'll follow orders to massacre a bunch of scientists but when it comes to handling a prisoner you'll just do whatever feels natural? Great discipline guys.) They're going to pay for that lack of discipline because their method of execution is to throw Freeman into the garbage chute, and we wake up at the bottom of the trash compactor.

Thanks HEV suit, that was a long fall.

Borrowing the design from Star Wars the walls start closing in, and we have to frantically climb up a mountain of crates to escape in time.

I did not require assistance from C3PO.

The soldiers were at least smart enough to take my arsenal so I'm weaponless.... for about a minute.

Don't leave crowbars anywhere near this guy.

Fortunately I don't need heavy weaponry for this next part, which is light on enemies and big on swimming in raw sewage.

Gordon Freeman, MIT PhD, regrets his life choices.

You wouldn't believe the wonderful variety of things they do to raw sewage here, sending it through rotary grinders, up and down conveyer belts, and inexplicably shooting flamethrowers at the surface of the watery sludge as it goes by. You'd think that a man with a crowbar and a PhD might be inclined to try to get through the waste treatment plant by forcibly opening doors via the crowbar, but crowbars are for hitting alien life forms and U.S. Military personnel, not to be used to jimmy open locked doors, and so we must swim through this shit whenever possible. Half-Life's level design is excellent. There's no in-game map and despite that I very rarely get lost or can't find the way forward - I felt like I was completely lost wandering around the waste treatment facility and at one point I did retrace my steps, but despite the size and how complex it felt I somehow wandered forward successfully.

This is a good sign.

A stinking, sewage-smeared Freeman sloughs his way out of waste treatment and into a biolab complex. What we find here turns the narrative on it's head - I'd been assuming that my little cart-related action spawned the whole interdimensional invasion, but this part of the complex has live aliens - along with specimen containment for them and notes about them. Whoever these guys are they'd already made contact with the aliens and have been studying them, and the Anomalous Materials incident just made whatever connection existed between the worlds go haywire.

I don't know what that is but there are controls in here to euthanize it, just in case.

This also has me re-evaluating the military attack - I'd been thinking that it would be pretty hasty for some government official to hear about an accident at Black Mesa and immediately respond to it by killing everyone, but if there were already known aliens here and someone decided ahead of time that if there were ever a major containment breach then the policy should be to burn it all to the ground? That's a lot more plausible, though it doesn't make me any less mad at the military here. The military here have their hands full - they're fighting me again plus the aliens wandering around. There are also working containment measures in place which you can activate that will kill everything in the next room.

That device on the ceiling is about to blow away a couple alien soldiers and the men they're fighting.

Found a new weapon, and it's live... I mean, actually live...

I forgot up until this moment that Half Life features some extraterrestrial armament.

I tried it the Big Red Bug out on a half-zombie which it took quite awhile to kill, and then it bit ME. Crowbar vs. Treacherous Big Red Bug: They're annoyingly hard to hit. You can throw out a bunch at once, they seem like a useful thing to throw out in larger fights and then get away from. The Biolab also has a room with a habitat set up of the alien world, I think it's called Xen.

Please consider donating to your local Habitat for Headcrabs

This is an interesting room because you have the option to flood the room with poison gas and kill the headcrabs wandering around in there, but if you do that the room seals off and you can't actually go into it and get some juice from the HEV charger inside. It's better for you and the flora to actually go in and kill the crabs yourself and preserve the rest of it, which feels a bit like a metaphor. In one of my favorite scenes in the game, you walk along a corridor when suddenly an orange beam blasts through the wall in front of you. You hear a conversation between the gleeful guard that fired it and the scientist cautioning against using it because if it's unpredictability and the potential for an 'overcharge', and then the room they're in explodes and you walk in to find the Linearity Cannon along with a pair of smoking boots.

This is a wonderful way to warn you not to charge it too long.

To get out of the biolab you have to find someone with retinal access (and I guess the retinal scanners have to have their subject alive, there's plenty of dead scientists with intact heads around here). I eventually find a group of three survivors and they're all too happy to be rescued, I'd like to get all three out but since they all have access I really just need one.

There used to be four but 'Peters' tried to get past the surgery machine.

They are currently stuck behind a surgery machine gone haywire, so the first part of our escape involves turning that off.

Even the non-haywire version looks horrifically unsafe.

Once the scientists let you out, you get outside which is such a wonderful contrast with the dark interiors of the facility. Unfortunately the military are out here in force, and you have to fight / run past a lot of them. Used in sufficient numbers those red bugs are actually pretty great, I just unleashed a whole swarm of them and they bit a whole squad to death, and I only had to run for my life from my own weapon for a few seconds!

