Note: This article contains major spoilers for Half-Life and Half-Life: Blue Shift.

Last week, I unpacked Half-Life: Opposing Force, and I didn't make my disappointment with it much of a secret. Valve's Half-Life delicately integrated you into its setting, but Opposing Force's Black Mesa kept you at arm's length and, in the late game, rallied Shock Troopers and Voltigores to snipe you the second they saw you. The expansion was devoid of a narrative goal for its protagonist and crammed fifteen pounds of weapons into a ten-pound bag. It's, therefore, a joy to say that Gearbox's second Half-Life expansion, Blue Shift, welcomes you back into the facility like a prodigal son and exhibits a remarkable restraint in assigning your loadout.

Commissary

The narrative and game design of Blue Shift flow from who you play. As security guard Barney Calhoun, you are once again an associate of the other Black Mesa personnel, but right from the opening scene, the story makes it clear how a change of job can be a change of social status. The first level, Living Quarters Outbound, is a near neighbour to Half-Life 1's Black Mesa Inbound. If an audience has already experienced a scenario once, they become sensitive to the differences between a close recreation of it and the original. This allows a creator to highlight subtle outliers that distinguish the two scenes. Barney, like Gordon, begins his day with a tram ride from the dormitories to his department, but where the transit for researchers appears diligently maintained, the track for the guards protests its use with violent sparks. When Barney reaches the guards' prep and rest area, Freeman speeds past en route to the anti-mass spectrometer while one of Calhoun's coworkers struggles to open the front door.

As Gordon, socialising with other physicists always felt stilted and formal, but there's more camaraderie among the guards. You visit their barracks in Level Two, Insecurity. There's a communal area to lounge around and eat snacks, and the boys chat about those beers they owe each other. But the security in this club is subordinate to the scientists, and they aren't afraid to let you know. One egghead threatens to get a guard fired if they can't allow them access to their office, and when you head down to the elevators at the end of Insecurity, a researcher comes out with this:

"Well, it's about time. We don't pay you people to mosey around at your own convenience. Make this thing work".

If it's not already apparent that the guards get Black Mesa's grunt work and table scraps, you'll discover it through your objectives and item locker. The original Half-Life furnished you with fourteen weapons, with Opposing Force upping your claim to sixteen. Blue Shift is positively minimalist, limiting you to just nine instruments of aggression. A glut of guns may have choked this shooter's first expansion, but sometimes, it feels like its sequel is overcorrecting. Every firearm you slide into your holsters appeared in the two previous Half-Life instalments, and most of them in the early days of their campaigns.

You've had more than enough time to get acquainted with the Glock and the M4, yet they loiter, and without any new cohorts by their side. All the same, I can't deny that the weapons you do get are balanced enough to feel timeless, and you're pushed to stretch each as far as you can. Your division is on a budget, and you don't have the obliterative luxury of a soldier's arsenal like Shepard or the products of clandestine experiments like Freeman. You are security and must make do.

Out of Scope

A more cynical reviewer might tell you that Blue Shift cannot mechanically nail down the guard aesthetic. Barney is mending transmitters and priming batteries, but shouldn't his remit be standing between civilians and Headcrabs, pistol in hand? Not necessarily. Plenty of hirelings at the bottom of company ladders are forced to stray outside their job description and perform a range of menial tasks. You see it happen all the time with teachers and janitors. In Black Mesa, we have a group of men who are paid to protect, but as the stage Insecurity shows us, they're also expected to run the I.T. systems and fix the elevators.

The further a workplace falls into dilapidation, the more consuming this job creep becomes. As employees leave and demand for production and maintenance increases, there's more work to be done by fewer people, and that labour isn't going to be carried out by the senior employees. The higher your rank, the more sway you have in the company, and the organisation can't risk driving out the workers they value more dearly. So, the extra tasks fall upon the backs of the more easily replaceable parts, who may already be designated the "odd jobs" and who might have more practice at them anyway. In Half-Life, the resonance cascade fractures a research facility, and it's up to Barney to flood the coolant tanks and close the steam valves to get the scientists out. After all, the guards are already the resident bug fixers, and who else is going to do it? The scientists? The only one of them who would be capable is Gordon Freeman, and he's got higher priorities.

But with personal safety at an all-time low and the intellectuals desperate for someone who will put their life on the line, this is Barney's chance to become a hero. He is permitted an arc that no other character in this series is. He rockets from a lackey whom his superiors are at ease reprimanding to someone who gets to operate tech alongside the researchers, and eventually, to a knight in shining armour. In the final level, Deliverance, a scientist tells Calhoun they owe him their lives.

Home Sweet Home

In this side story, we play a borderline custodial worker, so some corners of this Blue Mesa feel a bit banal. I say that as someone with a ravenous appetite for industrial art. You can be standing knee-deep in the filthy water plant of Duty Calls and start asking yourself, "This is an empowerment fantasy?". On the other hand, this expansion sees Half-Life's environmental realisation rise from the grave, and we bask in its glory.

The stage Captive Freight is a train yard where we must search cargo wagons to find scientists, and comes complete with a section of track where we turn a carriage on a table. Power Struggle has us charging a battery and engaging in charging-a-battery-related activities. In Focal Point, the trip to Xen, our hands are wrenched off the wheel of the scientific institution, but so they should when we're travelling outside its fortress walls. In the teleportation lab (Focal Point, A Leap of Faith), we set up the transporter. Lastly, while Duty Calls' canal and water processing station are quotidian, we do get to turn valve and bust turbines to unclog the plant.

Duty Calls

It's during the transition from Insecurity to Duty Calls that the resonance cascade does its cascading. Watching disaster from the window of an elevator may not sound like fun, but you still get all the chaos of a building's stitching snapping. Flaming metal falls from the roof, and the cart plummets. When you land, you find the impact was more than the scientists' bodies could take. Red lights flash, an alarm blares, and a creepy robotic voice heralds the end for Black Mesa. As the security guard, it's us who turns off the alarm. With that din silenced, we're left in the eerie quiet, knowing they will soon arrive. A couple of theatrical phrases in Duty Calls tell us how depraved our adversaries are. Marines dump a body down a pipe, casually complaining as if they'd been asked to take out the trash, and a couple of Headcrab Zombies try to rip a guy right down the middle.

It's not all sunshine and dislocated shoulders. Duty Calls is where you'll find the sluggish and irritating cargo puzzle. To reach the ladder at the top of its room, you must adjust two platforms to the right heights and move a barrel and a crate nearby, cobbling together some ersatz stairs. But the pulley for the platforms inches along at a sub-glacial speed and unless you ram the boxes at an angle perfectly perpendicular to them, you'll slide off them like rain on glass. The effect is amplified with the barrels as they're rounder than the crates with a smaller surface area.

The camera is also not fit for purpose. A player's view should orient their character within the larger context of entities that they can affect and that could affect them in the near future. Else, the player should be able to change their perspective to get that view quickly. When the player starts pushing a huge palette of goods, they take control of an object larger than the default avatar, one that affects a wider area. Therefore, the camera should fit more of the world into view.

Plenty of other games have us enter a "crate mode" when we start jostling objects bigger than the player character, and in these modes, the camera trucks backwards to fit more into the viewport. When you ask Blue Shift for that courtesy, it stands there and shrugs its shoulders. Left with only a first-person perspective, it's difficult to tell if we've positioned a crate or barrel appropriately relative to the platforms around it, at least while still pushing it. At ground level, these items partially obscure our sightlines, and when trying to jump onto one, there's always the chance you'll accidentally nudge it because the lip of it disappears below the camera. We also can't pull objects, meaning that if we've shoved one too far forward, we need to run around the other side and line ourselves up again to correct our mistake.

These flies remain in the ointment across all box interactions in these games. Chapter Six, Power Struggle, has a more rotten version of this puzzle where you must line up a rank of barrels and then run to a distant room to fill the barrel exhibit with coolant. These containers are light enough to float on the surface of the liquid, and you're trying to make a bridge out of them to get to the far side of the area. If you don't get your barrel alignments or air control right and fall into the coolant, it's insta-death. Even if you catch your mistake before you leap, you have to return to the coolant panel room to drain the fluid, return to the barrel room to adjust the canisters, go back to the panel room to fill the tank again, and then return one more time to barrel purgatory. It's enough to make you want to blow up the containers. You're in luck because that is also something you can do in Duty Calls.

The exploding crate puzzle is simple when you break it down. There's a turbine you need to destroy to continue, as well as a freight elevator with a combustible box on it. You lower the crate and push the box into the canal. When it hits the turbines, it rips their fins from their shank, clearing the river. This sequence doesn't sound like it should be pride of show, but it's resplendent with slick design touches that make it land.

When you reach the waterway, a never-ending stream of crates is caught in the tide. That current carries the boxes into the fans that then crush them. So, you have a clear indication of what direction the water moves in, that it can carry crates with it, that crates stay buoyant in it, and that if you try to squeeze through the fins, they will rip you apart. There is a sign that cautions you not to push explosives into the turbine, which lets you know sending boxes into the mechanism is an option and is a devilish bit of reverse psychology. Of course the player will want to disobey the rules and wreak havoc. When our dynamite does show up, the designers also have Vortigaunts ride down on the lift with it. This keeps the section from becoming too inert and shows that action and puzzle sequences do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Captive Freight

As we enter Chapter Four, Captive Freight, we come across the USMC's calling card: a broken keypad. The stage's military theming permits us access to the big guns: Satchel Charges, the M4, Grenades, and Explosive Barrels. Immediately, it's not the Soldiers that we contend with. Instead, the Black Mesa warehouses have the same problem many others do: vermin, which comes in the form of harmless roaches and baneful Headcrabs. When we later test our mettle against the military, there are choke points in which we emerge from skinny doorways into vast container parks, a tip of the cap to Opposing Force. We get our revenge on the army when we unbox a thoughtful present: the Minigun. This mounted weapon lets us vapourise a platoon as they charge through a yawning gate. There's also a minor reference to the military trapping Freeman in the original game when some problem customers lock you in a train carriage.

Those are the positives. The negatives of Captive Freight are scatterbrained signposting and AI pathing. The objective of the level is to find and secure Doctor Rosenberg, who has the know-how to evacuate people from the facility safely. Like other escort NPCs, Rosenberg can bump into corners and freeze, but more problematically, he sometimes spontaneously vanishes. I've run down a corridor, turned around, and found that the good doctor is missing. Can you tell this guy works with teleporters? All you can do in these instances is backtrack through what should be cleared stage on a manhunt.

The best prevention is deliberately slowing your progress through the level so you're never putting too much distance between Rosenberg and yourself. If you can't find him, you're also unlikely to uncover the mounted gun. Its housing looks like many of the impenetrable crates strewn about the trainyards. While trying to determine which train cars contain scientists or how to redeem your Minigun, you're also listening to an abrasive loop of physicists banging on metal and crying for help. Guh.

Focal Point

Focal Point takes us back to Rosenberg et al.'s lab, where their teleporter can place us on the road into the New Mexico desert, but only if it's properly persuaded. Black Mesa's teleportation technology uses a fascinating, hacky workaround to slingshot travellers from A to B. Unable to send people directly to a destination, the researchers have to use Xen as a connecting station before pulling the teleported people back down to their terminus. This could be how the invasion from Xen happened: Black Mesa's teleporter technology laid the rails to that dimension, and something travelled back down them. Like Crowbar Collective's Xen, Gearbox's shows signs of a vanguard from the research facility arriving there before the aliens visited Earth.

During Barney's layover in the outworld, he will retune the Black Mesa teleporters there, with Blue Shift as a whole taking the form of the proxy teleportation Rosenberg describes. In the base Half-Life, Xen was the end of the line. In Blue Shift, the border world is somewhere we return from, our vacation to it falling in the middle of the campaign. After Captive Freight, a hub crowded with human enemies, a stage that's entirely extraterrestrials is warranted.

Some of the passages in Focal Point's alien geology house underground lakes. They remind me of the creepy cave diver videos you can find on YouTube. The metallic echoes in these crawlspaces make them sound too much like vents when they're supposedly rock or biological formations. However, Focal Point does serve as a riposte to Valve's Xen, showing it's possible to have an alien world with platforming challenges but without moving scaffolds or janky ambulation.

Power Struggle

Blue Shift's sixth chapter is Power Struggle. In one of my playthroughs, all of my saves for Power Struggle corrupted. I used console commands to jump ahead to Chapter Seven, but for whatever reason, the mechanised door at the start of that stage wouldn't open. Thank god I kept an old save from an earlier run, or that could have been my campaign over then and there. With a litany of games today activating in a glitchy state, you often hear players lamenting how games "used to release finished". They're right that there was a period when entertainment software was more stable, but you can't look back too far. Blue Shift was born during a long era of video game history when it was normal for products to fall apart in your hands. Count me thankful that the technology progressed.

I do like the routing in this basement. You have an exit elevator, a coolant basin, a room which you fill the basin from, a room where you see a little play in which a Vortigaunt kills a couple of employees, a room where you charge the battery, and a room where you activate the power. It's not always clear where to go next, but the game manages to link all those ventricles together so that each chamber is only a stone's throw from every other. It does that while allowing an alternative return route through the stage after you've filled the power cell. I also love what the level does with the power gauge. The player needs to know whether electricity is flowing in the department because until it does, they can't complete their goal of charging the battery. The power meter in this level is an early example of diegetic UI, and it indicates whether the circuit is online.

So, where should the designers place the indicator showing the circuit is on? Do they glue it next to the level's entrance or about halfway through? Both would be opportune waypoints at which to remind the player of their objective. But then perhaps the UI element belongs in the breaker room, so after players throw the switch, they can see they've gotten the place humming again. What Gearbox realises is that they don't have to park the indicator in any one place. They embed a power meter in each of those locations I mentioned, making your success status a frequent fixture in the diegetic UI.

Leap of Faith, Deliverance

A Leap of Fatih and Deliverance are the seventh and eighth chapters. While Half-Life and Opposing Force end with a boss fight, Blue Shift sings itself off with a high-pressure thriller sequence. You and Rosenberg prime the teleporter to get you the hell out of dodge. In the previous two Half-Lifes, teleportation was a battering ram with which to invade. In Blue Shift, it can be a lifeboat. The plan doesn't go off without a hitch. At the last moment, you appear to be stuck in a stochastic nightmare, teleporting to random locations without any control, but then the bug resolves itself. As a general rule, protagonists shouldn't have their problems solved for them; the audience finds it more meaningful when characters put in effort to make their dreams a reality. Flouting that rule, Barney Calhoun gets a freebie, and the script traps him in this spatial flux just to release him without contest.

Barney only rescues three whitecoats. It's hardly the grand heroics we saw from Gordon, but a life is a life, and I respect that Blue Shift believes four people are enough to be worth caring about. Given the 100-decibel, cringey humour of Borderlands, restraint is probably the last trait you'd associate with Gearbox Software. However, the studio shows praiseworthy self-discipline over the course of this expansion, including during its ending.

A Different Wavelength

In a multitude of senses, developing content for another studio's game is less strenuous than building a title from scratch. You start with a platform, assets, gameplay systems, and a world. But in other senses, it is more challenging. You're handling unfamiliar tools, putting on an impression of someone else, and constrained to the possibilities of the engine you've been given. Blue Shift is one of the driest shooters I've ever played, and that means that even in 2000, some people were going to find it too much of a wallflower. From the vantage point of 2024, the physics and technical stability of Blue Shift are also outdated. Some of that will be down to the greenness of Gearbox at the time and the industry of that generation knowing less about the theory of entertaining players. Some of it will be down to what the GoldSrc engine was missing.

Yet, nothing can take away from Gearbox that this is the expansion where they imitated Valve with shocking legitimacy. This game exudes the original Half-Life's ethos of putting you in touch with scientific and industrial organisations by letting you touch one. We're all aware of the power of environmental storytelling, but we often reduce the technique to set dressing. Half-Life and Blue Shift make the case that if video games are an interactive medium, then an environment is best conveyed through call and response. Thanks for reading.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Half-Life, Half-Life: Opposing Force, and Half-Life: Blue Shift.

The Gearbox Software of today is barely recognisable as the fresh-faced Texas developer that launched in 1999. The studio did its stint in the WWII shooter genre with Brothers in Arms and is best known for its firepower delivery chute, Borderlands. Yet, for its first six years in the industry, Gearbox mostly supported existing series. It's honest but undervalued work that's kept many a company afloat over the years. Like Valve Corporation, Gearbox was founded by a rag-tag team of expats from another workshop. Where Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington were straight outta Microsoft, the Gearbox founders had cut their teeth at 3D Realms and Bethesda. This was a young, independent studio with roots in both FPS engineering and narrative dreamweaving. It had plenty in common with Valve, and so it was a logical choice to write the Half-Life expansion packs.

