Lowering the bar.

Black Mesa is a fan remake-cum-reimagining of Half-Life, and it shows. It’s a very technically impressive game, extracting just about everything it can possibly wring out of the damp towel that is the Source engine. It’s a fairly well-designed game, by virtue of most of its elements being copied over wholesale from the original Half-Life. It’s obviously made by people who are very, very passionate about Valve’s work. But Black Mesa forgets, omits, or changes enough of what worked before that it ultimately commits the mortal and unforgivable sin of making Half-Life kind of boring, a crime for which it must be punished by making it boil upside-down beneath the lake of ice for all eternity.

I like Half-Life a lot. I hardly love playing Half-Life, but it’s a game that I both enjoy and respect, which is a sadly uncommon combination. I’ve never existed in a world without Half-Life, a statement which I’m hoping will make some of you wither into dust, and that makes it a bit difficult to personally gauge the impact it had. Obviously, there are hundreds upon hundreds of reports detailing exactly what made Half-Life so special. There are articles and videos and commentary tracks all recounting all of the little quirks and nuances that later shooters silently adopted because it was what they were expected to do now. I can appreciate it from a sort-of dispassionate, outside perspective; as far as I can tell, shooters before Half-Life were mostly just copying Doom’s homework, for better and for worse. If nothing else, you can absolutely tell that a big shift to a more cinematic style was emerging with Half-Life — again, for better and for worse.

Regardless of the finer details, Half-Life is now a very old game. Twenty-five years old, in fact. And the neat thing about games that get that old is that it inherently primes people for a remake. “The gameplay needs an update”, “the graphics look bad”, “fix Xen”, the masses say. It’s a mentality you have for toys. Make it shiny, make it new, make it talk when you pull the string on its back, make sure you add lens flares and ray tracing. It’s certainly nothing that Half-Life needs. Half-Life is already an incredibly solid game that had a fierce impact on the industry and near single-handedly made Valve the monolith that it is today. To suggest that Half-Life — just about any game, really — needs a remake is to fundamentally assign this toy mentality to art.

But, hell, a remake could still be cool.

I like Half-Life, and Crowbar Collective likes Half-Life, and a lot of other people all really like Half-Life. Besides, the game has already been made for them. If all they’re doing is porting it from GoldSrc to Source, what’s the worst that could happen?

We ultimately don’t know the worst case scenario, because it never came to pass. We do, however, know of a pretty rough scenario, which is Black Mesa releasing in the state that it’s in.

The initial few levels are actually very impressive, largely because of how close they play to the original. The tram ride is there, the resonance cascade is there, the brutal ammo restrictions and tight corridors filled with headcrabs and zombies are still there. Hell, even your first encounters with the aliens are tense and unforgiving, encouraging you to use flares to light enemies on fire in order to conserve your ammo. It’s neat! All the way from the start of Anomalous Materials to the end of Office Complex, Black Mesa feels remarkably like Half-Life fully realized. It’s all shiny and pretty, you’ve got some mechanics to play with that were originally intended but didn’t make it to the final release, and it’s a very enjoyable time. You can even forgive Crowbar Collective for getting rid of the scientist who dives through the window and says “greetings”.

And then We’ve Got Hostiles starts.

The HECU still look like they’re holding MP5s and pistols, but they’re secretly wielding Freeman-seeking laser beams. There’s no longer an ounce of hesitation on their part; if they see a hair on your head poking out from cover, they’re shooting you, and you’re taking damage. They’re like Blood cultists in body armor. Also in keeping with pre-Half-Life design decisions, their AI has been drastically dumbed down. The HECU will still at least try to flank you, but they no longer seem all that interested in the concept of their own survival. They’ll rush you down open corridors with no cover, seemingly only interested in getting as in your face as they possibly can, regardless of whether they’re holding an SMG or a shotgun. Throwing a grenade at their feet will make them loudly announce that there’s a nearby grenade, but they don’t ever seem to actually try getting away from it. They’ll do the little Source Engine shuffle that the Combine like to do — if you’ve played enough Half-Life 2, you know exactly what I’m referring to — and then blow up. This is in obvious and stark contrast to the HECU in Half-Life who, while hardly all the avatars of John Rambo, at least seemed like they weren’t showing up just to die. Combat in Black Mesa against the Marines largely just boils down to you and a grunt sprinting at one another with the fire button held down and you winning the war of attrition by virtue of being the only guy here with power armor. Compared to the earlier, more impactful Black Mesa fights against Vortigaunts and houndeyes, this is a letdown; compared to the HECU in the original, it’s shocking.

