a couple of summers ago when i played this, i got stung by a bee at a family pool party. it kind of sucked and it's the only time i've ever been stung. anyways, i had a delayed reaction (meaning it swelled up two weeks later) and took some benadryl, then hopped onto half-life with my friend who was taking me through the series.
over the course of the next hour, with the combination of the benadryls, irritability from the reaction, and a lack of sleep, i began to like, astral project into half-life. specifically we were playing the on a rail segment, and i could like, feel myself melting into the game. it was honestly so terrifying and yet i couldn't stop playing, my brain was becoming soup, my friend was asking me questions and i was not registering them. i have yet to play half-life alyx but even vr could not come close to this experience. i was straight up in that minecart and i was fighting for my life

eventually i managed to tell my friend "hey sorry, i think i have to log off" and they were like "yeah you've been kinda quiet". i think this experience was so essential to my thoughts on half-life 1 it bumps up the score by half a star.

im logging all my thoughts on other supergiant games so im going to log this too.
this score is probably not high enough for some people, but 3 stars for me still means "that was good!". i def liked hades and also there's like so much content to it it's crazy. i know i haven't even scratched the surface despite playing it for much longer than other supergiant games games. games games. makes it a real mouthful
but for some reason, i don't know what it is, like maybe i'm just way different now than when i was 14-17 playing the other supergiant games, but i kind of started to feel frustrated with hades when it came to actually playing it. maybe you can say "lone git gud", and that is true, i am not good at video games and even turned on the essentially-cheating-mode later. but i don't know, the more i played, i kind of started to have less and less fun, and i really just wanted to focus on the story to be honest. i think hades probably has the most amount of fluff writing of any of their other games and i was just like... man... let me just read this!!!!!!! i wanna read this!!! playing this isn't fun for me!!!!

now the truth of the matter... i technically did not beat this game as you are supposed to beat hades 9 times or something. i stopped after the 4th win because i just got annoyed i would have to do that over and over again. but i did essentially look up the rest of the game on youtube anyways after/watched a ton of videos just capturing certain dialogues/convos, so i think i'm okay.

i don't know what didn't click about this for me. like maybe i needed to play this in the companionship of the right person, like how if someone played style savvy with me i could probably keep them entertained for hours with my sheer knowledgedumping. i'll try this again when i get a beautiful girlfriend who likes hades.