Released in '99, Half-Life: Opposing Force was the first of these two supplements. In it, we play Corporal Adrian Shepard, one of the US Marines sent to Swiss Cheese the resident researchers and alien invaders at the Black Mesa Facility. The DLCs of the last five to ten years have rarely changed up the protagonists of their stories. Plenty of modern games are based around one character that you continuously upgrade over time. So, if the developer has you switch perspective, you lose all your pretty trinkets. Half-Life is more about the journey rather than a growing protagonist or the spoils of war. This allows it to migrate you to a new avatar without it feeling like it's robbing you of your riches. Although, who your protagonist is still counts for a lot.

Corporal Punishment

While Gordon Freeman was thinly drawn, he was fun to roleplay because he was perhaps the only scientist in action games doing scientist stuff. Gearbox's invitation to be a soldier in an action game is one that could have been sent to you by thousands of other interested parties. But this expansion is remembered for subverting through other means, for flipping the script of the heroic empowerment fantasy and letting you embody the villain. It shouldn't be. Officially, you play a Marine sent to perpetrate war crimes, but when it comes to the grisly business of killing civilians, Opposing Force gets squeamish.

As you arrive in a Black Mesa employee's workspace, they have to know they're face-to-face with the reaper, but there's never a flicker of discomfort from them. During the first act, a Isaac Kleiner-type guy lets you know he's aware of rumours soldiers are rubbing out scientists, and he still treats you like you're there to fix the photocopier. And never are you directly ordered to end someone's life, half the reason the government sent you to this boiler room in the first place. There are more opportunities to kill physicists in the base Half-Life, where you are a colleague to the researchers, than in Opposing Force, where you are their state-assigned executioner.

It's not that there's an article of storytelling that rules Shepard has to obey his superiors when they say he must murder. But if he's disobeying them and the writers don't state firmly that he made that choice, they're not communicating the plot to their audience. The game also casts you in a benevolent light through the gel of moral relativism. You might be a bad guy, but the real bad guy is the "Black Ops" who are at the labs to carry out an even more dire duty. It's hollow because, for most of the expansion, it's unclear what separates you from the Black Ops besides the colour of your fatigues.

Mission Critical

An uncomfortable question arises for Opposing Force, one that it's stimyed when trying to answer: If Shepard is not a harbinger of death, then who is he to Black Mesa? Gordon Freeman's goals were to escape his bunker, pull the breaker on Xen's organising intelligence, and close the portal. Barney Calhoun is the protagonist of Blue Shift, the second Half-Life expansion. He is entrusted with protecting the facility's scientists and, later, smuggling a small group of them to safety. What's Shepard doing? Hanging out? He can smoke some aliens while he's in town, but we know he ultimately can't halt the Nihilanth's ingress because Gordon's already got that covered.

In Opposing Force's eleventh level, "The Package", we learn from a cowering researcher that the Black Ops are in the facility to arm a plutonium warhead. Again, Half-Life puts the topic of nuclear disaster front and centre. After receiving this disturbing news, we walk to the other side of the car park, find the bomb in the back of a flatbed, and disarm it with a single button press. The time between alarm and all-clear and the ease with which we disable a nuclear payload means it could be one of the jokes from Jazzpunk. "Press E to defuse nuke" is a primordial "Sit down to hear intense news". But Opposing Force isn't laughing, and to the extent the defusing does give Shepard some status in the mythology of Black Mesa, it comes in Chapter 11 of 12. It won't make any difference in the grand scheme of things anyway. The facility still explodes.

I'm not even sure what Opposing Force's Black Mesa is to Black Mesa. In Gordon's Half-Life, you can invest in the research facility as a location because each level is one of the departments that operate the place, and there's plenty of evidence that those areas act towards their stated aims. Opposing Force is an industrial madlib. All the right props are there: fans, furnaces, pools of radioactive goop, but it's always a flip of the coin whether the expansion encases them in a cohesive pipeline. Therefore, it becomes difficult to believe that scientific illumination is happening here.

In the environmental and interaction design, Gearbox is trying to put you in the headspace of a military officer. Freeman was posted in the labs, where a scientist would be of the most use, and with his PhD in physics, he knows how to find scientifically-backed solutions to problems like turning on reactors and launching rockets. But control panels and sensitive instruments aren't of much use to a soldier. Shepard's world is one of gritty on-the-ground militarism. He's crawling the tunnels, skulking in the warehouses, and crouch-jumping like he's still at boot camp. He's more likely to use his agility, brute force, and the chain of command to solve a problem rather than academic knowledge.

The level Crush Depth has this wonderful communicator of who Shepard is: there's a malfunctioning x-ray machine we must pass through, and it's lit up with arcing electrical charges. Here, Freeman would reroute the power or find the off switch, but as Shepard, we unblock the route by blowing up the electrical relay with a gun. There's another such moment in Friendly Fire: You need to give your squad access to an indoor car park, but the buttons to open the shutters are damaged. Undeterred, you detonate some mines to destroy the debris blocking a door and let your team use the side entrance.

HECU

The X-ray machine and mines aren't the only setpieces with which the developers have fun. There's the board room in Friendly Fire where a Vortigaunt bursts through a projector screen as if it were a movie monster come to life. There is the return to the tram ride from the original game in "We Are Pulling Out". This time, you find incendiarised, stationary cars, letting you know that you're joining the party long after the fire was started. And there's the teleporting alien encounter in Vicarious Reality. Vicarious Reality is effectively an alien zoo, and in one enclosure, you see a trail of dead bodies and an open door. The subtext is clear: the alien killed its captors and fled. You run to the end of the corridor overlooking the enclosure only to find the exit is locked. So, you turn around and make your way back, but aliens zap in in front of you, breaking the glass of the exhibit. When you jump through the hole in the glass, it turns out that despite the unlocked gate, the Voltigore is still home, and it materialises in front of you. Here, environmental storytelling is a form of misdirection.

But while those filmic sequences have a certain wow factor, being a non-scientist in this scientific facility, we cannot have a conversation with it. Spaces in Opposing Force also generally feel barer than in the erstwhile Half-Life. Then, there are the localised design flubs. Pit Worm's Nest is a store-brand version of Half-Life's sixth section, Blast Pit. Without even leaving one expansion between the original operation and itself, Opposing Force exhumes the concept of a gaping hole with a leviathan rising out of it. In Pit Worm's Nest, as in Blast Pit, that abomination slices at you with razor-sharp scythes. It's not just that centrepiece that's bootlegged; it's also the mission flow as you must, again, flip switches in two tangential departments and then return to the main chamber to vanquish the monster. If that's not derivative enough, Opposing Force's stage also has Blast Pit's airlocks. I don't know why we're going back to the well already or why we'd want to do it with suffocatingly thin corridors or an excess of acid-spitting enemies. I'm tempted to ask if a single expansion pack needs three different aliens with corrosive projectiles.

If it's a glut of the same encounters you want, there's also Chapter 10, Foxtrot Uniform. Foxtrot Uniform is proud of its waffle of concrete tubes infested with Voltigores. Voltigores are elephant-sized and can shoot lightning orbs and charge like bulls. This combination of enemy and environment means you can be walking into a black veil only to have a ball of energy or a fleshy beast come flying out of it and annihilate you. This is one of many locales in which you must activate your night vision goggles, Opposing Force's equivalent of the flashlight. Filling your screen with console green, the goggles are visually offensive every time, and even with them, the draw distance in the tunnels is myopic. When you can get a bead on the Voltigores, you're given little elbow room to avoid their charges or the explosions they let off when they die.

Nothing made me close the original Half-Life as often as getting killed by blind fire, and Opposing Force can't get enough of it. Take "The Package", where it's par for the course to pop your head out of a doorway and spend a second locating your enemy. During that second, the enemy won't hesitate to attack you before you can determine what angle they're firing from. It's a tendency of shooters I'm more than happy to leave in the 90s. Towards the end of Opposing Force, you average an extreme number of deaths per meter and encounter surplus spawns of the same creatures, trapping you in an extradimensional Groundhog Day.

I do have to applaud the design of the Pit Drones, which dash towards us like they have a nitrous tank strapped to them. Every time, it makes me freak out, but is also a little amusing. They're like a Headcrab capable of a continuous lunge but which cannot leave the ground. The Shock Troopers are interesting as a draft for the Half-Life 2 Headcrab Zombie, dispensing a flesh-eating leech when they die. It wasn't until playing Opposing Force that I realised that it was Gearbox rather than Valve that came up with this concept of the after-enemy. But the leeches are slow and can only survive for a few seconds outside of their host, whereas the Headcrabs are jumpy little mites that it's up to us to exterminate. So, where Valve's residual enemies are a call to action, Gearbox's encourage waiting around a corner and doing nothing until your pursuer dies of exposure. Sometimes, there are so few scientists and the alien population in Opposing Force is so distinct from that in the base game that it's hard to believe it takes place in the same setting.

I also can't forgive how unceremonious the fight with the game's final boss, the "Gene Worm", is. It employs a standard cycle in which you have to shoot two weak points on the antagonist, exposing a third weak point, which is what we really want to eviscerate. But that third sweet spot is a pink portal. The defining feature of a portal is that matter passes through it rather than colliding with it, and when you shoot at the glow, you don't dislodge any particle effects or pained roars from the Worm to tell you you're making a dent. And, of course, this big fella has vats of health. Therefore, the feedback suggests that rather than the centre mass being the boss's Achilles heel, shooting it doesn't do any damage at all.

Learning two of the grossest habits from Half-Life's Nihilanth stage, Opposing Force's Worlds Collide is also waiting-room quiet and jerky in its pacing. When you incur an injury, which is easily done, you need to exit the room, shimmy up a rope, and then stay stationary in the healing pool to restore your health at a rate of about 1 point per second. It's such an insult to the player's time. It's also been unacceptably likely that the player would slay the Gene Worm only to have a glitch prevent the ending from triggering. And not to get personal, but Gene Worm, if you're reading this, your house looks like shit. The room is dilapidated and mismatched, dirty but a mundane dirty. It has about seven different materials patched over each other and a rusting yellow metal facing you every time you reenter. You're gunning down Cthulhu in an underloved shed.

It's not the only environment I have a problem with. In Chapter 4, Missing in Action, you appear to be trapped at the bottom of an elevator shaft but can find an escape by climbing a grate like a ladder. It's a stupid puzzle because there's nowhere else in the game that you can climb a hatch; it's been drummed into you by this point that they're only ever decoration or destructibles, and yet, here, one is your ticket out of the pit.

There's also an area I have to mention in Friendly Fire, not because it has a strong bearing on the quality of the levels as a whole, but because it boasts the most bizarre architecture I've seen in a game. You enter what looks like an office reception area with a skylight in the ceiling, but if you break the skylight, there's only rock above it. Make your way across the lobby, and you'll discover another pile of rock directly outside with a ~100m human-made tunnel through it. So, you've got a skylight built somewhere it doesn't get any light, an office that opens directly onto a mountain gorge, and the architects have bothered to build a tunnel through a hill when there's a short path around it anyway. You don't have to think about the practicality of the canyon lobby for it to bother you. Because it's not structured like any space we'd visit in the real world, it feels wrong to be there in the virtual one.

Bug Out

While we can single out dodgy settings and encounters, you have to stand back to see the contusions on the weapon set. There isn't one implement I would grade an F. The worst I could say is that the Wrench moves like I'm swinging it underwater, but the option to wind it up for heavier blows gives you a depth with your melee implement that shooters usually reserve for a ranged weapon. The game also gets in the military spirit with tools that pump up the damage, like the Combat Knife, which delivers a flurry of strikes with a short depression of the left click, or the formidable Desert Eagle, which you can shoot either by eye-balling your target or with a laser sight.

I have a soft spot for the Spore Launcher, a living gun that eats ammo and spits bullets. But you have sixteen weapons, some of them with alternate fires, in a campaign that players beat in an average of five and a half hours. This loadout feels like the gestation of Borderland's smorgasbord of loot, but in Opposing Force, unlike in Borderlands, there's not enough time to put all of your guns through their paces. Conceivably, that top-heavy fraction could be a motive to replay Opposing Force, but the shortcomings I've mentioned here make slamming my hand in the oven door sound more tempting than hitting "New Game".

Field Exercise

A lot of the original mechanics in this Half-Life don't get more than fifteen minutes of fame. Although, it feels less that Gearbox is leaving potential on the table and more that the mechanics were never fostered past a tutorial form. There are now ropes that you can climb, like the one in the Gene Worm battle. They split up how you course through Black Mesa's veins, but the 1999 physics engine can't simulate the sway of a rope, so they're more like sticks. Big sticks for you. If you see a radio in the environment, you can use it to call for backup, or if you run up against a sealed door, you can lead an engineer towards it and have them divorce it from its hinges. It's not nothing; you're acting the part of a soldier, but it does feel like acting. It's inauthentic. You don't have options for how you send out a distress call, and it's not a challenge to operate the transmitter, so this radio lacks the complexity of the real-world devices. And always assigning the welding man to the weldable doors means you don't have to mull over the delegation of duties that a military authority would.

Opposing Force also undoes some of Half-Life's commendable work in convincing you that its soldiers are intelligent. They never follow close enough for me to be sure they're at my back, and I need to keep checking behind me when I have them in tow because they can easily bump into a wall and stop moving. Even a Roomba would change directions. And they don't shut up, belching unprompted monologues that sometimes don't make sense given the context. I've seen them kill a human and brag about how much they love murdering aliens. Because they keep pulling from their ten awesome action phrases, they run out of script and start cycling back through it fast.

The most enhancing new mechanic is one of the most discrete. It's the medic. Both Freeman and Shepard's Black Mesas contain first aid stations. The stations have a limited amount of health that the player can transfer to themselves, point by point. Opposing Force's medics are essentially first aid stations that follow you around. A portable health battery is a generous leg up to give a player, but the boon they provide is offset by the intimidating attack values of endgame enemies. Because the first aid stations are fixed, you were sometimes encouraged to backtrack to them to make sure you were fighting fit for the battles ahead. The medic, however, can always march shoulder-to-shoulder with you, eliminating the need for any boring return journeys. They are the fellow troops that I felt most reliant on throughout the Black Mesa campaign.

Fissile, Futile

Despite the occasional company of engineers or medics, a lot of Opposing Force is about a man who comes from a tight-knit squad being separated from his fellow servicemen and forced to fight alone. In "We Are Pulling Out", you can do nothing but watch as your fellow marines evac without you. At the end of Worlds Collide, Shepard is completely disentangled from reality. Opposing Force has easily the darkest terminus of any Half-Life game. Shepard disarmed the government's bomb, but it went off anyway. If you linger by one particular window in "The Package", you can see the G-Man rearming the device after we defused it. Adrian becomes trapped in a catch-22. The man with the briefcase finds him too fascinating to let die but too dangerous to roam free. The corporal is stranded in a cosmic limbo pending "further evaluation". A cliffhanger is only as gratifying as your follow-up on it, but Half-Life never revives Shepard from his stasis. Gearbox couldn't work out what to do with him, and to this day, Valve hasn't either.

Armed

Half-Life's first expansion is at the top of its game when it comes to transforming the platform beneath it. It was a landmark release because it didn't just add a couple of guns or enemies for a new campaign. It's bursting at the seams with weapons, and it feels like an alternate universe version of Half-Life, which might be the worst thing for it. Yes, Opposing Force realises you as an outsider in Black Mesa, but in doing so, it disconnects you from its environment. It has more guns than you'd ever expect from a six-hour campaign, but another way of saying that is that it's cluttered. In 1999, that opulence of mechanics was welcome, but in an era where every AAA game is stuffed to the gills with "content", there's not much novelty to it, and the expansion languishes in disorganisation. Thanks for reading.

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Half-Life.

Over the past fortnight, I've been revisiting the original Half-Life, and its remake, Black Mesa, chewing over their weapons, setting, and place in FPS history. Now, I want to pick around the edges, to talk about the trivia. We're going to take some time out to explore the physics of Half-Life further.

The Anti-Mass Spectrometer

What better place to start than with Black Mesa's "anti-mass spectrometer"? This is the machine which, in analysing a sample of alien matter, starts a "resonance cascade" and connects Earth to the hostile cosmic outpost of Xen.^[1] While "resonance cascades" are fictional, mass spectrometers are very much real. Isotopes are atoms with a particular number of neutrons in their nucleus. For example, if you find plutonium with 144 neutrons in its nucleus, that's the isotope plutonium-238. If you find plutonium with 145 neutrons, that's plutonium-239, a distinct isotope.^[2]

Mass spectrometers can sort the atoms and molecules of matter based on their relative weight. The nuclei of all isotopes of an element have a unique weight. So, if you know the weights of the various isotopes out there, then look at the weights of the particles detected by your spectrometer, you can see where they line up to deduce what your sample matter is made of. This has made mass spectrometers standard kit in chemical analysis, and that includes chemicals from other worlds.^[3] Our space agencies have used them to probe the Moon, Mars, and the gas giants, among other bodies, while Black Mesa tried to use one to get the lowdown on Xen. The beam that comes out of Black Mesa's anti-mass spectrometer is probably charging the particles in the Xen crystal, preparing them for analysis.^[3]

The "anti-mass" part of the anti-mass spectrometer could indicate that the facility's machine analyses antimatter. For every particle of matter, there is a version of that particle that has all the same properties but with an opposite charge: this is its anti-particle. So, where an electron is negatively charged, an anti-electron or "positron" is positively charged. When matter and antimatter touch, their charges cancel out, and they annihilate. But antimatter doesn't tend to stick around for very long because of this volatile property.^[4] That means that Gordon's stable crystal sample, which does not obliterate when in contact with a matter-based cart, cannot be antimatter.