Given how frequently you enter skirmishes with the Marines, it's something you really can't ever get away from for the overwhelming majority of the game. Crowbar Collective mentioned that their goal was to "make combat more intense", and it seems as though they've tried to do that simply by flooding rooms with significantly more enemies. By my count, Half-Life's We've Got Hostiles pits you against 21 HECU; Black Mesa sends out 32. It doesn't sound like much, and it isn't at first, but it starts to add up fast. Someone on Reddit actually went through and counted every single on-screen HECU kill, and it comes out to over 550 in Black Mesa compared to Half-Life's 250. When you also take into consideration the fact that pre-Xen levels are condensed compared to the original (with On A Rail being noticeably cut way down), the enemy density is completely out of control.

It's not just that there are more of them now, either. The HECU take roughly the same amount of bullets to put down (about 60 health in Black Mesa relative to the original 80), and your ammo is even tighter than it used to be. Being able to carry 250 SMG bullets with ten grenade rounds on the alt-fire was a bit too freeing and a bit too fun, so now you're hard-capped at 150 SMG bullets and three grenade rounds. The pistol now only holds 150 rounds, instead of 250. The shotgun now holds 64 shells instead of 125. The enemy AI is somehow stupider than the one from twenty-five years ago, so it's not like the game has been made any more difficult now that Gordon's got the HEV suit without pockets; holding the MP5 at head height and clicking from a distance seems to do most of the work for you, and the HECU drop about as much SMG ammo as it takes to kill them. The optimal strategy, it seems, is to just hang back and fish for damage multiplier headshots with the MP5 and then go to the next slaughtermap room to continue the process for the next seven hours until Xen.

While Half-Life's Xen was the end product of tightening deadlines and dwindling budgets, Black Mesa's Xen exists almost as a complete refutation of the original's design circumstances; it very obviously got an overwhelming amount of development time and assets and takes up nearly a third of the new game, whereas the previous Xen was over and done with in about twenty minutes. I think Xen is where Black Mesa most obviously becomes a fan game, because it's clear that nobody in charge ever felt the need to say "no" to anything. It's incredibly long, packed to the gills with scripted setpieces and references to later Half-Life titles, and it keeps using the same wire connecting puzzles and conveyor belt rides over and over again in the hopes that making Xen longer will make Xen better. There's a section here in Interloper where you have to bounce off of one of three spring platforms to kill a Controller, and then that opens a path for you to destroy a fleshy glob maintaining a force field. You would think that the fact that this is split into three very distinct paths would mean that you would thus have three very distinct encounters, but they all play almost identically to one another. All three of them are circular rooms with a Controller floating around, and you break his crystals in order to make him vulnerable to your attacks. It isn't a difficult fight, and it isn't a complicated puzzle, and ultimately just winds up being the exact same thing three times in a row. This happens constantly throughout Interloper, which mostly consists of you sprinting down long conveyor belts and then jumping off of them onto other conveyor belts for about two straight hours.