Guess this answers where the complex gets its power from.

Uh-oh. This looks like a job for the Linearity Cannon.

Crowbar vs. Helicopter: Come down here and fight me you coward! I suppose there must be a debate when you re-make a game as to what, if anything, you're going to change. Some change is inevitable - for one thing, the graphics in this game are better, and so far there's been minor things that have been different such as the super crowbar and the location where you find it, but by and large I think every other weapon is a pretty faithful recreation (which is largely to the good as most of these weapons were well designed and fun to use), and I think most of the levels are the same layout as well. Overall that's a good thing, because the original Half Life is an excellent game. Within excellent games there are still low points, missteps, and things you hope that a remake might do better... such as the minefield, which could have.. no, should have been removed.

Do not attempt this, under any circumstances, ever.

Gordon Freeman must clear a way though these buried explosives BY THROWING GRENADES AND SHOOTING THEM. It's silly as hell, not particularly fun, not remotely what you'd do to clear a minefield, and while you're trying to carefully traipse your way through it a seemingly endless supply of headcrabs burrow out of the soil to "enhance" the experience. Why IS there a minefield here anyway? It's just out here in the desert in front of a maintenance tunnel entrance, of which there are dozens, and placing a minefield around it makes it pretty damn useless as a maintenance tunnel entrance! If there are any changes to this part it's that the mines don't hurt you much, if I recall in the original accidentally setting one off hurt a lot, and it's a miserable section to get through. This time though I'm not sparing on the explosives and even though I hit a couple they don't hurt as much, so onward we go. Traversing a sheer cliff face I find a laser-guided rocket launcher, and the game is kind enough to immediately send another helicopter after you so you can try it out.

10 / 10 would recommend

It's even good enough to take out a tank, which I encountered shortly afterwards.

Thanks for not coming after me before I could kill you.

And then the explosions stop, because there's too much of them. Normally you can just shoot these blue laser-tripped claymores and move on, but this building is haphazardly packed to the brim with things that go boom, and if one goes boom they all do and you go up with it. This leads to a tense 'don't fuck up' section, much better than the minefield.

Time to tread lightly.

It gets pretty elaborate. What madman set all these up? Some disgruntled soldier who just wanted to see the ammo warehouse explode?

This is a few more claymores than you strictly need.

Your reward for navigating that mess is the alien Bee gun!

Just put it on your arm Gordon it'll be fine

The bee gun may have been my favorite weapon in Half Life, both because it has homing ammunition and because it generates additional ammo. I think this version may be changed from the original because the bees certainly fly in less-wonky ways and I suspect the ammo regenerates faster, but the bee homing doesn't seem as aggressive so it may be a worse weapon now. Still good for shooting around corners. I think there are some changes to this area, I suspect I've fought more tanks by now than there were in the original game. Actually I'm not sure there were any tanks in the original, I do recall an APC or two. The military is dropping in reinforcements with VTOL aircraft and the Xen-ites (Xenons? Xenonauts?) are dimension-hopping in force, it's an all-out war on the ground here. Alien soldiers with bee-guns of their own have appeared.

It may LOOK like I'm fighting with the humans against alien beasts but those people will turn on me in a moment.

Crowbar vs. Alien Bee Gun Soldier: It hurt but he dropped first. Also I've now had the game crash on me a couple times in this area. Newer game != more stable game. The Xen / Human battles are fun to watch and there's a lot of them, I'm starting to feel like a war correspondent.

A pack of gangly electro aliens attack a VTOL while it refuels.

An M1 offers support to a squad advancing up the street.

At the end of this street, we've reached our destination - the Lambda complex. Or at least the parking garage for it.

Xen's influence is growing (literally) here.

Pushing deeper inside, it looks like the dimensional incursion hasn't spread everywhere - the central reactor area still appears pristine and it looks like the military hasn't done too much damage here either.

I'm just happy to be here, folks.

It's not all smooth sailing within the complex, of course. There's a whole warehouse chock full of assassins waiting for me. It's taken me so long to get here I suspect they're glad to see me until things don't go their way. I meet a scientist that tells me I should get to the teleportation chamber. Great idea, really could have used teleportation before now. One of the scientists here is a weapons researcher, and he hands over his project - a Muon (or Gluon, I didn't catch it) gun. He says he can't bring himself to use it on a living thing, but the living things that teleport in have no problem using their weaponry on him.

His own invention avenged him.

This thing is extremely powerful and the only reason not to use it on everything all the time is the ammo consumption. I'll need to restart the nuclear reactor here, get the coolant pumps and such going, just the sort of thing you want just one person doing while fighting aliens, it's fine.