Perhaps Black Mesa's anti-mass spectrometer uses antimatter in its scans, even if it doesn't read antimatter. The "anti-mass spectrometer" could also be a spectrometer that analyses "anti-mass". We've never observed matter with negative mass, but that doesn't mean physicists haven't theorised about the concept. If you can imagine an object that weighs 20kg or 105kg, then you can imagine an object that weighs -20kg or -105kg. But like the sample Gordon places in the spectrometer probably isn't antimatter, it can't have negative mass either. When pushed forward, an object with negative mass would move in the opposite direction of the thrust, and we don't see that with the Xen crystal. Any item with negative mass would also fall through an item with positive mass, but Black Mesa's sample sits in its cradle quite comfortably.^[5] So, similar to the conclusion we made with antimatter, maybe the anti-mass spectrometer employs negative mass in its inspection of matter.

Black Mesa's Weird Periodic Tables

If you cast your mind back to your school days, you'll remember that the periodic table lists elements by their atomic number. Look up the table today and direct your attention to the bottom right of the big castle, and you'll see the set of elements with the highest atomic numbers. There's element 112: copernicium (Cn), element 113: nihonium (Nh), and element 114: flerovium (Fl).^[6] In Black Mesa's levels Anomalous Materials and Unforeseen Consequences, we can also find periodic tables, but on them, elements 112-118 aren't named the same as on our periodic table. Element 112 has the symbol Uub, element 113 is Uut, element 114 is Uuq, and on like this up to the end of the set. So, what gives?

The atomic number of an atom tells us the quantity of protons in its nucleus. Hydrogen has 1 proton, so it has an atomic number of 1. Oganesson has 118 protons, so it has an atomic number of 118.^[6] There might be limits to the number of protons you can have in an atom, but up to that possible maximum, you can always conceive of new elements because you can always add more protons.

Now, the element with the highest atomic number that's present in nature is uranium: number 92.^[6] All elements with more protons than uranium have to be synthesised. But even once someone has forged a new building block of matter, it takes time for the scientific community to verify that and for the verified elements to get an official name from the IUPAC (the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry). In between the apparent discovery of new elements and their knighting by the IUPAC, placeholder names are included for them on the periodic table. Besides naming the chemicals, the IUPAC is also the organisation that came up with the scheme for assigning placeholder identities back in 1978.^[7]

"Systematic element names" are cobbled together from references to the atomic number of the element, followed by the suffix "ium". In this scheme, the prefix "un" represents a 1, and "bi" represents a 2. So, in between the synthesising of element 112 and the confirmation of that discovery, it wore the name ununbium. "Tri" means three in this scheme, so the placeholder element 113 was ununtrium.^[7] These elements are then given symbols made up of the first letters of their prefixes: Uub for ununbium, Uut for ununtrium, etc. Therefore, these are the names we see on Black Mesa's periodic table. So, the periodic table in Black Mesa's lab was printed after the naming of element 111 as roentgenium on November 1, 2004, but before the naming of any of the elements from 112 onwards. Ununbium, element 112, would be dubbed copernicium on February 19, 2010.

We can actually narrow down the game's dates even further using the wall hangings in the Black Mesa offices. All the calendars in the facility are flipped to the month of December and place December 1 on a Friday. In the 00s, there were only two years in which December 1 fell on that day: 2000 and 2006. Combine that with the date range from the periodic table, and we know that Black Mesa must take place during December 2006. If we steal a trick from Reddit user Neinfeld and use the phase of the Moon in On A Rail to pinpoint the time further, we can tell the game takes place about December 10.^[8] Note that the base Half-Life may have a distinct timeline for which Neinfeld also has estimates.^[8]

The Lambda Core Reactor

The waters around Black Mesa's all-important fission reactor glow blue, and that's not a fictional contrivance. The trope is that radioactive material glows green, and elsewhere in Half-life, it does. This concept was likely imprinted on the public by the radium-based luminescent paints used in the first half of the 20th century. It turns out, if you mix radium with a zinc sulfide/silver compound, it glows green, letting you create interfaces and signage that glow in the dark.^[9] It also turns out, it can give you cancer. Uranium ore can also be green, and uranium glass glows green under UV light, although with most consumers not being miners or owning a blacklight, it's unlikely many of them would have been exposed to that knowledge.

But reactors aren't covered in radioactive paint or made from radioactive glass. They do, however, spit out a lot of electrons, and those electrons emit photons. You'll be familiar with electrical particles emitting light quanta if you've ever seen a bolt of lightning. In media where you have electrons travelling faster than the photons they emit, you get this blue glow called "Cerenkov radiation". You might be thinking nothing can move faster than the speed of light, and that's kind of true, but when scientists say "speed of light", they generally mean the speed of light in a vacuum. When light passes through matter, like water, it slows down. With the light slowed, other particles, like electrons, can move faster than it, triggering the Cerenkov radiation.^[10]

____

There are some other minor scientific morsels to be gleaned from Half-Life, like Valve naming Gordon Freeman after the physicist Freeman Dyson or the main menu giving a shoutout to the radioactive isotope Carbon-14, but we've hit the big points I wanted to.^[11] While no one of the details we've discussed is a big part of the game, settings come to life in the confluence of little details, and it's in the details that Half-Life and Black Mesa live up to their laboratory theming. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. We know the sample analysed in the anti-mass spectrometer is from Xen: we can see crystals that look nearly identical in the outworld.
2. Plutonium (August 25, 2023), World Nuclear Association.
3. Mass Spectrometry by Paul Andersen (August 8, 2013), YouTube.
4. Antimatter by Christine Sutton (February 27, 2024), Britannica.
5. Landis, G.A. (2019). Negative Mass in Contemporary Physics and its Application to Propulsion. NASA Glenn Research Center.
6. Periodic Table (Date Unknown), The Royal Society of Chemistry.
7. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (1978). Recommendations for the Naming of Elements of Atomic Numbers Greater than 100. De Gruyter.
8. I have found the exact dates of every single major event in the Half-Life series. by Neinfeld (July 23, 2020), Reddit.
9. Green glow of radiation by Karl S. Kruszelnicki (May 20, 2008), ABC Science.
10. How does Cerenkov radiation work? by Fermilab (October 31, 2018), YouTube.
11. Valve Corporation (2004). Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar. Prima Games (p. 30).

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Half-Life, Black Mesa, and Portal 2, and moderate spoilers for Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode Two.

Last week, I talked about Half-Life as the last great lurch forward in 90s shooters. I reviewed a game with a weapon set that, while sagging around the edges, contained some of the most reliable core firepower you can get your hands on. I also described how Valve designed enemies with a mind for setting up interesting player choices. But most games aren't only rules, hazards, and tools. They are places; places with an atmosphere, a purpose, and a history that, as the protagonist, we continue the writing of. We can't talk about Half-Life or Black Mesa without talking about Black Mesa.

These FPSs braid an almost unbroken tether between you and their research facility by only including one cutscene, and even that's from the first person. They eschew out-of-body experiences that might remove you from your perspective as a researcher in this fragmenting complex.^[1] We're going to talk more about that complex today. Last time, I only assessed the weapons and enemies that I had something to say about, and in this article, I'm taking the same approach to stages. I'm also going to skip over Black Mesa Inbound, as we already have the introductory tram ride in the bag. If we're keeping to the schedule, we should pick up at Anomalous Materials.

Anomalous Materials, Unforeseen Consequences

Anomalous Materials is the mission where it all goes wrong. Black Mesa's analysis of an unidentified mass turns the facility into an interdimensional welcome mat, and all manner of extraterrestrial predators wipe their feet with it. I could sit here and write out an explanation of the "resonance cascade" as a character motivator or a scientific phenomenon, but if you really want to understand it, you have to accept it as a metaphor for the real-life Chernobyl incident. In 80s Ukraine, you had an experiment at a scientific facility centered on a bizarre material (uranium-235). Nuclear plants like Chernobyl's work by using a fission reaction to heat water, turning it to steam. That steam rises, pushing a turbine, and the kinetic energy of the spinning turbine is converted to electrical energy. But when you cut the reaction, the turbines don't stop spinning immediately; they take a very long time to wind down.^[2]

The engineers at Chernobyl wanted to know if, in an emergency, they could use the spin-down to keep the reactor's water pumps running in the case of a power outage. But those technicians ignored safety procedures and warning signs, pushing their reactor beyond operational limits in order to please seniors in the Soviet hierarchy.^[2][3] When they tried to abort the experiment, they were overruled by their supervisor, and by the time they worked out that they were cooking a meltdown, it was too late to stop the chain reaction.^[2] Their experiment killed thousands. However, many of the heroes of the hour were also scientists who worked tirelessly to contain the danger, some of them putting themselves at extreme risk.^[2][3]

Half-Life was released twelve years after Chernobyl, and in its second level, Anomalous Materials, you head to a test chamber as scientists complain that equipment has been breaking all day. A control panel explodes in a shower of sparks, with one of your colleagues shouting, "It's about to go critical". Another responds that the machinery wasn't built for the upcoming experiment. Then, they start cutting corners, rationalising it at each turn point. They overcharge the spectrometer to 105%, but they need to show promising results to the administrator. They deviate from standard procedures, but it's fine because Gordon is a highly trained professional. There's a discrepancy in the readings, but it's not a problem. Probably. When it does become a problem, Doctor Kleiner tries to shut down the machine to find they are past the point of no return.

After the cascade, in the level Unforeseen Consequences, we find the same scientists who were minutes earlier poring over equations and preparing equipment lying still and soulless. Here and there, the aliens that have claimed their lives still creep around the labs, and more shock troops teleport in. After the fact, the dead can't be brought back, but one scientist can minimise the aftershocks: Gordon Freeman.

There are also references to atomic physics all over this drama. Gordon's HEV suit has a built-in Geiger counter, one frequently triggered by radioactive leakage in the facility, and the level Lambda Core sees us activating a nuclear reactor. The term "half-life" represents the amount of time it takes for half the radioactive atoms in a substance to lose their radioactivity. The series' logo is the lambda, which is also the seal on Black Mesa's internal nuclear plant and, in the game Black Mesa, the marker of supply caches. This Greek letter denotes radioactive decay constants. The decay constant is the ratio of the radioactive atoms in your sample to the rate at which their radioactivity blinks out. On Half-Life's box and the game's main menu is an equation for calculating a half-life: you divide ~0.693 by the substance's decay constant.^[4] The menu also contains the terms "decay constant" and "uranium-235".

In Black Mesa's Unforeseen Consequences, a researcher references Henri Becquerel, the man who discovered radioactivity. Even the name "resonance cascade" invokes a runaway chain reaction. There is little reason for the game to make these references to atom smashing outside of referencing Chernobyl. The nuclear reactor in Black Mesa is a minor character in the story, and the resonance cascade is not nuclear in nature.

Office Complex

It's in this fourth level that we begin to see how the rip in reality has maimed the functionality of Black Mesa. Doors are blocked, offices are abandoned, and windows are smashed. The facility appears as a believable scientific institution because, in addition to the rooms where the magic happens, we see the vast network of supporting services that the experimentation relies on. About half of the game's levels have us visiting one of those subnets.

There are the offices that file paperwork in Office Complex, the generators that electrify other departments in Power Up, and the transport layer that ferries scientists between jobs in Black Mesa Inbound and On A Rail. We tour the warehouses that store the materials for all this production in "We've Got Hostiles", and we see how Black Mesa disposes of waste from its operations in Residue Processing. Finally, in Surface Tension, we tip-toe around the guard booths that keep researchers safe. It makes the opening chapter, with its diorama of an interconnected research site, a microcosm of the whole game. But in so many levels, the developers ram home what the resonance cascade has meant for Black Mesa by showing you these hubs unable to execute their respective services. The generators are parched, the subways rerouted, and the guards flushed out of their security booths. In Office Complex, no admin is getting done amongst the exposed wiring and the Zombies ripping skin from muscle.

On the bright side, Office Complex comes after you've had some time to catch your breath post-meltdown and is your first opportunity to regroup with building security. You might be able to argue that this is Half-Life's horror level. It has one too many Headcrab-infested air vents for comfort, but you need to squeeze through them if you want to make it to the surface and escape the facility. This is also a level where Black Mesa (the game)'s modern lighting shines, so to speak. There are too many blinding bright corridors in the original Office Complex for it to feel like every shadow could hide a zombie or that a total shutdown of the plant has occurred. Black Mesa bathes the white-collar workspace in a thick darkness, only occasionally punctuated by errant beams of light that let features and actors stand out against the background. This shading will later set the tone for the conspiratorial laboratory level, Questionable Ethics.

You can also thank Black Mesa for rectifying Half-Life's overbearing acoustics. In 1998, the GoldSrc engine pushed the envelope by letting floors vibrate with your footsteps and the clank of your Crowbar bounce off of walls. In 2024, it's just irritating. You can also hear enemies through walls with no muffling, which muddies data on when an alien is near you and when it's not. Black Mesa's sound is less distracting and keeps you in the moment.

"We've Got Hostiles"

The fifth chapter, "We've Got Hostiles", greets you with a welcoming committee of Turrets. I prefer Black Mesa and HL2's handling of Turrets to Half-Life's. In the base game, a Turret is an enemy with health like any other, and depleting that health blows it up. In the revisits to Half-Life's world, you play schoolyard bully, defeating Turrets by knocking them down. It makes you think differently about what you're using your weaponry for and better matches the flimsy profile of the devices to their mechanics. The Source Half-Lives also let you carry the machines as impromptu weapons, which feels like a mischievous exploit of the enemy's tech.

But the robots aren't the sharpest left turn in "We've Got Hostiles". At the start of the level, you hear an announcement that the military has taken over the research centre. A nasty realisation occurs when a scientist yells, "we're saved", runs towards a marine, and is summarily executed. The military isn't here to save you; it's here to cover up the incident. Who do you think set the Turrets?

Half-Life was partly inspired by Stephen King's 1980 novella, The Mist. King's most Lovecraftian yarn, The Mist is about a fog that descends on the New England town of Bridgton. This white shroud hides giant spiders, tentacles, and other monsters in its folds. The horror comes from the potential that abominations of any proportion could be hiding feet in front of your face, and you wouldn't know it. However, in true King fashion, the other danger is what normal people will do to each other in times of desperation. Even the arrival of the fog is probably attributable to people. Close to Bridgton is a military base that purportedly housed a project called "Arrowhead". According to business owner Bill Giosti, the base was performing atomic experiments, which we can speculate ended in a resonance cascade of sorts.^[5]

Head of Valve, Gabe Newell, had read The Mist before brainstorming for Half-Life. One title the studio considered for their game was "Quiver", a name that would link it back to The Arrowhead Project.^[6] Half-Life and The Mist are both about other-worldly creatures invading Earth and feature the military prominently. Half-Life also has killer tentacles extending from unknown sources in the levels Blast Pit, Surface Tension, and Interloper.

And we can't forget that authorities tried to hide the red flags and then the active emergency at Chernobyl. Valery Legasov, the Chief Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Nuclear Energy Institute, says that when he cautioned operators about the defects in the RBMK reactors, he was ignored.^[3] Immediately after the meltdown, the government also did not inform residents in the vicinity of the incident. Half-Life imports the attempted hushing of a crisis at a scientific facility and the physicist trying to slow a car crash already in motion.

Even with ardent competition, video games have come out on top as the medium that pledges the least critical fealty to the American military. To this day, so many huge games portray any soldier with old glory on their shoulder as a valourous good guy. While Half-Life never puts a name to its antagonist, it takes place in New Mexico; the military here are obviously American, and the game depicts them as capable of a war crime on home soil. In Western nations, Chernobyl frequently serves as a shorthand for perceived inefficiencies in Soviet and socialist systems, distinct from our economic and governmental apparatus. Yet, Half-Life imagines a disaster and toxic response of the same scale and severity being possible within the borders of the United States. It's a tributary of the Half-Life/Portal universe's distrust of institutional authority.

Select individuals who work for scientific organisations like Black Mesa might be commendable, but as entities, Black Mesa, Aperture Science, The Combine, none of these spectres are trustworthy, and the armed forces are just dogs. "We've Got Hostiles" introduces a mechanic it often invokes near enemy squads where we must duck under lasers, giving an oppressive effect. In the chapter Apprehension, a couple of Soldiers will throw Freeman, still alive, into a garbage crusher. This disbelief in enforced hierarchies may be related to Valve's famously flat studio structure. There are leads on projects, developers who occupy more senior social positions, and owners, but Valve doesn't believe in official bosses, and Half-Life is very wary of them.^[7]

On A Rail

After Crowbar Collective's makeover, On A Rail is a whole new person. Valve's version of the chapter was a long march through successive military ambushes, and it made it feel impossible to escape the army. Crowbar's rendition is a dark, quiet reprieve from the surface world that turns the volume down so it can bring it back up blaring in Apprehension. It also provides a breather from constantly fighting Soldiers, something that you don't get in the original game. Half-Life 1 plays the human-heavy levels On A Rail and Apprehension back-to-back.

