Games Showcase: Black Mesa

What if you could relive a favourite childhood memory—but with everything upgraded so it’s as awesome as you remember?

I’ve just finished playing Black Mesa, and ... well, that’s what it is for me.

It’s a remake of the original Half Life.

Dedicated fans—particularly, I think, movie fans—wince at the word “remake”, because remakes are often awful: missing the point of the original, adding nothing.

Black Mesa on the other hand truly captures the spirit of the original while not being shy about making changes. Weirdly, it ends up closer to how I remember Half Life than the actual game.

Retweak

I actually played Black Mesa some years ago, but it wasn’t quite done yet—it was released in parts.

The last part of the original, Xen, was widely considered to be the weakest segment of the game.

So, rather than do a close remake, for Black Mesa they decided to use a bit more artistic license.

This time around I just played the new Xen chapters, and they’re pretty great.

The look is suitably alien:

Xen

And there’s plenty to do: fun places to explore, fun exotic flora and fauna to battle, and very Half-Life-appropriate “puzzles” involving finding, fetching, wiring up and breaking things.

Railroading

Around the time the original Half-Life was released, games were exploring with the notion of player freedom.

The early Doom games are probably the most oft-cited example with fairly confusing levels and some backtracking and exploration needed to win through. Locked doors were used as a sign that you needed to explore somewhere else to pick up a keycard.

For Half-Life, though, they went completely in the opposite direction: players don’t like backtracking, they decided, and they also don’t like to have a choice between two paths that lead to the same place, because they will probably backtrack to cover both to pick up any ammo or other powerups along the way.

So in the original Half-Life, and all the sequels, there is only ever one path. It’s a lot like being in an action movie: whatever the protagonist does turns out to be the quickest route to the next interesting thing. Jump off a building? Great! That’s where the next fight happens.

It’s a bit weird, a bit too much “the universe revolves around me”, but it works well for me if I just relax and enjoy it. The key, of course, is that since the game gives you no choice it must lead you through a series of interesting events—which for the most part Black Mesa does very well.

Critique

If I had to give one specific criticism: I think some of the puzzle-driven areas are a tad too repetitive; often there are three variations on a theme, it wouldn’t hurt to cut some of these down to two.

On the flip-side, to compliment something I haven’t mentioned before: the sound track is great. Like in the original, there is no constant background music; instead, specific tracks are used to highlight particularly important events. It works really well.

Wrapup

Good times! And if you never played the original Half-Life and wonder if it was worth the fuss, I recommend playing Black Mesa instead. It’s how we all remember the original.

> Dario Casali, a designer at Valve who has worked on all Half-Life games, remarked in an interview that during development on Half-Life: Alyx he had attempted to play the entirety of the original Half-Life again for research, but after five hours decided to play Black Mesa instead, reasoning it was a much more enjoyable product.

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