(v1.2)
incredibly detailed as a recreation and the atmosphere is just fantastic; setpiece moments like the combine army march and the failed teleportation are awesome, and the manhack minigame is a cool piece of delightfully dystopian worldbuilding. but there isnt much to the gameplay otherwise, and mostly this plays like an extremely extended walking-sim version of the first 15 minutes of hl2. which is somewhat to be expected, but the atmosphere can't carry it forever... i hope the rest of the project can pull things together with strong gameplay AND great vibes

A handful of short, fun and really well-detailed levels with a sprinkle of tasteful ludonarrative design and ambiguity. Are these actually broken bridges you have to jump with this car, or is John just needing to overcome his drunkenness? As an extension of that, are the zombies even zombies, or drunken hallucinations of normal people trying to stop his rampage? Everything is literally falling apart under John's feet, his alcoholism and violence ruining his family's life and the world around him, and I love the music choices as externalisations of a silent character's feelings. Amazing what mods are capable of!

Diamond in the rough. A kind of outsider piece, as if the modder hadn't actually played Half-Life at all, nor learned any basics of level or encounter design. And yet it's super compelling, I think because of the phenomenal atmosphere - the music and sound design is wonderfully fitting and the visual presentation of these gargantuan levels inspired feelings of alienation I've not felt in a long time from a video game. In Portal, there's the framing of Aperture Science and "testing" that contextualises the surreal, enormous levels, but even this game's repeated visits to some sci-fi hub area don't explain a thing. When a piece of a gigantic machine fell down and destroyed half of a (huge) room I was in, it was a really powerful feeling of smallness. You understand nothing and you're tiny and weak, but you're pushing ahead anyway.

It's not very fun gameplay-wise, with annoying encounter design that spams a lot of enemies in wide open areas with no cover, but given the intensely vibes-based design that comes across, and the unexplainability of almost everything, godmoding or noclipping to progress feels thematically justifiable. The environments and atmosphere are the attraction here, and to my mind they're unlike anything else I've seen in a fangame/mod, so go in for those and don't worry about the shooting or puzzles.

this followup to Genry's Great Escape isn't exactly good, but it's a gigantic improvement on its predecessor and does a handful of smart things that endear me to it more than even some higher-effort HL2 mods like Snowdrop Escape. it feels like a scattered collection of micro-ideas and design experiments the developer came up with while learning the engine, but with the Aperture flavour the disconnectedness is diegetically justified. its omnipresence, ironically, creates a consistency Snowdrop Escape lacked, and while its setpieces are technically much less impressive the level design makes for multiple unique styles of encounter, also unlike Snowdrop Escape's narrow corridor shooting. that's not to say the encounters are necessarily good - a few are pretty terrible - but they're varied, and that counts for creativity points in my mind. optional story content is a nice touch, even despite the clunkiness of its execution, and i genuinely loved the pyramid puzzles and traps. it's the first time i've seen Half-Life 2 go to the desert! so that totally rules!

i hope this is just a prelude to something else the developer has cooking, because the glimmers of greatness buried beneath the rough edges are really compelling. and the narrative, the redemption arc, coming from Genry's Great Escape to this, too! this kinda stuff is why i've fallen in love with modding and other independent creative endeavours like this. video games are rad as fuck!!

quite a letdown. the level design is kinda weak - there's a lot of narrow corridors and enemy encounters rarely feel very unique as a result - and the excessive puzzles are far-too-frequent pace killers that feel like they're intended to pad out the run time. there's a lot of ideas, but doesn't really explore any of them to much depth - especially the aperture connections and multiple-universe references that are disappointingly dropped about 2/3rds of the way into the game. the military-shooter style for the guns with ADS instead of HL2's usual hipfire is a weird choice that doesn't add anything to my mind, and combined with the pretty broken enemy AI and aforementioned poor level design i ended up tired of the combat and unimpressed by the puzzles. it's a shame, because the aesthetics are incredible, and i gotta give props for the effort to voice act all the characters, even if it's not great in english. entropy:zero 2 clears, i'm afraid

very very solid mod! the looping level design is something i've always thought would be cool in an fps, but it didn't quite hit for me the way i thought it would, and the music being stock kevin macleod stuff is a bit immersion-breaking if you've heard it all before a hundred times. but it's so pretty! and the storytelling is really well-executed! the setpieces are great! and it's half-life combat, who doesn't love that? definitely stands tall next to Blue Shift/Opposing Force, even if it's not quite everything i love about HL1

cave story is one of my biggest inspirations, and i think the progenitor of my love for idiosyncratic, diamond-in-the-rough passion projects. i'd be a different person without cave story. textual themes and motifs aside, to me this game is ultimately about how cool it is to make art. mash all your favourite genres and tropes together and watch the magic that comes out! i love that more than anything. if i turn my game design brain on, i'd have issues, but who cares about game design when this world is so fucking cool?

...nicalis please fix the challenges on the steam version it's been 13 years