The anger that the deceptive and meandering level design of On A Rail inspires means you can look straight past its setpiece ending, which was remarkably well-received by players. If you saw the rocket in Black Mesa Inbound and thought, "It would be so cool to launch that", this mission has got you. We'll need the satellite it puts in orbit for later. Valve would later expand the rocket launch concept into a whole game with Half-Life 2: Episode Two.

Residue Processing

The level in which we discover how Black Mesa disposes of waste comes right after the Marines try to throw away Freeman, chucking his stunned body into a trash compactor. Residue Processing also begins some real game designer's game design. At the end of the previous chapter, the boys in camo repossessed all of your weapons, and you slowly regain them over the course of this and the coming missions. Where FPSs often start with melee implements and pistols, work up to automatic rifles, and then crescendo with rocket launchers and esoteric blasters, Half-Life can rewrite that order and force you to work around the gaps in your inventory.

This isn't possible from the start of the game as the designer needs to first hand you trivially operable guns and then graduate you to the more finicky tools. But by Chapter 9 of Half-Life, we are experienced with most weapons, and the designers can set out a new order for us to discover them in without bamboozling us. The game also has the weapon set reflect that we are getting closer to the alternate universe of Xen by giving us a couple of alien guns: The Snarks in Questionable Ethics and then the Hornet Gun in Surface Tension. From an aesthetic perspective, you can also see how the rusty tunnels and smashing pistons in Residue Processing were a dry run for the backstage areas of Portal. Tantalising.

Surface Tension, Forget About Freeman

With our arrival in Surface Tension, we are finally able to taste fresh air again. There are some beautiful New Mexico landscapes in this sequence. Just like a film can substitute one location for another, most of the reference imagery for Valve's New Mexico was actually taken in Eastern Washington.^[6] Valve will revisit this style of rocky, remote setting in Team Fortress 2. Naturally, Black Mesa's version of this stage is more upfront about what we should and should not do to cross the desert. For one thing, the landmines are now visible and destructible; detonating them feels like popping bubble wrap.

The guard towers and booths you'd associate with a prison, and a desert that stretches all the way to the horizon, tell us that we cannot simply run from Black Mesa, and we've known for a long time now that the military isn't going to rescue us. We need a more permanent solution, especially because the aliens are catching up to the Soldiers in terms of the threat they pose. Xen's regiments have disabused us of the notion that they're atavistic animals and have increasingly proven themselves to be an organised intelligence. By Chapter 13, Forget About Freeman, the Marines are in retreat, and we're stuck in the compound with the monsters that beat the US military. But experimental scientists like Freeman are all about solving issues, and hope remains at the Lambda Complex.

Lambda Core

Perhaps if science is the problem, it can be the solution. The Lambda Complex houses a nuclear reactor, and if we can fire it up, we can use it to open a portal to Xen. There, we can plug the invasion at its source. So, we do that in the fourteenth level: Lambda Core. Valve would later release two whole games about portal technology set in this universe, with Portal 2 also ending with us opening a doorway to a celestial body. At one time, the studio intended Half-Life's opening level to be called The Portal Device.^[8] Although, where Aperture Science has this white plastic Apple look, Black Mesa doesn't appear like anywhere that was meant to be shown to the public. With Lambda Core, Half-Life makes it clear that despite its Chernobyl parallel, it believes in the power of nuclear energy to positively transform our world. It's recklessness with the technology that is the folly, not the technology itself.

Xen

On the other side of the portal, Crowbar Collective surprises us. There have been films and TV shows that shock and delight audiences by deviating from the established events of an existing narrative, like Once Upon A Time in Hollywood or Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Black Mesa is doing the same thing but for level design. Not only do they replace the Xen excursions with original missions, but they also extend Valve's architecture. It's a significant factor in How Long to Beat listing the Half-Life campaign at twelve hours long, but Black Mesa's at fifteen.

In the original Half-Life, Xen is a mulch of rock and meat, but in Black Mesa, we also brush past rainforest leaves and hear mock whale song. Valve's borderworld is disturbing because it's featureless, while Crowbar's has more than one personality but includes a thriving ecosystem. It avoids the naive view of nature. Some people and media think of life outside towns and cities as living in romantic harmony. Black Mesa establishes a more convincing ecosystem by giving us animals that can exist in equilibrium but are still ready to burn through prey with acid or bite their heads off. When you see the Headcrabs and Houndeyes in their natural environment, they immediately make sense.

The early outworld has none of the living scientists, guards, or recharge stations that we've come to rely on, making it audiovisually and mechanically inhuman, even if the 1998 hinterland is infinitely inferior to 2020's. Try to climb a hill in the original environment, and you'll get locked into a painfully slow slide up the terrain. For a programmer, it's relatively simple to calculate the movement of one flat object over another, and the research facility is flat ground. Even the parched desert of Surface Tension is mostly level. But the exoplanet of Xen is naturally going to be rocky, or where it's made of biological matter, lumpy, and calculating the interaction of a flat object and a curved object is a greater ask for a program, one that's beyond GoldSrc.

On Xen, all vaguely complex movement leaves me fumbling. The worst sections are those where you must jump from one slow-moving rock to another in low gravity. Games are almost always reliant on us having a basic understanding of how our tools work and what we're meant to do with them. At the start of Half-Life, I might not understand the nuances of all my guns or the enemy types, but I have a pretty good conception of how a bullet will move when I fire a gun and where I'm meant to aim. A decent platformer will give you a rough idea of your jump arc, where you need to leap from, and where you need to land.

In Half-Life's fifteenth mission, everything you learned about jump physics goes out the window. And as Xen demonstrates, the slower the objects involved in a physical interaction move, the further into the future you have to calculate outcomes. Our predictions are made harder by the first-person perspective; you can't see where exactly you stand in the context of the larger environment, and it's not uncommon that while you try to leap from pillar to post, enemies will take potshots at you. Once you are in the air, attempting to press the back key so you don't fly past the platform also disables further air control, reducing the amount you can finesse any jump.

Half-Life's controls are tuned for twitchy arena shooter combat. It wants you to be able to get up in another player's face in a couple of seconds. When you apply that same movement to a platformer section, it feels like trying to drive a Ferrari over stepping stones. And because you could send a letter to someone in the time it takes a platform to complete one cycle, a lot of my memories of these spires are of me standing around, waiting for platforms to line up. Xen's inadequacies are generally blamed on Valve rushing to finish development, but much better than rushing Xen would have been cutting it entirely.^[6]

Gonarch's Lair, Nihilanth

In a more rational world, we could take comfort in the bunny hopping being only one tine of the platforming/combat/puzzle trident, but the Nihilanth, the game's final boss, can also teleport you to a tower of platforming terror. Just when you thought you got out, they pull you back in. It's tedious because it's more platforming, but it's also disruptive to the boss fight because the platforming doesn't integrate into the battle with the psychic fetus. It's an unrelated challenge in a different room with no Nihilanth in sight. This prestige is also eerily quiet; it's absent of music, and there aren't even many sound effects.

Black Mesa's Nihilanth shootout is, thankfully, 100% platforming-free, guaranteed. Yet, it still toys with Half-Life's interest in teleportation technology by having chunks of the facility arrive in the mastermind's nest. Black Mesa has a refreshingly narrative philosophy about boss fights. The game does not end with the most strenuous combat: that would be the Gonarch boss fight. The villain of an entire level is made into an on-again, off-again encounter. The Gonarch is not just sublime in its goring charges but also its unfettered reproduction. The Nihilanth battle, by contrast, sends the game off on its most extravagant note.

Black Mesa further patches Xen's surface interaction and makes platforming more straightforward by removing crouch jumping and implementing intuitive double-jump controls. It normalises your speed, and when it does have you boost yourself to a distant surface, it ensures it's stationary and sizeable or backed by a wall. You won't overshoot as long as you're reasonably sharp at platforming. Crowbar's skyboxes for Xen should hang in a museum, and on this land, the developer awards us more of the tastiest enemy dynamic: that between the Vortigaunts and Alien Controllers.

Interloper

On Xen, Vortigaunts are pacifists when left to their own devices but will rain hell down on Freeman when a nearby Alien Controller connects to their cortex. The Controllers make for slight targets and can maintain command in a battle even from a distance, but they are nothing without their guards. As the dance with these dime-store Modoks is a constant motion, you have to keep asking, is it more practical to take out multiple immediate targets (the Vortigaunts) or try your hand aiming at distant glimmers (the Controllers)? And there is the ethical dimension. Could you stand to kill the Vortigaunts when they're powerless slaves? And what more perfect relationship is there than foreman and engineer for the sweaty manufacturing and packing plant of Interloper? The drudgery of the Vortigaunts speaks to the game's themes of industry run amok and man against institution.

Unfortunately, Crowbar accidentally made too much Interloper. I know what you're thinking: "A boring amount of time spent in the box factory? There's no such thing", but the level machine broke down, and now conveyor belt platforming sections won't stop coming out. It's an unlikely blemish on a game that was made by a small, formerly amateur team that is otherwise discerning when pruning Half-Life's dead leaves.

A Battle You Have No Chance of Winning

Endings are hard. Most writers want to cap off their stories with the protagonist seeing their every wish granted. This approach to plotting can be disappointing in its predictability. Half-Life's ending reignites our interest in the narrative by letting us see past the battle we've fought for the last twelve hours. It all revolves around the G-Man, a besuited figure with bleached skin and uneven speech who knows all too much about the events of the game. While "G-Man" has become the accepted name of the character among fans, he's too cryptic for the developers to give him any canonical label. The name "G-Man" was pulled from the program files, but we generally don't take metadata as an authority on the canon. There's a model titled "scientist01" on the disc, but we wouldn't surmise from that that the character it depicts is called "Scientist 01".

But we need some words to refer to the man with the briefcase, so I'll keep calling him "The G-Man". The G-Man gives Gordon a choice that's not really a choice. He considers Gordon's sealing of the portal to Xen to be an audition, one that he's passed. The G-Man tells us we can either accept a mercenary contract with his employers or die. More than a decade before avant-garde subversions like The Path, Half-Life laid out this interactive thesis that a choice where one of your options is failure is no choice at all. Our negotiation with The G-Man takes place in the same model of tram that we rode into the facility on, but flying through a field of stars. The coding is that Gordon is once again going through a transition and heading to a site of conflict.

Here, players may find pieces of the story that previously seemed free-floating coming together. We know that Black Mesa researchers made expeditions into Xen, and in Black Mesa (the game), their presence there is pronounced, with makeshift encampments full of whiteboards, as well as Headcrabbed scientists. In Chapter 11, Questionable Ethics, we explored a lab where aliens from Xen were subject to cruel experiments which fruited in face-melting lasers. So, while the accident at Black Mesa was down to human error, it didn't come out of the blue. Just like the military in The Arrowhead Project and the Soviets at Chernobyl, Black Mesa, or its unseen administrators, had been playing with fire for a while. While the devils of Xen deserve no peace prizes, what happened in the New Mexico desert was not a freak invasion; it was a counteroffensive.

It may even be that someone intentionally sparked the resonance cascade. During Anomalous Materials, nosy explorers will have seen the G-Man opening a briefcase and showing the Black Mesa scientists the sample Gordon placed in the anti-mass spectrometer. Whether the G-Man's employer was the US government, we don't know, but the game leaves open the possibility that it was. As we see in Black Mesa Inbound, there's a USMC presence in the facility, and in the space tram, that creep tells us some of our weapons are government property, but is the government property just the guns we scavenged from the military or also the devices developed at Black Mesa? And here's some more food for thought: Gordon Freeman's sponsor in Black Mesa is classified; someone or some entity mysterious and important. Could it be the G-Man or the people he works for?

At the end of Half-Life and Black Mesa, there is a feeling of having travelled a great distance because of a lack of cutscenes that teleport us from one place to another. Everywhere Gordon went, we went. Additionally, Valve posits a lot of thought-provoking questions about their world without leaving out a sense of conclusion. Although, like Gordon, the Valve of this time had no idea how much further the G-Man would take them.

Departure

Half-Life is a lesson in how settings can be made to feel more realistic when the creator thinks of them as a working mechanism. It's a classic example of the mechanical theming of areas providing them with distinction and character. It's an argument for the atmospheric power of setting your media in the aftermath of a disaster. It's also proof of how you can use escalating revelations to keep the player on the edge of their seat until the last minute.

And what do we make of Black Mesa, a game that aims to court the Half-Life fan, even while rejecting much of its material? How can it be a celebration of the advancements I mentioned when it assesses Valve's work with an eraser in hand? Black Mesa says that homage takes a little criticism. If you believe in a piece of media, then you know that it can stand up to scrutiny, that it won't fold at the first sign of scepticism. And if that work helped modernise its format in its time, then celebrating it means striving for a comparable contemporaneity.

We can get so sensitive about the literal accuracy of video game remakes that we don't allow them to convey what was special about their source material. If you want a version of a game where the original gameplay is preserved, but the visuals are overhauled, I have no problem with that. More power to you. But if what we're searching for is the preservation of a game's spirit rather than its literal code, a redesign rather than a republishing can show you who the game truly is. Black Mesa is the poster child of that philosophy. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. The single cutscene in the game consists of Soldiers carrying your body towards the crusher at the end of Apprehension.
2. Chernobyl Accident 1986 (April, 2024), World Nuclear Association.
3. Rich, V. (1988). Legasov's indictment of Chernobyl management (Content Warning: Suicide). Nature vol. 333 (p. 285).
4. Decay Constant (January 19, 2024), Britannica.
5. King, S. (2007). The Mist. Signet Book (p. 31-32).
6. Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary by Secret Tape (November 17, 2023), YouTube.
7. What's It Really like Working at Valve? We Found Out. by People Make Games (January 25, 2023), YouTube.
8. This is evidenced by the Half-Life pre-release build that leaked in 2013.

All other sources linked at relevant points in the article.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Half-Life and Black Mesa and minor spoilers for Half-Life 2.

A Year in Games

Ask long-standing fixtures of video games the best year for the hobby, and chances are their modal response will be "1998". It marks the birthdays of Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, Spyro the Dragon, StarCraft, Banjo-Kazooie, and Dance Dance Revolution. It also fell within the heyday of the FPS. The first-person shooter was shocked to life with 1992's Wolfenstein 3D, and after that, gamers grew accustomed to the most discerning quality from the genre, spurred on by breakthroughs like 1993's Doom and 1996's Quake and Duke Nukem 3D. By '98, expectations had reached a fever pitch. But that didn't stop the newly-formed Valve Corporation from throwing their hat into the ring with Half-Life.

Half-Life had some stiff competition: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and the original Unreal muscled in on the shooter territory in the same year, but Valve's submission emerged as, if not more, lauded than both. The firm's name became synonymous with polished, punchy entertainment. Despite a lack of prior shipping, this Washington-based studio was able to develop one of the strongest games in one of the best years for the medium and on highly contested land. Half-Life sold one million copies by December 1999, putting the wind in the sails of the company that would eventually open PC gaming's largest marketplace.

Half-Life is also a bridge between worlds. By 1998, Id's games had made the opening speech for the FPS, providing an infosheet for what a level, weapon set, and enemy compendium should look like. Their games moved at vertiginous speeds that dared audiences to find matching reflexes. Still, six years after the release of Wolfenstein 3D, it wasn't yet clear what would come next. A little further down the line, we'll get the Halo archetype, with its recharging health and forward-thinking weaponry system, but in 1998, that hadn't come to fruition yet. Instead, Half-Life was what was next. It was received as a blessing, and other developers stitched its yarn into their works for a few reasons:

1. Half-Life strengthened the connection between players and setting.
2. Not content to be just a bunch of rooms with aliens in them, Half-Life introduces unique mechanics and scenarios for levels, with filmic schemes for how we outsmart every big bad.
3. Half-Life was making the FPS wow, even at a measured pace. It's hard enough to build a game where expedient movement and non-stop conflict get the audience's pulse racing. To keep them absorbed, even when the gunfire dies down, shows range.

Large sections of Half-Life also kind of suck.

Decay

Today, we'd see Valve's level and enemy design as violating The Big Book of Video Game No Nos. You've got two levels (Xen and On A Rail), which even megafans will tell you they hate. I'll save my commentary on Xen for later, but On A Rail blindsides the player with sneaky traps and subsections of it are impervious to navigation. Still, I've never understood why On A Rail is singled out for criticism when the same germs infect other levels. The problems are just, on average, more tightly packed in the minecart stage, which is itself needlessly long. To me, Surface Tension is as bad as or worse than On A Rail, being a drawn-out slog of invisible landmines and Snipers hiding in the battlements. Many of the doors through its canyons are slim fissures which vanish into the mountain edifice.