What burns me most about Black Mesa's Xen, however, is that the entire borderworld has had the personality sucked straight out of it. Xen used to be a Giger-esque hellscape, all bone and speckled carapace. A lot of the level geometry textures were taken straight from reference photos of insects, and it did a great job selling Xen as something of a hive; lots of gross, fleshy, chitinous pockets carved into the walls, pale white and red moving parts that are clearly both artificial and organic. It makes sense, contextually, because the Nihilanth is itself a hybrid of flesh and metal, and the home that it's made of Xen is reflected in its design. Black Mesa's Xen, in its deepest parts, is way more heavy on the machinery angle than the organic one. Through the thick, red haze, it's hard to tell what you're even looking at. The glowing blue lights leading you by the nose sit next to what are very clearly just steel girders and pistons, which is immensely boring when you compare it to the almost-living Xen from two and a half decades ago.

Old Xen's inspirations were obvious, but it still managed to carve an identity out of them. Black Mesa's Xen, on the other hand, looks like fucking everything else.

I want you to look at these two pictures and tell me that they don't look like they were from the same game. I want you to look at this screenshot and tell me that you can't picture the SSV Normandy flying straight through it. I want you to look at this image and tell me that it doesn't look like a Destiny raid map. Whatever identity Xen once had is gone, stripped bare to make it completely indistinct from any photobashed ArtStation "outer space" drawing to be used for padding out a portfolio and nothing else. Originality is both overrated and unimportant, but when you throw out something neat in favor of something bland, I'm going to be hard on it. Gordon Freeman crawls grunting to his feet after going through the Lambda Core teleporter and walks through blue bio-luminescent plants until he sees the Eye of Sauron looking down on him and a woman starts singing over baby's first synthwave.

On that note, Black Mesa has entered itself into the club of Media that Needs to Shut the Fuck Up, given how it starts playing some pretty mediocre tunes from the word go and never ever stops. Music is playing constantly throughout the game, never giving you a single quiet moment or a chance to drink in the layered soundscapes, and it hardly even has the decency to be good most of the time. For every decent pull that fits the action, there are two tracks that clash so hard that they spoil the scene they're in. Blast Pit 3 plays during the sequence in Blast Pit where you have to sneak past the tentacles back up through the missile silo. The incredibly loud, chugging guitars that lead into the How to Compose Dramatic Music For Film tinkling piano keys don't fit the sequence at all. Again and again, these amateurish tracks keep leaching into the game like pesticides into groundwater. The intro to Lambda Core where you uneventfully ride a freight elevator for two minutes is punctuated by steel drums and pounding synths in a moment that should be quiet and introspective; Blast Pit 1 legitimately sounds like a recording of somebody warming up before their actual performance; every single track on Xen inevitably leads into the exact same fucking ethereal female vocals "ooh"ing and "aah"ing over the instrumentation. It wasn't enough for Xen to look like everything else on the market, so all of its songs sound identical to one another, too. It's rough. It's so clearly a collection of just about every thought the composer has ever had in the past two decades, all strung together end to end without much of any consideration as to when it ought to be playing or what ought to even make it into the final game. I can't remember the last time that a game's music annoyed me this much.

Peel away the layers and poke your fingers through the flesh, and Half-Life is still at the core of Black Mesa. Enough of it is still present that playing Black Mesa isn't a completely miserable experience. All it managed to make me feel, however, was that I'd rather just be playing the original instead. Black Mesa can't manage to be anything more than a slipshod imitation of Half-Life, and the moments that it does well are the moments that Valve already did better twenty-five years ago.

Xen was never bad.

This is the Dark Souls of video games.

A grander take could probably be made than what I will do, but what has been said in the discourse of Dark Souls and the Fromsoft Formula over the last twelve plus years that hasn't already been mentioned? This game is difficult, but not for the reasons I like games being difficult. In Bloodborne and Sekiro, for better or for worse respectively, I felt like I was being challenged upon the contents of me versus boss, or me versus world enemy. Previously, my encounters with the toughest elements of those games, Elden Ring included, boiled down to my skill against a meticulously crafted combat experience. I like that to an extent. You don't necessarily feel cheated if you lose, rather pursuant of a methodology to improve. In Bloodborne when I found myself fail-rolling against gravestones when fighting Father Gascoigne, I told myself "Git gud" and was able to overcome the fight after a few more tries. In Sekiro, I bit my lip, yelled an obscenity, and buckled down my parry timings to win the duels. In Dark Souls? I threw my hands in the air like a confused ape wondering what jape had wandered upon my nape.