The Gluon gun produces a lovely disintegration effect.

Yes, I do have to swim into the tunnel marked 'No Access, Radiation Hazard'. No, a regular door was not an option.

No, I haven't found the radiation report guy.

Yes, I got the reactor turned on. NO, I don't think it's supposed to look like that!

YES, IF I SURVIVE THIS I WILL GET CANCER

Ok, I'm slightly singed but it'll buff out. I've reached the teleportation chamber, which thanks to a thick door and some autoturrets has held out against all odds.

And boy are they glad to see me.

Apparently there's a powerful entity in the world beyond that they believe is controlling all this, and our only hope is to send someone through to go kill it. They've been watching my progress and getting things ready for me, obviously since they couldn't possibly invade an alien world without a state-of-the art hazardous materials suit....

WHICH THEY ALREADY HAVE. They already have an HEV suit here just ready to go!

In fact, they have absolutely everything they need to have attempted this long before I got there! A fully stocked armory, a guard better trained in the use of weapons than MIT PhD over here, and a long-jump module for the HEV suit! I didn't even have one of those! What the hell were you guys waiting for? Were you holding out for a goddamn crowbar? If so, you're in luck, because I think it's the only thing I'm bringing to this party! Fine. I'm here, I came all this way, why let someone else steal the glory. Hey, anyone else want to put on that suit and help save humanity? No takers?

Nobody else wanted to jump in the big science machine.

Floating alien brain guys attack the teleportation device as it powers up, to no avail.

Crowbar, I think we're not in New Mexico anymore.

Xen is where the remake really shines. The original Xen in Half Life is pretty damn ugly and the section is relatively brief.

This Xen is absolutely gorgeous.

I think they may have thrown away the original's entire Xen level (which is fine, it was just ok) and re-done it. It's definitely longer. Xen has old threats - there are houndeyes running around and I'm sure we'll see more aliens soon - and new ones, such as this ceiling electrode which zaps you if you get close.

Crowbar vs. Electrode: Ow ow ow do not recommend.

I'm not the first person they sent here in an HEV suit - there's actually several dead HEV users here. This explains why nobody back in Lambda wanted to take that last suit and try their luck - those brave enough to do it already did it.

I even found an HEV zombie, nice touch.

The Lambda team set up a forward base where they were studying Xen and it's creatures, it's a pretty extensive mini-building.

 Looks like they found a way to use the yellow crystals that grow here as a power source.

I'm really enjoying Xen, and one thing I've been pondering along the way is whether I'd recommend people play this or the original Half Life or this if they've played neither. The two games felt nearly identical up until the open battles before the Lambda complex, but it's Xen that has solidified my thoughts on the matter - unless you are committed to experiencing Half Life in it's original form (and go for it if you are, it's still a great game), I think Black Mesa is the way to go, because this is the version of Xen that I want people to experience.

This amazing cave is not in Half Life.

I'm using the bee-gun wherever possible as there's very little spare ammo here.

Crowbar vs. Angry Tentacle: Death

I suspect the devs agree with me that the explosive-tripwire-warehouse was a good section, because whoever set that up made their way over to Xen and just kept the party rolling.

Maybe the G-man is doing it, I haven't seen him in awhile and who knows what he does for fun.

I've run into a bigger, badder version of the Houndeye. This one's attack doesn't actually damage you, it unleashes a pressure wave that sends you flying - since Xen which is a series of floating islands that'll kill you if you get sent off the edge but if you are positioned up against a wall you'll be fine.

Crowbar vs. Alpha Houndeye: Fine if you don't get thrown into the void.

Overall they've turned down the encounters a bit, making for a more relaxed experience as we come to the end of our adventure. There actually is a fair bit of ammo of all types on the HEV suits and supply crates and I figured out that these blue pools / electric rocks will refill your health and armor.

These appear to last forever so health / armor is less of a desperate situation than on Earth.

And then up ahead it looks like we've just about reached our objective - only one imposing island remains between me and the tower that I assume is my goal.

Freeman is really kicking himself for not bringing a camera.

That chonky island in the foreground conceals another surprise - alien technology. I got a whole alien teleportation device repaired and all fired up in just minutes - just the sort of thing you hope for when you're getting that diploma from MIT.

We've come a long way from pushing a cart holding a rock.

Through the portal I found myself gazing at the glorious sunrise over Xen.

Or sunset. Or maybe the sun just remains in that spot, this place is weird.

Every so often in Xen, the Lambda team has been teleporting a canister full of ammo to me - you can hear it come in because it makes a familiar electric crackle sound, the same one that enemies use when they're teleporting in near your position. Only this time, it's very loud, and the lightning is very close, and I suffer instantaneous death when the resupply container materializes right where I happen to be standing. Nice resupply Lambda team, way to telefrag the last hope humanity has. Mankind is fortunate that I quick saved.