Half-Life wants to have these branching departments where you backtrack through previous areas to complete newly unlocked jobs, but never quite pulls it off because of its distaste for indicating where you should go next. The game also makes exploration and puzzle-solving obtuse by setting up rooms in such a way that you can't always see the effect of the switch you're flipping. And while Valve has a vibrant encounter palette to draw from, sometimes they just dump a bunch of Headcrabs on the floor and say, "This'll keep you occupied. I'm going for a smoke". For a long time after Half-Life's release, there was plenty of room for improvement to the game. Plenty of room for Black Mesa.

Retrofitting

Half-Life is a vehicle for Gordon Freeman, a doctor of physics at the Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico. When an experiment at this underground base opens up a portal to another universe, bloodthirsty aliens pour through and spare no time slaughtering the Black Mesa scientists. Freeman, the only surviving researcher from the experiment, gets his hands on an arsenal and must run the gauntlet of an alien invasion to reach the surface and safety.

Crowbar Collective is an international group of game developers who coordinate through the internet and got their start in the industry as hobbyists.^[1] They released their remake of Half-Life, Black Mesa, in 2020, after its early access probation. From about 2019 to today, we've been living through a golden era of remakes. You have the new Resident Evils, Demon's Souls, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, to name a few. In the games industry, development budgets and standards keep ascending, and they haven't found a ceiling yet. Where companies would once upscale an old game of theirs and acquaint it with new hardware, some are now rebuilding them from the ground up, which is how Black Mesa was made. But Black Mesa is anomalous materials.

Crowbar started hammering away on their remake in 2004, long before the current generation of such revivals, and they don't even own the game they're remaking. Black Mesa is the sole example I can think of of a AAA game made by a small indie studio, and was only possible with the backing of Valve.^[1] Not to suggest that any big games corporation is the "good guy", but it is remarkable. Nintendo's over there sending DMCA takedowns to tiny fan games based on their properties, while Valve saw modders rebuilding a product they'd sold over 9 million copies of, and their response was to cut them a licensing deal.

Another exception Black Mesa found to industry rules: it heavily modifies the gameplay of its subject. In these video game remodels, design is often not considered up for reappraisal the same way that graphics are. This is both because tweaking mechanics can require more fundamental technical changes to a game and because of our extraordinary reverence for the sequences of nostalgia fodder. Crowbar's wisdom is in their brilliant discernment between what of Half-Life has aged like wine and what has aged like milk. The studio has enough love of the game to make it feel like 1998's bloody industrial demi-horror. However, they don't let sentimentality cloud their judgement when it comes to separating the wheat from the chaff. For example, consider how the Collective treats characterisation and setting.

Black Mesa

Half-Life was praised in its time for its unconventional choice of protagonist. It has also been the target of gentle mocking due to a perception that it's taken a generic action game protagonist, written "PhD" on his chest in Sharpie, and pretended he's an academic. Admittedly, there are long stretches in which the shooter's only salute to Freeman's career is you occasionally bumping into whitecoats who'll fire off a "Ah, a fellow scientist". It's also tough to justify why Freeman is more proficient with a gun than the hundreds of marines in Black Mesa. Half-Life gives us the ID card of a physicist, but we meet other physicists, and it's clear Gordon is a different breed.

On the other hand, you clearly embody someone who knows the ropes of this compound, and you play out plausible actions for a person with scientific and engineering knowledge. You launch a satellite, power up a nuclear reactor, and switch gauges on the facility's tramline. If that's not roleplaying a scientist, I don't know what is. While Duke 3D's interactive sinks and toilets were considered revolutionarily responsive environment in 1996, '98's Half-Life has a level where routing power, fuel, and oxygen into a control room lets you turn on a rocket booster to kill a giant tentacle alien. It's these scenarios that make Black Mesa able to stand out as a location and ensure each level is a dedicated mission with its own parameters.

Even the purely observational tram ride in the first chapter is about establishing a laboratory where new technologies are actively being produced, and all the cogs are turning each other. A robot arm welds a metal grill, eggheads studiously monitor computer equipment, and a vat of industrial waste leaks into a pool of the same. This chapter exists to give us an idea of the types of sparking industry we'll be exploring during the game and the long days of button-pressing we'll commit to here. We also get to see a fleeting glimpse of the New Mexico desert, both letting us situate Gordon's workplace in a larger location and teasing the midgame.

In comparison to the metal album environments of the shooter classics, Half-Life's techno-setting is positively down-to-earth, even if its enemies aren't. Such is the nature of an invasion. Half-Life can coach a relationship between the player and this workplace largely through its platforming and puzzles. Not a lot of science gets done with a machine gun, but it does get carried out with physical mechanisms and interfaces. So, it's when Half-Life has us thwart laser shielding, electrify Tesla coils, and brave the interior of a centrifuge that we become Doctor Freeman, physicist. With the shooting alone, we can't enter into conversation with Black Mesa as a research facility. With the engineering, we can.

That spirit of physics is even more present in Black Mesa, which believes that if we're a physicist, we should be thinking about weights, charges, and trajectories. It adopts the Source engine in all its thrust and dynamism, adding turrets that deactivate if you can tip them over, a bumper pack of rewiring puzzles, and a Shotgun that can knock enemies off their feet. I'll talk more about Black Mesa expanding Half-Life's physics motifs in the future. But weapons and enemies carry between levels, so to get a ground-level comprehension of what makes Half-Life Half-Life, let's study what we're firing and who we're firing at.

Lab Equipment

We're not going to cover all the weapons in the locker, but there's one that we have to talk about above all others: the Crowbar. The rule of thumb for video game bludgeons is that you get one strike for every time you press the "thump" button. But the Crowbar stays swinging for as long as you hold down the left-click, and at a frantic speed, too. It feels desperate to interact with the environment, and who are we to deny it? Black Mesa's contribution is to make its clangs less ear-splitting when it does find a surface.

Our entry-level gun, the 9mm Pistol, is not just a practical accessory but also becomes a generic "interact" button as we head further into the game. We can, for example, use it to flip the switches in On A Rail or detonate the mines in Black Mesa's version of Surface Tension. We're afforded more firepower by the Submachine Gun. The SMG would be fun enough as just a geyser of bullets, but its secondary fire, a grenade launcher, puts it over the edge. It may not prime explosions as large as the Hand Grenade or Rocket Launcher, but it can fire faster and hold more ammo than the Rocket Launcher, and its projectiles detonate faster than the Grenades do. You also don't need to switch away from the SMG to use that secondary. It is Christmas in a metal casing.

I wish I could get as excited about the original Shotgun. In Half-Life, you cannot afford to open yourself up to attacks unnecessarily, but the Shotgun demands you get up in the face of enemies to deal damage. Afterwards, it leaves them standing to continue assaulting you. Black Mesa's Shotgun is more ruthless in its butchery, and its operating range is less ambiguous. The remake also allowed me a besotted reunion with one of my favourite video game implements: the Half-Life 2 .357 Magnum. It is effectively a sniper rifle without a scope. Slow but devastating, with an unsparing ammo count, it is a testament to the steady aiming of the Source shooters.

There are two weapons I never find myself using, and those are the Hivehand and the Snarks. They both sound killer: the Hivehand shoots homing venomous insects, and the autonomous Snarks tear at anything that moves. So, you can damage aliens around corners and have bugs fight your battles for you. But the hornets are imprecise and take too long to reach a target. It is a disqualifying flaw in the original Half-Life, where you need to dispatch foes at the drop of a hat if you don't want to get vaporised by them. Meanwhile, the Snarks are as happy to nip at you as a Vortigaunt or Soldier.

Research Assistants

With all this talk of Half-Life's narrow permission for errors, you might conclude that it features fewer crutches for the player than its modern counterpart, Black Mesa. Surprisingly, it's the 1998 shooter that's fitted with auto-aim and a tutorial level, while the 2020 remake is free of both. It's not that Black Mesa is less obliging to the player; it's that rather than serving player aid on a side plate, it bakes it into the game as a whole. Black Mesa follows Half-Life 2's philosophy of making education one of the goals of its level design, teaching players how mechanics work organically rather than bluntly instructing them on what to do when. That the player must work out to crouch to pass through a door or shatter a barricade with their Crowbar means that they cannot let these techniques wash over them without absorbing them. They have had to actively think about how to apply them, and it's application that makes a lesson stick.

As for the auto-aim, in Half-Life, a few missed shots could give the enemy the opening they needed to smear your organs over the walls. The assisted targeting makes sure they don't get that chance. Although, even then, the auto-aim can be inaccurate at long distances, and the demarcating line between short and long distances is never explicitly established. In Black Mesa, flubbing a shot here or there is not the end of the world, so the game does not need a system that guarantees you can hit targets up to a couple hundred meters. I think people who want games to aggressively scrutinise their skills are frequently uncomfortable with the idea of enemy attack power being diluted, but here's an example of a developer doing that and it making the play more skill-dependent.

Everything Xen

More than any other enemy, it's the Headcrabs that bear the brunt of our equipment. Headcrabs are the first and most ubiquitous enemies of Half-Life, with memorable gameplay and monster designs that made them an anti-mascot for the series. Flat, parasitic creatures that can clamp down on a skull and pilot a dead body around, they're like cordyceps on an ant. But the Headcrab can only leave a scratch on you, and the Zombies they create move at a hobble. So, both are suitable opponents, even for a player who's just getting to grips with the game or genre. Because each parasite and host aren't too cumbersome to fight off, Valve can also add them to a great number of encounters without worrying it will push those beats above the acceptable threshold of difficulty.

Technically, the Barnacle gives the player less guff as it's a stationary enemy. But because Barnacles are sedentary and often avoidable, they don't create an action atmosphere, and so, cannot support a lot of combat on their own, whereas the Headcrabs can. Similarly, the mild threat Headcrabs and Zombies pose also means that designers don't have to spawn them in a space where players have a lot of cover, and the tiny Headcrab can fit into almost any size arena: even an air vent. Again, that means more stations for them to guard.

Despite its wimpy bite, the Headcrab is perfectly optimised to induce panic because it goes right for your face, and even if you do manage to sidestep one of these screeching pests, now it's behind you, and you don't know exactly where. If you've ever seen a spider in your bedroom, looked away, and then looked back to find it gone, you'll know this dance. The Shotgun is pure Heacrab's bane: a weapon with a wide spread is just what the doctor ordered when you have a tiny animal flying at your face like a speedball and no time to aim. But a Shotgun takes a second to cock and isn't blessed with the largest magazine. It inevitably creates stressful scenes where you're praying you can load shells into the chamber before the parasites get within striking range. The Pistol is a more economical solution to Black Mesa's infestation, but you can be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking you'll chip away at a Headcrab meters off, then before you know it, it's right on top of you, and you're madly blasting the handgun at it.

The Heacrab synthesises brilliantly with the other enemies. Try to shoot Headcrabs that get behind your back, and you take your eyes off another potentially more rotten foe. Similarly, those other enemies can distract you from the crab, only for it to sink its teeth in when you least expect it. In a disturbing setpiece in Office Complex, a Headcrab Zombie is trapped in front of a flashing computer screen, seizing. As an actor in the play, the Zombie is deeper than you might think. In Black Mesa, it obeys the HL2 rules wherein its Headcrab will detach and try to sick you if you kill it with body shots, but there'll be no such drama if you can nail it in the head. Even twenty years after Half-Life 2, the idea of a weak point not modifying damage or pushing the enemy into another state but changing whether or not they spawn a secondary enemy is novel.

Early in the game, the Zombie's slow speed allows a player less attuned to FPSs to practice positioning and aiming without needing to move constantly. Later enemies that can fire and are light on their feet, like the Vortigaunt or Houndeye, ask the user to develop a skillset to match. The Zombie's leisurely shamble can sometimes be its deceptive strength. When in a room with it and other enemies, you may choose to prioritise gun-toting monsters more distant than the Zombie because the undead can't hurt you until they can touch you. Yet, as with the Headcrab, if you put them out of your head for too long, you'll be lacerated. I wish enemy types intermingled more because the synchronicity between them can be stupendous.

One creature that doesn't play well with others is the Icythosaur, which, having made its home in Black Mesa's opaque waters, turns every river and canal you enter a mystery box which may or may not contain one of these giant piranhas. It's a classic survival horror guessing game: if the designer creates the possibility, but not the guarantee that a monster could appear in a number of areas, an atmosphere of terror settles over the entire game. Yet, because the player is not actually encountering the villain every time, they don't become desensitised or exhausted. For land aliens like the Bullsquid and Vortigaunt, all empty space becomes a monster closet as they can teleport in wherever they please.

The Icythosaur swims in a serpentine motion, except when it charges at you, lining itself up to leave a huge bite mark in your HP. Its lunges are breakpoints where you might be about to penetrate it with a Crossbow bolt, but you might also be about to get ripped limb from limb. The Icythosaur-Crossbow dilemma is a variation on a popular pattern in shooters, one you can find elsewhere in Half-Life: The moment during which an enemy is a sitting duck is also the point at which they have the strongest defensive capability. Throughout Gordon Freeman's war, you will see enemies like Vortigaunts, Bullsquids, and Grunts that will alternate between moving but not firing and firing but not moving. So, they frequently relocate to keep the combat changing and also provide continuous challenge while altering the nature of that challenge.

The enemy that sees the most improvement between Half-Life and Black Mesa is the Soldier. In 1998, gamers raved about Valve's intelligent military NPCs, and the trick here was as much their dialogue as their programming. They will verbalise their upcoming moves and seemingly report to each other if they have or have not found Freeman. Without their audio barks, they wouldn't seem to be strategically coordinating against you. With the dialogue, they come across as a living network. And then there's that spice the troops add to the combat by throwing Grenades. You get flushed out of cover, forced to show quick wits by finding a new hiding place.

So, what's the problem? Well, for one, you can't afford to be out in the open much due to bullets can go in you. And if you're in a Soldier-heavy encampment like On A Rail, there's not a lot of refuge to seek after you flee cover. So, you're at a strategic loss and don't get a lot of interesting choices when a frag lands next to you. But you'll find the real sore spot when you open fire on the Soldiers: they're meat shields. In Half-Life, they can take a volley of SMG bullets before they die, just crouching there and spurting blood. With such resilience, they don't register as human, and their lack of reaction causes our weapons to feel ineffectual. In the gameplay, they're hardy, trigger-happy, and stand in the open, which means that it often feels like there's no option to defeat them but sucking down damage, and the player should always have an alternative to failure. Black Mesa's decision to simply debuff the soldiers pays surprising dividends.

While the Marines are the most annoying about it, any enemy can pose an inappropriately outsized risk because this shooter uses a static rather than recharging health system. I dissect recharging health mechanics in more depth over here, but the bottom line is that if the player can enter the same room with 1 health or 100 health, a level's difficulty can deviate wildly. Half-Life is as good an example as any of how you can feel like you hit a brick wall in an action game because you entered a room with red HP, and there are no first-aid kits nearby.

As a game fitted with the same health mechanics, Black Mesa can't entirely avoid replicating this flaw, but it does a lot to loosen your belt. Full of Wolfenstein-like secret compartments of ammo and health, it can better regulate the degree of challenge while rewarding your exploration. However, breaching a plentiful supply hamper is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you're better equipped for battles in the near future. On the other hand, if the game thinks you need that concession, you've got a tough fight ahead of you.

Integral Functions

With these supply drops squirrelled away in the stages, you can see that while we can discuss enemies and items in isolation, it's when they stand against the backdrop of a level that we get their full effect. You can't understand the total horror of the Headcrab until you're stuck in a vent with it. The case is best made for the Crossbow when you have soldiers holed up on the other side of a courtyard, and you need to neutralise them without exposing yourself. Therefore, if we want to discuss weapons and enemies, we also have to analyse level design. But I'm afraid this is where I get off. We've covered a lot of ground today, enough to constitute a full blog. Next week, not only will we trawl the ruins of Black Mesa, we'll gaze upon the creatures on the other side of the portal to Xen, and that's when Half-Life gets really ugly. Until then, goodbye and thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Black Mesa: The 16 Year Project to Remake Half-Life by Noclip (March 15, 2022), YouTube.

All other sources are linked at the relevant points in the article.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Cocoon and minor spoilers for Gorogoa.

Now and then, a game gets so popular within its niche that its magnetic field stretches beyond its genre's devotees, attracting players from across gaming's wide spectrum. Super Smash Bros. did this as a fighting game, The Last of Us did it in the narrative drama sector, and it's happened myriad times in the puzzle genre. We saw it with Baba Is You, Superliminal, and in late 2023, with Geometric's Cocoon.