I named my character Chunky Thomas... there is no real etymology here, but after playing thirty-three (afk time included) some hours of Dark Souls I think Clunky Thomas would be a better moniker. I came to the conclusion after defeating the lava-spider boss (leaving name out as a spoiler) that Dark Souls did not feel more difficult because of its bosses than other Fromsoft games, but rather that the game was more difficult overall. This is due to a plethora of reasons that can be mostly boiled down to archaic overworld design and resoundingly poor hitbox tech. Now when I speak on the overworld design I don't mean the environments, because for 2011 they are phenomenally detailed and deep, but rather the corpse runs, enemy placement, and contrived sequencing of "objectives" to name a few. Legendary Youtuber VideoGameDunkey's "Thank You Dark Souls" quip isn't just a silly gag, it's a great dig at the cheap tricks this game pulls on the player when simply trying to enjoy going from A to B. Blight Town should be called Indict town because of how much of a sour mark it jumps the game off with. Nothing says "fun" or "weehee" or "yahoo" like jumping from the top of a cliff down to the bottom while fighting through enemies that you can't see, corners that abruptly end, easy places to trip and fall and have to restart progress, and status effects galore. Blight Town is simply the easiest place to point a finger at, but this happens in multiple places in the game, most annoying when you are trying to take on Dark Souls' large collection of bosses. Corpse Runs are no stranger in FromSoft games, as Demon Souls had you do it from the BEGINNING OF EACH LEVEL, but with Dark Souls they are incredibly sinister. It sucks to die in any game sure, but you kinda know it comes with the Fromsoft territory. Though it's unfair to judge games after their successors made positive changes, I really missed Elden Ring's statues of Marika and respawning you right near boss rooms. There was a boss (named after four enemies,) that I'd die to and have to make a two to three minute trek each time across some seriously dangerous ground to even make it back to the boss arena. Now I coulda "gotten gud" and beaten the boss much earlier sure, but having to retrace my steps to that extent soured my experience greatly. This happened time and time again, where even if I wasn't dying to the boss a lot, the amount of times I did coupled with the journey back made the experience excessively tiredsome.

I remember playing Dark Souls as it released in 2011, I didn't quite understand it but I had a blast playing through and observing my buddies back then on their PS3 take on this mysterious world for the first time. Ever since watching them play, I tried it myself a few times and it never took because of its aimless exploration and lack of upfront story. I was the Fallout and Elder Scrolls kid that liked having a game that said "story here" and "objective roughly in this area" and I haven't really ever gotten over that. It's the way my brain works and has since, I operate very well in a space that offers me a general sense of direction in lieu of a formless endeavour. Do I like games and media without a said "goal?" Absolutely. Minecraft is one of the greatest games of all time in my opinion. Even in another Fromsoft title like Elden Ring, which is one of my favorite titles ever, I enjoyed it despite not having a clear "go here" mantra. But what Elden Ring did do that Dark Souls didn't was give you even a modicum of a hint. I get that the sequences of Dark Souls could be formulated on one's own after a good amount of careful deliberation, but I simply don't have that time anymore and my brain sure dislikes the conflict of trial and error in such an unfair world. In Elden Ring I could explore an area and not no where to go, but it would be okay because the general placement of enemies was less opressive and I could traverse the world with ease. In Dark Souls, getting from place to place is a hastle and a non-guarentee in the manner of having your souls/humanities survive. I loved looking at the world but had a strong disdain for moving through it. Another dislike I had in this regard was not having each bonfire be a warp spot, the decision making is clearly to make the game feel less "safe" but to me felt more like a headache as a result. Not having any kind of map or reasonable connection between realms of interest is inexcusable and dejecting toward a players time and wherewithal.