Oh no. Oh hell no.

I genuinely think I repressed this memory

You know that the Gonad Beast must have been quite the topic at the Black Mesa development meetings. I suspect that they grabbed the creature animator who was 'always a little off', locked them in a closet, and told them to do their thing. Crowbar vs. Scrotus:

I can never un-see this so you must also suffer

Did I say that Xen was relaxing? Not after the Testicular Terror showed up! Alternately fighting and running away from this guy involves a really long (sorry) sequence of events.

Finishing him off leaves a mess behind.

An exhausted and none-too-clean Gordon Freeman stumbles onward to a much more ominous looking part of Xen.

Please tell me that's not an alien waste treatment facility

God damnit.

Yes, I did have to wade through it.

Yes, I regret my life choices.

Something unexpected is going on here - there are alien guards forcing the gangly electro-guys to work. Unlike Half Life, in this game we now actually get to see that they're enslaved.

The slaves actually don't hate me but the food here sucks.

I'm starting to feel some empathy for the poor guys when a band of those floating brain aliens attack, and one of their powers is to directly control these guys and force them to help attack me. Sadly killed some of the slaves in self defense, which didn't make me feel great when I found this guy crying afterwards.

Sorry man... er, electro-guy

Crowbar vs. Floating Brain Alien: They're every bit as cowardly as helicopters. I skipped out on the surviving slaves - I need to save humanity, after all - and started heading up the river of sludge when I stumbled into a Gargant. I started running from it, and immediately ran into a second one... and then another... and another. I think a found a nest of the damn things, there were more that twice as many here than in the entire original game.

This is the part where you run.

Remember way back when I saw a couple floating islands and thought I was near the end? I was very wrong. They added a LOT of Xen - all this would easily qualify as it's own DLC or possibly even a sequel in its own right. The Lambda guys appear to have a good fix on my position because they teleport in a supply capsule right ahead of me every so often now, and it's become my only source of ammunition - I stopped finding the HEV suits long ago, we're now venturing where no human has ever tread.

I ended up sabotaging and wrecking this sludge pipe station.

Took a casual swim in the soldier-growth vats.

Disintegrated a horde of the floating brain-aliens that attacked me at this power plant.

Finally managed to snap a decent picture of aforementioned brain aliens.

And currently I'm on an extended self-guided tour of the Mysterious Green Box Shipping Facility

The slaves have all ignored me unless they get directly controlled by floating brain guys, and when that happens they revert to pacifism if I kill the alien mind controller, so happily I haven't killed any others since the first unfortunate incident. I am utterly and completely lost at this point, I haven't seen the sky in a long time and if this were an open world game I doubt I'd ever find where I'm supposed to go. Thankfully there is only one way forward from each part, so there's only one right track to follow... but I still feel as through I'm hopelessly lost on an alien planet. It's been awhile since Lambda sent a capsule my way. I hope they're still all right. It'd be nice if they ever sent a note along with the ammo.

This is actually an elevator

I've wrecked so much machinery at this point that I'm going to cause an alien insurance industry crisis. In Half Life 2 the gangly electro guys look at Freeman with a sense of reverence, and that didn't make a whole lot of sense from the original Half Life where all you did was kill them, but by now there's over a hundred alien slaves that have seen me disintegrate their overseers. Raise your gangly electric fists to the sky my brothers, so we may all be free. My wandering ends when I find a teleporter to the Eye of Sauron.

Getting here required one hell of a detour.

The eye is itself another teleporter, and that brings me to the final confrontation. Face to face with a singularly powerful being that's already enslaved this world and is trying to enslave ours.

A Big Ugly Baby

This is a very flashy fight while not being too difficult - Lambda sends more capsules and for the first part there are armor crystals / health regen pools to use. While I'd never, ever hit a baby with a crowbar, I did use it to smash some of the power crystals that you have to destroy during the fight.

Ok I confess I did really want to crowbar the baby

The battle ends with the BUB not quite dead, I got teleported away and I'm left looking at the tower again wondering if the monster will survive after all - a question which receives a rapid, unequivocal answer.

Radiation guy is going to be very unhappy with me

And.. that was pretty much my workday. I did my job pushing a cart, all hell broke loose, and I spent the entire rest of my day trying to sort out the mess. I skipped lunch, I'm pretty sure the radiation guy I need to talk to is dead, and I hereby submit my resignation from Black Mesa Corp.

It's not all bad though. They say you close one door and another opens.

I met a nice man on the train and he offered me a job!