Cocoon casts us as a humanoid insect born from an egg. Our infancy is a little bland; we learn the buttons of the environmental interface and go through the motions of some simple sequence puzzles. Our explorations hit a stride once we have a couple of orbs in our thrall. Orbs power up mechanisms like moving platforms and lifts, but eventually, they also provide unique utilities. For example, the orange orb reveals hidden gantries, and the green one lets you solidify clouds of mist. Each of these balls also contains a world. If you can find a circular pool, you can put the orb on the holder in the centre of the water. If you can put the orb on the holder, you can enter the orb and complete the puzzles inside. Rubbery pads inside the orb worlds let you ascend back to the level you entered them from.

Rather than advancing linearly through a series of chambers, we make a little headway in World A, which allows us to make some progress in World B, and that unlocks some gate in World A we can continue through, and so on. The progression is multi-threaded. Cocoon has also worked out that since people in real life can transport almost any object, if we could compress worlds into objects, we could relocate entire fields or industrial hubs. As we can hold orbs when we enter other orbs, we can also place orbs inside orbs and worlds inside worlds. If we could nest objects within each other in our universe, as we can in Cocoon, then we could add their capacities to each other, which is not possible with our physics. What I mean is that 6+3 = 9. However, if I'm in my garage and I have a box that is 6m³ and I place another box inside it that is 3m³, the first box doesn't now have a volume of 9m³. The first box has the same volume it always did, minus the space that the walls of the second box take up.

To see how Cocoon subverts this geometry, let's imagine a typical brainteaser we'd encounter in it. We have three orbs at our disposal: Orange, green, and purple. The orange and green spheres each have a single pool inside, and our goal is to cram two orbs into one orb. Whether I choose to place my orbs into the orange or green sphere, I find myself entering a world with only one orb holder and, so, it would seem, the capacity for only one orb.

We have to ask, are we deadlocked? No, because we can, for example, place the green sphere inside the orange and then the purple inside the green. We were able to add the capacity of the green orb to the orange orb's by placing it inside it. It is comparable to being able to drop a 1m³ box into a 1m³ box to get a 2m³ box. If you want to see another game that models additive spaces with more emphasis on volume, look no further than Tibia: the MMO launched by CipSoft in 1997. In this RPG, each container has a number of slots, but those slots can be filled with other containers, leading to adventurers placing bags inside of bags inside of bags to maximise their carrying capacity. The only limitation is weight. In Cocoon, challenges commonly call for this technique of using one container as a vessel for others.

In puzzle games, it's typical to define a "switch" as an object that we must place a weight on to produce some specific effect. We then define weights as the items we need to place on those switches to bring about the effect. This makes the spheres the weights of Cocoon, and the pedestals its switches. But there's more purpose bound up in Cocoon's spheroids than there is in the conventional weighted cube. The orbs unseal future zones and activate mechanisms, but they also are zones, containers, and bestowers of player abilities. Through the multi-faceted practicality of the spheres, Geometric Interactive instils in us bug mindset. I've looked at insects before and thought, "Wow, how could you care so much about one lousy dewdrop?" but in this ludonarrative, I feel hyped about my dewdrop and genuinely productive handling it.

As Cocoon is a puzzle game developed after 2007, it's mandatory that we compare it to Portal. For gameplay purposes, the exit pads in Cocoon's worlds are fixed portals, and the orbs are portals we can place. Although, we can only situate the orbs in a few developer-sanctioned locations. Unlike the portals in Valve's puzzler, Geometric's never link two places within the same instanced environment; they can only grant passage between environments. And distancing itself from Portal, Cocoon is not an active physics simulation. Designer Jeppe Carlsen had previously drawn up Limbo and Inside, games that had some grounding in the principles of momentum and collision. Cocoon is almost entirely absent of these concepts.

To add to that, most games that take place in a space are about moving entities around that space, whether that's pushing a cart along a track or running towards a net. Yet, the spaces themselves are immovable. In Cocoon, the geography is in flux. It's not the only game in which that's true: in The Pedestrian, ROOMS: The Toymaker's Mansion, or Gorogoa, the environment is sliced into sliding tiles that we must rearrange. Aligning them just so can make two halves of an object into a whole or give the protagonist an unobstructed climb to the next floor.

In fact, Gorogoa could be a long-lost uncle to Cocoon. We may zoom into its panels and find new scenes inside, often to step back at a later timestamp and discover the old world anew. The worlds also exist non-contiguously for much of runtime as well, and you'll leave some dimensions idle as you execute plans in others. To a point, you could peg us as playing multiple different interconnected levels at once, and that goes in either Gorogoa or Cocoon.

Where the distinction arises is that The Pedestrian, ROOMS, and Gorogoa more frequently have you thinking about the adjacency of spaces, while Cocoon takes a fiercer interest in their hierarchy. To be doubly clear, Gorogoa has more tricks up its sleeve than being a sliding tile toy, but it and the games I've grouped it with are full of these impasses where victory is a matter of deducing which two panels go next to each other. What these other games have little of, and what Cocoon has in spades, are areas where we don't just need to decide what spaces belong next to each other but how we should nest them inside each other.

Given the logic by which we mentally map places and the animations that accompany our entrance to and emergence from Cocoon's orbs, it would be natural to conceptualise the spheres and pads as existing above or below each other. Yet, if we compare them to objects positioned in regular 3D space, we can see that would be inaccurate, at least if we're using the common definitions of "above" or "below". Imagine you're standing on the second floor of a house and that there's a trampoline on the first floor, directly underneath your position. If you start walking across the second floor, away from your initial coordinates, that trampoline is no longer directly below you.

In Cocoon, we can jump off of an exit pad in one world and emerge out of the orb into the universe "above". It's like being able to jump from the trampoline downstairs to the spot on the second floor directly above it. It would be just jumping to a higher floor if we couldn't take that orb, carry it twenty kilometres north, place it in a pool, and still move "down" onto the same exit pad. Even though we are twenty meters away from the area that would have been "below" the springboard, we can still "descend" onto it. In a reversal of this relationship, any exit pad in any universe will rocket us to the location of the orb in the "above" universe, regardless of where we situated that orb.

Placing down an orb in Cocoon isn't like installing a lift in a building; our job is not to "line up" elements of the above world and the below world. Rather than picturing a straight tether linking the orbs and pads, I find it helpful to think of the universes in Cocoon like the folders in a directory tree. In Windows, you could be in C:\Program Files\, and that location could have an "Audacity" folder inside. If you were thinking of entering the Audacity directory, you wouldn't ask where in Audacity you'd come out relative to your previous position in Program Files. All you would say is that you were in C:\Program Files\, and then you were in C:\Program Files\Audacity\. In Cocoon, unlike in Portal, when you jump into a doorway, you don't think about the coordinates you'll emerge at on the other side. You don't get a choice. You simply know that previously, you existed in the hierarchy at, say, BaseWorld:\Orange\, and now you're entering BaseWorld:\Orange\Green\.

The folder simile extends to the preservation of which sub-worlds sit inside which worlds. In Gorogoa, I could have two tiles on my screen; we'll call them L and R. R exists to the right of L, and L exists to the left of R. If I slide L downwards, R does not slide down with it. The relative positioning of the two tiles is now different. But look at what happens if I do something similar in Windows Explorer. Let's say C:\Program Files\Audacity\Plug-Ins\ is a valid file path on my hard drive. If I move Audacity to the root (C:), Plug-Ins will remain a direct subfolder of Audacity. C:\Audacity\Plug-Ins\ will be a valid file path. Folders slide with each other. Likewise, if I have a hierarchy of orbs that goes BaseWorld:\Orange\Green\White\, and I move the green orb to exist directly inside of the base world, it will still have white as a direct sub-orb. I will be able to go to BaseWorld:\Green\White\. Please appreciate my Orb Notation.

To further extricate Gorogoa and Cocoon, in Gorogoa, worlds can be presented alongside each other, but in Cocoon, you are always fully immersed in whatever orb you have engaged with. So, hopping off of an exit pad in the latter game is like leaving a cinema and reconnecting with the city outside. However focused you were on the film, the exterior reality is a hundred times bigger than it. Reentering an environment you're already familiar with can still be awe-inspiring. Even the teleporters in Cocoon shook my worldview when I first stepped foot on them. In other games, disappearing from one location and spontaneously appearing at another is not too remarkable, but Cocoon gets us used to the idea that portals always take us into or out of other worlds. So, when we discover one that teleports us across the same world, we intuitively frame it as the exit pad transporting us up to the same world we're already in. How do you exit into the place you already exist in? Mind-boggling.

What's missing from my current description of Cocoon is a reason why you should care how the universes are nested. Say there's a puzzle you need to complete inside the purple sphere. What does it matter if the purple portal is inside the orange one, the green one, or no portal at all? It matters because of the powers that each orb confers. You need to hold a ball to activate its effects, but you cannot be in an orb and hold it at the same time (typically). Therefore, deciding the hierarchy of the orbs is deciding what abilities will be available to you where.

You'll recall that the orange orb makes invisible walkways visible. That means that if I'm inside BaseWorld:\Orange\Purple\, I can't use the orange orb to light up the hidden paths in the purple world. I'm unable to wield the orange orb here because I'm already inside it, and that will be an issue if I need to cross invisible bridges to get to the next area of the purple world. In fact, this limitation could be part of the puzzle. If I'm in BaseWorld:\White\Green, I can't use the white orb's power to fire bolts of energy.

The omni-solution would seem to be accessing all orbs from the base world at the top of the hierarchy, ensuring that we always have access to every power, minus that of the single orb we enter. Although, you're generally not tasked with using the green power inside the green orb or the purple power inside the purple orb as the designers understand that under regular conditions, this is impossible. If we can't enter all orbs from the base world, we'd at least want to be as high up the orb chain as possible because the fewer orbs "above" us, the fewer powers we are locked out of. That ideal scenario is frequently unattainable because:

1. We often don't have an exit pad nearby to retreat to exterior realities.
2. We may not have enough pools to place all the orbs in the base world and must often store some orbs in other worlds.
3. Within one orb, we may need to harness the powers of another orb to conquer an obstacle and so, cannot leave it in the base world.

Under limitations 2 and 3, we are forced to decide a hierarchy for the orbs, even if it's determining whether the white ball goes inside the green ball or the green ball goes inside the white ball. As we enter each orb, our suite of powers gets smaller, and abilities that were available to us before are stripped away. Again, we have to work out what powers we need on each level. Followers of Double Fine may recognise this pattern from Stacking, their 2011 Russian nesting doll game. Cocoon doesn't go as many layers deep as Stacking, but it does feature a Russian nesting universe.

Puzzle games often prohibit our use of certain powers or items at certain times in order to stop us from relying on the same reasoning and get us thinking with exciting new rubrics. However, just greying out a move on a radial menu would be frustratingly arbitrary: an egregious example of the designer reaching into the world and flicking a switch off because they don't like it. Stacking and Cocoon provide wonderful examples of how a designer can make a limitation feel reasonable, both by tying it to real-world logic and by having the player impose the limitation on themselves. We are the ones who shed the outer dolls in Stacking, and we'd never expect to be able to use an object after we've discarded it, so there's no disappointment when we can't.

In Cocoon, we wouldn't expect to be able to pass through a doorway and hold onto it, and we make the decision of how to layer the doorways, so there are fewer hard feelings when we can't put our insectoid mits on the sphere we want. The "catch" in plenty of Cocoon's conundrums is that it appears that we need to be inside an orb whose powers we must use. We often get unstuck when we find the loopholes that reveal how we can smuggle that one orb into another or when we realise that we don't need the orb hierarchy or power we thought we did.

Cocoon joins a long line of texts that depict the universe as an onion of concentric spheres, although most previous, significant entries in this legacy have been non-fictional. In the first half of the sixth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Anaximander said that the Earth, which was then thought to be the centre of the universe, was surrounded by a sphere or spheres. That sphere or those spheres would have been the night sky.^[1] Anaximedes, who is generally understood to have been Anaximder's student, added that the sky sphere was crystalline. Plato believed that the heavens moved in spherical patterns because spheres were the perfect shape. His pupil, Eudoxus, was completely orb-pilled, expounding a view of the universe that included 53 concentric spheres.^[1] Contrary to popular belief, Greeks as old as Pythagoras in ~350 B.C. knew that our world is a sphere.

For the dormant civilisation of Cocoon, their crystalline spheres are one of their finest technological triumphs. One of the reasons Cocoon didn't hit for me on my first session is that there have already been a lot of dead civilisation indie games: Journey, ABZÛ, Gris, Rime, Sable, Omno, Scorn, AER, the list goes on. Cocoon didn't feel much different until the spheres made their entrance. Another way Cocoon sets itself apart from those names is that it views technology as downstream from physiology. Its fallen world was built by insects, and fittingly, tiles take the shape of honeycomb cells, the technologists take the term "drone" literally, and bridges unfold in the image of dragonfly wings. Where we typically see the height of space travel in FTL drives, the people of this society looked into a dewdrop, saw a world reflected inside and wondered whether they could make such a thing a reality. They imagine you'd exit a teleporter as if you were a larva crawling from an egg.

If you can collect all the orbs, master layered reality, and make it to the throne of creation, you still won't really get Cocoon. You can only achieve a divine understanding of the celestial spheres by seeing the game through to its last seconds. The world elevator ascends you to godhood. You are reborn from tiny cicada to solar-system-spanning moth, and as it turns out, the whole game took place inside another orb: a sun. The spheres we were carrying weren't just like eggs: they were eggs, and they scatter from the star, hatching into planets. A new solar system roars to life, one we watch over with our moth wisdom. While we experienced a birth at the start of the game, it is at the end that we undergo our most miraculous emergence, with the whole ludonarrative proving to have been a chrysalis for a hierarchical cosmology. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Classical Astronomy by Robert Hollow and Helen Sim (2022), Australia National Telescope Facility.

All other sources are linked at the relevant points in the article.

Over the last decade and a half, the breakout stars of the puzzle genre have tended to be those titles that stun on sight. The showmen with core mechanics you can understand from the briefest flash, but that bend both reality and your mind. There is the Lego rule-rewriting of Baba Is You, self-cloning in The Swapper, the subjective resizing of objects in Superliminal, the time loops of Outer Wilds, you know the sort of thing. Not all puzzle games twist one of the fundamental axioms of our reality. The Witness is one of the best-acclaimed brainteasers of all time, and that's a catalogue of Buddhist placemat mazes, but experiences like The Witness are the exception rather than the rule.

It's curious because you don't see other fields of gaming relitigating the contract between player and environment as a default. Horizon: Forbidden West doesn't have you going back in time to reconsider how you might play the game every 20 minutes; in Baldur's Gate 3, perception is not reality; in Red Dead Redemption 2, you can't reprogram your horse. Not yet, at least. I don't want you to go away with the idea that strategy or action games are not worth your time because they aren't remixing their shit for every session. The takeaway should be the opposite: that they don't need to. Most games can keep a relatively consistent and shared notion of what reality looks like and still scintillate. And that leaves me asking: Why do so many successful puzzle games keep breaking the laws of nature when their friends in other formats don't?

The split goes back to what we're looking for from each gameplay genre and how each style of game generates challenge. When the draw of a gameplay section is its feel, it will stand up to replays because the pleasant sensations are there every time you return to it. You can also generally repeat hand-eye coordination courses in games without boredom. This is because having been able to contort your hands into the correct shapes at the correct times once does not mean you can do it again. The difficulty stands its ground.

Most experiences with games are also part scripted challenge and part procedurally-generated obstacles. Stages may have fixed objectives or layouts, but branch conditions and random elements, including AI behaviour, mean that you can play the same level multiple times, and it won't react to you the same way twice. The vendor's selection of items on the third floor will keep rotating, an enemy that may have dived right to escape a grenade once could dive left the next time. Not to mention, you exert a sway in how levels play out. Your behaviour changes with improvements in your skills, and designers offer choices to let you express yourself and take ownership of the experience.

Some puzzle games also allow for relatively freeform solutions to levels. You can see it in entertainment where we're building a solution rather than finding one, such as World of Goo or Space Engineers. It's further present in match-three games like Zuma or Royal Match. But a galaxy of puzzles exists outside of the match-three and systems construction genres. In the adventure, action-adventure, or environmental archetypes, we rarely get the same wiggle room for forming solutions that we do in match-three and systems construction games. And environmental puzzle games are in vogue. One may offer an alternative solution now and then, but sections in, say, Phantasmagoria or LEGO Builder's Journey are not open problems. They do not agree with the large majority of solutions we could offer and will not change their shape on replays.

With rigid rules, we know that if we've collected information about a puzzle once, we'll be able to apply it in the future to reach success. More than that, having a narrow band of valid solutions makes us put our thinking cap on when taking action. Because the locks of environmental puzzle games will not bend to fit your key, you need to seek a specific key instead of lazily picking one from the ring. And it's diligent deduction that makes us feel smart.