Combat felt jank, full stop. This is absolutely a product of the time but woah nelly did I have a rough time understanding the ways I was perishing to enemy combatants. I ran a full oonga boonga strength build, as I often do in games of this nature (or most action/RPG's) and attempted to operate under my knowledge of enemy moves and roll timings. I quickly learned after a few bosses that this wasn't going to work the whole way through, as each boss seemed to have their own hitboxes that were made up and impact upon my hp that didn't matter. It felt like I was always in 2-3 shot range, and that was frequently tested because the bosses would have an AoE that got me in the hitbox despite nothing indicating that I was actually hit by the bosses move physically. Many a time did I think (and this happened especially in the DLC) that I had succesfully timed a roll out of a move just to look up at my health bar and see a declining yellow bar make an appearance. Like I mentioned above, this is definitely due to the age of the game and hitbox technology not being near what it is today and in Fromsoft's magnum opus Elden Ring, but it feels awful to go back and experience. My takeaway was that I felt more cheated by encounters than I felt that I was playing the game poorly, I didn't get good feedback on many fights as to what I could do better, moreso just what I could survive.

I know this title is intentionally cryptic, and I also Know that my favorite Fromsoft releases are guilty of this too, but the lack of any cohesive story element left a sore spot for me. With the intro cutscenes big lore dump and some self searching on the good ol' interwebs, I was able to put together what the story means and why I was doing certain things towards the end of its narrative, but it could have been told in a much better and easier to parse way than what it did. Fromsoft seems to have learned this with time; as Bloodborne drips the narrative in front of the player a little more with Gehrmann, Sekiro is completely narrative driven, and Elden Ring has SIR GIDEON OFFNIR, THE ALL KNOWING giving out his lore dumps and information on the Elden Lords. Not having any of that in Dark Souls made it unfortunately difficult to know the "why's and what's" of my actions as the main character.

Dark Souls wasn't all bad, but it felt bad for me to play. I thoroughly enjoyed the aesthetics and tropes that would make their way through Fromsoft's games to follow. Locations like Anor Londo and the Royal Woods were really neat. Everything felt like it was meticulously designed to craft a once lived in fantasy realm. Bosses, while they didn't play so cool, looked real cool and had that charm to them that makes the series and company as special as it is. The music for these fights, and especially for the final (which was hilariously easy) boss was a good touch to make them feel memorable.

Dark Souls is clearly one of the more influential games of this milennia (Blade of Miqullla?) but it feels dated. I can't recommend this game to anyone because of its dated map design, hitbox tech, and lack of narrative cohesion, but I do understand why it exists and why people have such an affinity to it.

P.S: I began this review at around 4AM, thinking I'd offer a few sentences and then depart to bed, but it's nearly 5AM and I think I overstepped my intentions.

The Sunken King contains one of the better DS2 levels with lots of hidden levers and switches that alter your path around the map. It's a fun little dive into a maze like temple that is capped off with 2 really good bosses. Unfortunately, the optional area is a slop fest of 100 turrets that shoot shit at you on a run back to a 3v1 NPC gank fest. This "Boss" fight just reuses some annoying NPCs you've already seen before and is not exactly the most exciting experience. This optional area isn't some total bullshit gauntlet, but it is just kinda annoying since it amounts to a really lazily designed boss. Still, the rest of this DLC is very good.

This is definitely a game that I appreciate more than I actually like. I did enjoy what I played for the most part, but getting just under halfway through the game, I really don't want to play anymore.
For 1998 this game is super impressive, I found myself surprised at how much they were able to do for the time period. Nowadays though the game definitely drags. The movement doesn't feel quite right, the game is super stingy with health pickups, and sometimes enemies can kill you in frankly stupid ways to where it doesn't even feel fair.
When you're in a gunfight and carefully planning your actions it's really fun and engaging, but at the same time there's plenty of boring puzzle solving and the most awkward platforming imaginable.
So yeah, not a bad game by any means and I'm glad I checked it out, but this is not one I have any desire to pick up again, sorry to say.