For puzzles that have very few answers or one answer, it follows that if the player beats it, they know the required steps for it, and the level can no longer offer the emotional reward for solving a mystery. You can't be tasked with finding the key if you're already holding it. Unlike levels in an action game, puzzle stages also rarely occupy you with hand-eye coordination tests or use stimulating game feel as a design pillar. Therefore, they have limited replay value. I am compartmentalising here; games often engage along multiple vectors simultaneously. Appeal through action, puzzles, and sensory attractions are not mutually exclusive, so some puzzle games retain charm even across concurrent playthroughs. Plus, over a long enough timespan, players will forget the steps to complete puzzles, opening those levels up to get their mental gears whirring again.

Still, environmental puzzles rely on audiences lacking an understanding of how to solve them out of the gate. Therefore, if they only employ the logic of the real world or other puzzle gauntlets, the player may already know how to steer that logic to solve the story mode's problems. If you keep setting the player the same puzzles across multiple games, they arrive with all the knowledge they need to bore themselves to death. But suppose the player finds that time, space, size, or other aspects of the game world do not operate like that of any world they are familiar with. That they can clone themselves, spontaneously grow and shrink objects, or teleport. There is now new logic to be unravelled. The player must commit to a lot of induction and deduction to manipulate the systems in the direction they'd like.

Players become perpetual tutees, always refreshing their mindset, thinking outside the box to succeed at exams. The complementary aesthetic to that twisting of our worldview is a warping of reality. Mechanics like carrying universes in our hands in Cocoon or the infinitely tiling world of Manifold Garden don't just embody a mechanical aesthetic but also influence how their respective games look and sound.

When puzzlers have a perspective skew or hook mechanic, the word "gimmick" is inevitably thrown in their face. But by definition, gimmicks are superficial. Like sparklers, they fizzle brightly for a little while and then burn out. Yet, most sensational puzzle games need play and aesthetics that can support a multi-hour story mode at the very least. Their single-player tests the depth of their mechanical premises. The worst puzzle games burn down to their base in no time, but the best produce hours of thought-provoking trials capable of changing how we see virtual worlds and our physical one, too. Thanks for reading.

Lo-Fi Plays is a series in which I set out in search of games that are compact, developed on little to no budget, or that otherwise lurk in the shadows of obscurity. This is not a safari of the technologically extraordinary; I am combing for pet projects that do something innovative, charming, or otherwise noteworthy. Here's the crop of downloadables for March 9th. Everything on this list is free or "name your own price", so jump right in if you see a title that interests you.

Windowkill

Windowkill resides in the burgeoning genre of "ya gotta see this thing". Most of the time a game tells you to "think outside the box" that's a metaphor, but not when developer torcado has their way. Windowkill is a twin-stick shooter where you take on that most heroic of narrative archetypes: the circle, and the walls are always closing in. Both you and the enemies collide with the boundaries of the window you play in, and without resistance, that window shrinks. If you don't do something, you'll be crushed. It's your bullets that come to the rescue. They serve an elegant dual function, shattering enemies but also pushing back the edges of the screen.

If you want to stay alive, you need to divide your shots judiciously between the walls of the window and the malevolent shapes that beset you on all sides. It doesn't sound like you'd have to dedicate more than nominal brain power to that, but in practice, the play feels like spinning plates. The metamorphic frame mangles the traditional wisdom about where media stops and where the outside environment begins. Like most innovative art, Windowkill transforms something that you didn't consider could be transformed.

While a Robotron or a Geometry Wars leaves an open highway of reward before you, Windowkill has regular progression checkpoints. Those checkpoints come in the form of items you can buy once you have the coins. Note how the rogue-like-like progression allows you to determine what goodies you get instead of the designer forcing new tools on you. My advice is don't be afraid to "restock" the perks; they are everything for your survivability. A fancier release of the game is available for $5, but here I'm reviewing the free 2.0.3 version. If you can beat my high score of 15 minutes, 34 seconds alive, I will let you have the keys to my house.

Windowkill is available on itch.io.

Dead Seater

In the Autumn of 2023, Zeekerss made a convincing case for the next frontier in multiplayer games with Lethal Company. Lethal Company is a cooperative farce of damned industrial facilities and ruthless quotas. Dead Seater, from 2021, is another Zeekerss special. It stands under its own power as a cavalcade of panic-inducing nighttime encounters, but it's also a treat for the video game historian. You can see how this developer had already cultivated so many of the stylistic trademarks from Lethal Company two and a half years earlier.

Dead Seater has that violent, accelerated animation and hapless fools running into danger torso-first. It's also got the brown-grey colour mush you love, the objective of collecting valuable items in dark places, even the metal shelving from Lethal Company's storage rooms. Sorry, I should go back and tell you what you're doing in this game: You're returning to your childhood home and sprucing the place up before Daddy gets here. Most of the play involves feeling around the house with the power off, all the while fumbling with a fixed camera and tank controls. It's the Resident Evil 1 interface, but in that game, slamming into walls and then rotating like a corkscrew undercut the horror. But put it alongside Dead Seater's headless chicken animations, and you get comedy gold.

The protagonist has an almost featureless face, and there's barely a shred of decoration in the house. However, the material the shack is made out of is painted with a Bob Ross degree of care. The message is that this place isn't humanising, it's not a home, but the material component of it is alive. On that note, there's another trademark of Lethal Company hiding in here, and I won't tell you exactly what it is, but I'll give you this clue: it's not friendly.

Dead Seater is available on Steam and itch.io.

Glitchspace

Glitchspace is another game pushing the envelope regarding what is fixed and what is variable. The platforms and bridges of its minimalist cyberspace are not proportioned or positioned appropriately to get you to the exits, so why not make them be? You can reprogram choice blocks of the environment to change their geometry and motion. Programming can be an undesirable method of interaction in games for a few reasons. One: its complexity can be intimidating. Two: its abstraction can make it unintuitive for the average user. Three: with a verbose enough language, the player has too much power.

The mop for all this mess? Node graphs! It's weird how concepts that are familiar to game devs often go unknown to an enthusiast audience. Node graphs appear in an array of development environments and allow software engineers to wire together different traits and actors to decide the flow of a program. In Glitchspace, you might spawn one module that says "Rotate" and connect it to another that says "Numbers: 90" to rotate a model by 90 degrees. The game also restricts the use of certain modules at certain times, so you're not just turning into a wizard and cheating the levels by creating a long-ass ramp to the exit.

If you've wanted to dip a toe into game programming but not been sure how to start, Glitchspace can put you in touch with some of the basic concepts. It can also get you thinking about a virtual world like a coder does: not as landscapes and people but as vectors, booleans, and the like. That abstraction in your approach is mirrored by the geometric, computerised setting of Glitchspace. It has modernist white skyscrapers with red denoting the objects of focus, reminiscent of Mirror's Edge.

Glitchspace is available on Steam.

I Commissioned Some Bees 0

Hidden object games are boring, right? Right. I mean, wrong. You've just probably never played one with as much panache as I Commissioned Some Bees 0. Where other item hunters have you searching for one or a few sprites in a single scene, studio Follow the Fun is able to fit so many more fluffy little insects into one picture than you'd think possible. It's a long-form easter egg hunt, a day of gold panning where there always seems to be another nugget to shake free of the sand.

The experience also aims to disprove the stereotype that hidden object dives have to be cosy. Drinking from the talents of multiple artists, I Commissioned Some Bees can be spooky, scrawly, mind-expanding, or downright weird, with music to match. Images that would fry the audience's brain with their business in other entertainment manage to find a home in this gentle therapy. This is because it needs drawings that retain depth even after minutes of searching, and by gum, it finds them.

I Commissioned Some Bees 0 is available on Steam.

Portal: Revolution

Portal: Revolution is a mod for, and fan-made sequel to, Portal 2. If you're familiar with the series, you might ask, "Why even bother?". Valve set up the Perpetual Testing Initiative so we'd have community levels until the end of time, minimum. But there's more to Portal than the test chambers: there is skulking through the backstage; there are the glitchy, ponderous acoustics; there are AI of questionable emotional stability. Second Face Software brings it all glooping back into your PC. You get the pure joy of flying out of an orange hole and arcing gracelessly through the air, as well as forty original test chambers that pose "What if" questions the previous two games never did. What if you had to survive even advanced tests without the benefit of both portals? What if destroying a cube let you trigger some beneficial effect in a level rather than resetting the stage? What if trapping a weight between two portals was a method of shelving it while you fussed with buttons and switches?

Revolution doesn't come with a warm welcome, exactly. Some early test chambers are laid out so that key interactables are not visible from all angles. The voice acting is also a little LEGO Movie for my tastes, but this mod is fitted with unique setpieces and fresh mechanics. Fans, breakers, and other remixers mean new chapters come with new perspectives from which to think about the portals. As in most quality puzzles games, the solutions here are often deceptively simple. If you're jumping through a lot of hoops (or portals) to tick off a single step of a level, you're probably doing it wrong. The set design of this jury-rigged Portal 3 gives you dimmer white rooms and the modern Aperture in a degree of dilapidation you've never seen before. Tiles are looser, walls have become trellises for encroaching ivy, and at its most picturesque, Revolution lets you stare through voids in the ceiling into a prepossessing turquoise sky.

Portal Revolution is available on Steam.

___

I've written the edition. Talk about it if you like, and thanks for reading.

This is Springdale, a Cities: Skylines sandbox, as it existed on 2nd March 2036. It's a sprawling hive of commerce and leisure with a population of 135,000 and has all the organs of a functional metropolis: roads, hospitals, shops, universities, and so on. But that population is about to fall precipitously, and all of Springdale's services will grind to an abrupt halt. This city is about to undergo what players call a death wave.

On 6th March, a retail worker, Edward Campbell, posts on social media:

"Who should I call if no one shows up to pick up the dead?"

With a single click, we can trace this complaint back to the northeast corner of a district called Prospect Park. Here, a red icon emblazoned with a skull pulses over a residential block. When someone dies in a Skylines city, a nearby cemetery or crematorium should send out a hearse to pick up the body. The red skull symbol shows that the corpse has sat in situ for days, and it's not the only one. On the other side of Springdale, a cadaver in an apartment goes neglected. In a distant suburb, a dead resident rots for the neighbours to smell. These skulls start spreading like flu in winter, popping up all over the map in areas entirely unconnected to each other.

The basic problem is that while the city's morgues can swallow a lot of bodies at a time, they're not made to dispatch whole convoys of hearses at once. Each crematorium has seven cars in the garage, meaning I don't have enough vehicles to transport corpses on this scale. Soon, every block in the region has a few stinking ex-humans sitting in it. Something invisible is culling the population, and it's getting worse. As black vans fill the streets, the traffic slows to a crawl, which only prolongs the collection of the bodies. I demolish shops and homes and construct more morgues in their place, but the citizens are expiring in surging numbers, and the new funeral homes aren't close to keeping up. Worse, every hearse is another four wheels on the street, clogging the concrete arteries.

As the highways and avenues freeze to a standstill, emergency vehicles fail to reach their destinations, and employees struggle to get to work. The population plummets, and everywhere, from hospitals to shops, wave goodbye to the staff that they'd need to keep their heads above water. It incubates all the societal diseases you'd expect. Without adequate healthcare, more people get sick and die. With fewer firefighters, more residents burn to death. With a dwindling police force, more crime occurs.^[1] As refuse stops getting picked up, we get pandemics. None of the new dead can be removed from the buildings where they died, and a plague of bodies elsewhere only further spreads germs.

The whole supply chain breaks down. This city is meant to import raw materials for industrial workers to process into goods. Those goods should then get sold by shops. But the materials are not delivered to industrial sectors, fewer secondary labourers are arriving at their jobs, goods are not being driven to retail zones, and retail staff are not showing up to stores. The economy enters a debilitating recession at the same time as governmental costs are rising to get more hearses on the roads. As business revenues shrivel, so does the amount of tax collected, meaning there's less to spend on the city, creating a spiral of decay. Soon, my residents are living in the equivalent of a failed state: A sprawl of endless, impoverished apartment blocks filling with dead bodies and no one coming to help.

Illusions in Media

There are almost no wholly accurate simulations in video games. We're accustomed to programs like "Flight Simulator", "Farming Simulator", or "Cult Simulator", and yet, all these pieces of software employ skeuomorphism in the sensory and mechanical modelling of their subject matter. There is a discrepancy between the verbiage and aesthetic experience of the simulator game and the mechanisms and aesthetic experiences of the real tasks they represent. Additionally, the underlying mathematical and logical systems behind these pieces of software do not mirror reality. Games, like films, are powerful illusions, illusions more convincing than teleporting your card into the middle of an apple or having the Statue of Liberty disappear. Games create the impression of whole worlds, characters, and systems through only the sliver of them they depict.

That hallucination is possible because we infer conclusions from limited data. When you hear the sound of the rubbish truck outside your house, you don't go to investigate and learn what a rubbish truck is and the sound it makes all over again. You access your existing memory, and you fill in the blank of the rubbish truck based on the sounds you remember. If you see someone checking their watch and then running quickly down the street, you don't have to speculate much about their motivation for moving so fast. You fill in the blank from previous experience: they're late for something.

We need this inductive reasoning to operate in our day-to-day life. Otherwise, we'd be researching everything from scratch each time we encountered it. Media exploits the assumptions we make based on context clues. Film creators only compose what sits inside the frame. However, the frame's contents and the audio that cohabits with them encourage us to imagine whole universes outside the frame that the creators have not constructed in detail.

If we hear a scream from behind an on-screen door, we imagine a person back there, terrified. For a more detailed example, consider a film scene in which one character shoots another. An actor can use a prop gun to fire blanks towards another actor, and an effects team can then detonate squibs on the target to create the impression of bullet impacts before the target actor falls and remains perfectly still. The impression given is of a gun that can fire live ammunition, a round that soared through the air, and then reactions of force and lead poisoning in the victim's body, which caused death.

Of course, none of those objects or phenomena are real, but we made assumptions about systems and technologies based on observations. The film creators don't need to add any of the above "real" elements to the scene. What matters is the audience's perception. If a technically realistic inclusion in the art does not change that perception, it's superfluous to requirements. Part of the practice of TV, films, radio, and video games is knowing what you do and do not need to show your audience to get the impressions you intend.

Illusions in Games

Video games are a systemic medium, so we cannot just discuss what sights and sounds are perceptible at any one time. Not that video games are just films with mechanics added, but given that most games have us interact with systems, we should pay attention to what games do and don't leave in the systemic frame. What events or mechanisms within our vision suggest which events and mechanisms outside of our view?

If guests come sauntering through our door in PlateUp!, we will assume they travelled from a home, workplace, or place of leisure to get to our restaurant. We imagine they have lives outside of our business that have earned them the capacity to visit our restaurant and that they will take memories of their meal out into the world with them. This is true within the narrative of the game, but in-engine, the guests are spawned just outside the business and will be deleted shortly after leaving.

Or we can look at what a barrel roll in Microsoft Flight Simulator constitutes. The physics for the manoeuvre come across as shockingly real. We can feel a true-to-life sense of momentum, drag, and gravity on the plane as we turn it through 360 degrees of movement. But however realistic the physics of a game feel, they are never immaculate recreations of real-world physics. A complete simulation would require modelling every quantum particle that makes up the world, as well as all the interactions between those particles. It is not only outside of the scope of real-time processing, it's pointless, and is an excellent example of how more realistic systems do not necessarily enrich the user's experience.

The Illusion Dissapates

Of course, no creator is perfect, and time and resources are never unlimited, so the illusion that media presents us sometimes shatters. In the cases when it does, those hidden elements that create the false reality become apparent to the audience. Sometimes, it's those elements coming to the surface that constitute the fourth wall break. Maybe the viewer of our film can see a camera operator in the corner of a mirror. Perhaps the gun is obviously a cheap prop. The reader of a novel might work out that its timeline is broken so that a character would have to be in two places simultaneously. Here, the strings by which the writer is puppetting their characters become visible.

Just as we must analyse the systemic nature of games when looking at the illusions they create, we must keep the same aspect of them in mind when picking apart how their simulations disintegrate. Because illusions are created both through gameplay systems and technological ones, the shattering of illusions can occur through the failure of either. Technologically, maybe our character falls through the ground, or we see polygons z-fighting. But systemically, maybe someone who is meant to be weak acts as a bullet shield, or an entire city spontaneously drops dead.

The Mechanics of the Death Wave

So, what happened to Springdale? We know the city's flaw can't be too few crematoriums or cemeteries. Our increase in neglected bodies happened very suddenly, with no complaints of a lack of deathcare beforehand. Sure enough, if we check the city's analytics, we can see a spike in deaths. Now, there are a lot of things that can cut a Skyliner's life short: Poor sanitation, noxious pollution, an unsafe water supply, meagre medical facilities, and fires are all killers in waiting. But none of the communication from my citizens nor metrics in the UI report those problems with the city before the death wave.

This is very weird because if no plague or fire spontaneously gripped the city, that means tens of thousands of perfectly healthy citizens dropped dead out of nowhere. It gets stranger. If we look at the statistics behind Springdale, we can see this has happened before, multiple times.

The birth rate tises relatively steadily, then suddenly, there is an equivalent sheer drop-off of citizens, and around the same time an influx of citizens in proportional numbers. The menace of it is that every time this reaper, whatever it is, returns, it takes more people than the last time. As the jolts in deaths grow higher on every occasion, so do the spikes in population increase, until now, when deaths finally outweigh births and immigration. That relationship between the population booms and busts is the clue as to what causes the death wave.

Have you worked it out yet? Because I didn't until I started reading the posts of crafty hackers who'd gotten access to the numbers underlying the simulation. I have to give shoutouts to Spec. Tater's thread, The Short Life and Random Death of Cims on the Paradox Forums and to Blake Walsh's guide, Preventing "Not enough workers" and minimising Death Waves, which, more than anything else, formed the basis for my understanding of death waves. The essential piece of information you need is that in the original Skylines, when citizens would immigrate into a residential area, they'd all start at the same age. People generally move into a metropolis that will satisfy their needs. Good public amenities, a place to live, and job opportunities can combine to make your society oh-so enticing for an out-of-towner. Because they'd immigrate at the same age, they'd die at roughly the same age.

That explains the deaths, but not the waves, and why the waves amplify each time. We can, however, explore the causes behind those patterns by looking at how typical player behaviour influences NPC behaviour. Around the dawn of a new city, we're likely to expand it hastily. Building a quiet suburb into a bustling mid-sized town is manageable and unlocks some of those urban essentials like buses, taxis, and plazas. That early growth entails a sudden influx of new residents. Because all these people enter the town simultaneously, they'll die around the same time, so just through the act of expansion, the player is arming a ticking time bomb.

When that bomb goes off, and the population plummets, residential demand rises as homes empty out, and taxes on homes go unpaid without owners in those properties. We may also notice that our population, and likely our economy, are on the decline. So, how can we balloon the citizenry, and how do we usually respond to residential demand? We build more flats and houses. The shelter with the best ratio of nests to price is high-density residential housing, but such housing is more likely to attract young people and is not where citizens generally choose to start families. So, while building skyscrapers for people to live in might bounce your city back to health after a death wave, it doesn't create the conditions in which people might raise the children who would replace them after they die.

Keep in mind that at this point, we don't necessarily know that the reason there's all this residential demand is because of a rush of deaths. We might just be responding to the direct incentives of falling income and population and a rising call to fill housing. But if we're relying on immigrants to fill those empty domiciles and then building whole blocks of shiny new apartments alongside them, we're going to get a bigger population jump than the previous time we expanded our city. So, when the death wave for this generation of immigrants hits down the line, it'll be even more devastating than the last.

If we keep using this same technique of building new housing, especially cheap, low-footprint housing, every time we're low on humans and high on demand, we're going to keep amplifying the death waves. Eventually, a point will come when we can't move new citizens in fast enough to replace the old ones dying off, and the house of cards will topple.

Death Waves as Simulatory Failure

Death waves were a common blight on Skylines games, and part of what makes them interesting is that the player creates and perpetuates these mass extinction events, probably without realising. Why the developers thought citizens should all arrive in their new homes at the same age, we don't know for certain. I'd hazard a guess that the designers biased the systems towards the young so that players would get the most out of all their urbanites. If every alternate citizen out of our intake pipe were a senior, we'd spend more resources taking care of them than we'd get back from their labour. If everyone that enters our apartments comes in as the equivalent of a bright-eyed twenty-year-old, things will go much better for us.

Further, flattening the ages of the immigrants prevents erratic patterns in supply and demand that could make cities unmanageable. If details like whether immigrants will need education, whether they'll add to the city's GDP, or how long they'll be a net drain on resources are pseudo-random, it becomes harder to plan for the future. Ironically, what may be a plan to keep citizens' activity more controllable can make it impossible to work with.

What happened to Springdale was an example of the simulatory failure I talked about in section two. The systems intended to generate an illusion failed. Interrogation into that failure further makes the systems visible, stopping us from suspending our disbelief. We are incentivised towards that interrogation because Cities: Skylines is a game about systems engineering. It is a rough simulation of a city: trains carry passengers to destinations, farms produce food, loans need repayment. Almost everything in the game works, fundamentally, as it does in the real world, and so the game is an exercise of identifying the kind of problems we'd see in the real world (e.g. A lack of demand for products, a district with too little recreational space), and responding with the solutions we'd see in the real world (e.g. Exporting surplus goods, zoning more parks and entertainment districts).

If we could pop the game's hood and see the data that runs it, we'd have a very different view of our city. We'd be able to review the dice rolls and hard maths that underlie what looks, from the air, to be an organic and human series of choices and relations. We'd perceive our city less as a world of cafes and offices, and more as a structure of variables and algorithms. We would also notice all the missing components we'd expect to see in a real city, causing the diegesis to fall away.

The lack of a window into the base logic that drives the systems is, more often than not, no ball and chain on our planning. The underlying logical operations performed by the game's code translate into phenomena we can understand because they correspond to real-world states and events. Those states and events are relayed to us by the UI. Heatmaps highlight where parks are lacking, icons above retailers show where product is backing up, fires appear on the facades of buildings, and so on.

The death wave problem occurred because the game performed corner-cutting logic, resulting in a problem that we couldn't solve through intuition. We couldn't solve it because it didn't emerge from real-world logic and because the UI did not actively express what was going on. Therefore, we had to analyse the problem not as one of a city's population bottoming out but as a software hitch. This is why much of the community research into death waves had to be conducted by spying on the data within the game rather than playing the game as it was shipped. Modders, and eventually the official Skylines team, patched the death waves by making the age at which immigrants arrive in population centres pseudo-random, meaning new arrivals won't later all die at once. The fix was to keep age data as obfuscated as ever but bring the simulation in line with real-world expectations.

This is not the only scenario in which the game does not clearly externalise the information a player needs, but it is the most catastrophic example of it, as well as a highly common one. The logic of immigration and ageing in Cities: Skylines were the mirror that film director missed, the clashing chronology that took the reader out of the moment. Of course, the game's interactive nature makes the simulatory problem manifest very differently than it would in a movie or book. The believability of the world is broken, but the greater casualty is the sense of fairness and control that the game promises.

Lessons Learned

The specific simulatory failure we see in Cities: Skylines teaches us a few different lessons about how this phenomenon often occurs in games specifically and how its knife can be twisted. Firstly, it's useful to note that there would be no issue if all games simulated the real world perfectly, but besides being technologically and developmentally unfeasible, it would often be undesirable from a design standpoint for them to do this. Games simplify how the world works (e.g. A character can put on clothing in a fraction of a second, players can "fast travel" to teleport across the world) to more effectively achieve their aesthetic goals.

That usually means making the game funner and systems easier to understand than the real-world areas of activity they represent. However, by doing so, they violate the concept of simulation. That is permissible if the player is aware of the non-realistic element of the game or if the consequences for not being aware of that element are not significantly negative. However, if the player's success rests on treating the game as a simulation, and they're not aware that the designer may not be running a simulation, that's where trouble starts to arise. To streamline communication and sustain the fiction, the designers only surface the information they believe would be practical for the player to know and which would be emotionally appropriate for the specific game. The developers of Cities: Skylines believed player age to fall outside of that category, so we were left in the dark as to when a death wave was coming or why it was happening.

Secondly, the reason that a death wave is so devastating is because the ageing system is closely connected to a series of other gearboxes that are pivotal in the success or failure of a player. Also, because the ageing system pushes on these other structures with robust force. This will not be the case with every system that undergoes simulatory failure. If a character's face disappears in Assassin's Creed: Unity or their weapons clip into their model in Skyrim, that's not inconsequential from an experiential standpoint. However, it's not like the wider systems of these games are reliant on objects being kept from intersecting or the rendering of faces. Whereas, in Cities: Skylines, everything from the sewage lines to healthcare are leaning on zoning, immigration, and ageing. Therefore, when the player is unable to act in an informed and constructive manner with respect to one pivotal system, it creates a domino effect that fells all of them.

Conclusion

In review, all fiction is fundamentally reliant on simulation. Creators use sensory phenomena that we can perceive to lure us into assumptions about the areas of the world that we can't. Should this sensory level fail to convince us, then we will no longer be able to suspend our disbelief. In video games, this simulation has components of fairness and empowerment and exists on an interactive level. If the systems we interact with do not behave in a logically consistent manner, the metaphorical curtain falls.

Systems sliding out of alignment with our expectations can have dire effects because we rely on seeing real-world elements appear in games as cues for how we should act. The wrong cues can lead us to make catastrophically poor decisions in play without even realising it. In Cities: Skylines, the death wave was triggered by misinformed decisions. We can see that the failure is possible because this is a simulation, because designers hide play-critical information to maintain the simulation, and because the systems these failures occur in are closely related to other key systems in the game. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. In the real world, police are not to crime as firefighters are to fires, but this is the way it works in Cities: Skylines.

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Potion Craft, and mild spoilers for COLDLINE, Runescape, and Terraria.

What Are Information Spaces?

Back when I wrote about COLDINE, I said something is a space if you can exist at a range of positions within it but only move to the points adjacent to your position. What it means for two points to be adjacent is that you can pass directly from one to another without travelling through any intermediary points. When talking about spaces under that definition, I said that phone menus are spaces, but we can also apply this logic to a lot of datasets and diagrams like the colour wheel or the periodic table. In these fields, the regular spatial labels of up/down/left/right or north/south/west/east are accompanied or replaced by new attributes. Moving right along the rows on the periodic table means a higher atomic number, and scanning leftwards means a lower one. On the colour wheel, "redder" and "bluer" become directions. This is how we ended up referring to sRGB and ProPhoto RGB as "colour spaces".

By arranging concepts or entities according to attributes, these information spaces show how those concepts or entities relate to each other. We can map that yellow is a hotter colour than green or that lithium is lighter than beryllium (assuming we're talking about non-isotopes). Information spaces also provide a guide for how we might modify some object or concept to move across the diagram. They indicate that if we add red to our purple, we get pink, or if we add two protons to our indium, we make antimony. Because distances between points are supplanted by other differences (e.g. Atomic numbers or redness), movement across the space is performed by transformations other than conventional travel, such as adding or subtracting particles or mixing in certain pigments.

Potion Craft in Abstract

niceplay's 2022 game, Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator, is about brewing elixirs, draughts, things of this nature. In each phase, a customer requests a potion, and you must mix a product to match. In many games where alchemy is possible, we pour some specific resources in and get some item out. In Runescape, we can craft a Woodcutting Potion with some Clean Avantoe and Timber Fungus. In Terraria, we can rustle up an Invisibility Potion by combining Bottled Water, Blinkroot, and Moonglow.

niceplay supports a wider range of possible routes to potions through a system where it's not fundamentally the ingredients that determine what tonic you'll produce. Instead, it's the essences those ingredients lend the drink; fans of The Witcher will have seen the same idea at work in CD Projekt Red's RPG. In Potion Craft, two variables underlie the mixing system. We're going to call those variables waterness and airness. For each potion, there is a target waterness and airness that the concoction in our cauldron must satisfy.

If my potion's waterness is somewhere between 23 and 30 and its airness is somewhere between -10 and -17, it could add a "healing" property. Or if its waterness is around -40 and its airness is around 35, it will become explosive. I haven't pulled these figures from the real code for the game; they're hypotheticals to demonstrate general principles. I'm calling these quantities waterness and airness because if your potion has a positive air value, it can exhibit traits associated with that element, such as levitation or swiftness. If it's at a positive water value, you get water effects like freeze. A negative air number gives your product an earth attribute like growth, and a negative water number aligns it with the fire element; you can make a potion of light, for example.

There are also failure values that our two variables can hit. In that event, the potion is spoiled, our ingredients are wasted, and the airness and waterness are reset to 0. Within this system, the importance of ingredients is that they allow you to increase or decrease the waterness and airness by certain amounts. Again, I've simplified a little to establish some base knowledge, but we're getting the flavour of the gameplay. Like most systems represented in a highly abstracted manner, the number-adjusting game I've just described isn't very sexy. It's not giving the player much to look at and doesn't conceptualise data in a wrapper that most users can compare to everyday experiences.

Potion Craft in Space

Due to the gap between how the game works and how players are used to processing visual information, they are liable to experience mental strain trying to decode the raw data. If the magic vision modifier is at air 15 and water 20, and the sleep effect is at air -15 and water 30, and our potion is currently at air 5 and water 22, which of these two traits is our potion closer to? It takes some working out. Most designers want audiences to push themselves at least a little but also to be cognisant of what's happening in the game and have some concept of how they could alter the game state to their advantage. niceplay achieves that by representing the information spatially, like the drafters of the colour wheel and periodic table.

On the mixing table for Potion Craft, we stare down at a map. The X-axis on that map represents the waterness of our potion, and the Y-axis represents the airness. A bottle on that map stands in for the air and water values of our potions, and outlines of flasks mark the target range of coordinates to add new traits. So, if our liquid currently has -7 waterness and -19 airness, it will appear at the coordinates -7, -19. If a potion trait requires us to get our mix to 0 waterness and 28 airness, the marker for that trait will appear at coordinates 0, 28. When we add ingredients to the pot, a line extends from our potion bottle, showing the range of coordinates it will move through when we stir our cauldron.

By rendering the data in the same medium that the player experiences the real world (spatially), the developer makes the data readable to the player. If the user understands the game board and their tools, they can then make informed choices about how to affect that board. Creating a spatial representation of the data also implicitly leads to a graphical experience for the player, and that has aesthetic implications. Potion Craft uses the visual metaphor of an old seafaring map in order to respect its themes of spatial representation, anachronism, and discovery. As in our earlier examples, in Potion Craft, we can understand the act of changing some value to be synonymous with moving around a space. The game's interface constitutes an alchemist's periodic table.

Misconceptions

Recognise that information spaces exist whether or not we present their information spatially. Even if Potion Craft didn't spread its numbers out on a map, they would meet our definition of a space. On the flip side, having visual elements represent data across a space does not necessarily mean the graphics stand in for an information space. It's having a set of adjacent information that we can move through rather than just having some information visually encoded or even arranged by a property that makes something a space.

In the management play of Weappy's This is the Police, we see the officers under our command listed across the bottom of the screen in order from highest to lowest professionalism score. Here, we might say there is spatial representation as the ranks of the officers determine their positions in the space. Still, we know the officer cards do not constitute a space in themselves, as there's nothing and no one that could traverse them. What would it mean to "move" from Officer Calhoun to Officer Rocha? Or, in Mortal Kombat 11's Krypt, we can journey around a mausoleum with chests we can open. However, it's not like we can only crack chests adjacent to one we occupy or have occupied, nor does the relative layout of these lootboxes tell us anything about their nature. Therefore, the chests do not comprise a space even if we find them contained in one.

Information Spaces in More Games

It is the norm for games to represent at least some otherwise abstract information spatially; it's not just Potion Craft's idea. We can argue that any game staged across a physical space takes abstract coordinates and presents them spatially. But more than that, any time you have data plotted on a spectrum or graph, you have an information space and a spatial realisation of data. Obviously, health bars or Zoo Tycoon's revenue graph would qualify, but a space doesn't have to be a line or square. So, whenever a game contains a meter, that's a space-based visualisation of figures, even if it's in the form of a radial meter like the stamina gauge in Zelda: Breath of the Wild or the speedometer in Winning Run. It would also apply for one of the radar charts that represent stats in Ragnarok Online or Brain Age.

Under our opening definition, an information space does not have to be numerically-based either. I started this article looking at a phone menu, but also think about tournament ladders or the unlock trees in titles like Monster Hunter: World or Dead by Daylight. Those spaces don't represent one or two numbers in a system. Nonetheless, they have discrete points we can move between, some adjacent and some non-adjacent. And as when I introduced Potion Craft, we can speculate about the alternative. Imagine if Dead by Daylight gave you a list of every perk and, for each one, the abilities you needed to already possess to unlock it: an unthinkable hell. Once again, the power of representing information spatially is that it clarifies the relationship between entities in the information space.

When games present information spatially, it becomes the job of the developer to translate the abstracted data in the information space into the physical representation that is the most legible to the reader: A radar graph to show relative equalities or inequalities between values, an unlock tree to represent progression contingent on reaching previous points in the information space, and so on. The gifted designer can find hugely successful representative schemas that most other people wouldn't consider, like niceplay's cartography expressing attributes of potions.

For the player, the challenge in these systems is in traversing the information space. As in games that use physical spaces, there are goal locations, limitations to the abilities we use to pass through the space, and regions that are punitive to land in. In Potion Craft, points of failure are represented by deadly shoals, while potion effects are desirable land. We might view the bottom of Breath of the Wild's stamina gauge as being like a platformer's spike pit or the far end of Ragnarok Online's strength meter as having similarities with a brick wall.

Conclusion

With that, we come to the end of this brief glance at information spaces and spatial representation of information in games. We reiterated that a space is where you can exist at a range of positions but only move to adjacent points and not non-adjacent ones. We looked at how rendering information spatially, rather than in an abstract style, reduces cognitive load on the player and provides a basis for graphics. We also talked about the spatial representation of information in a variety of forms, from meters to graphs to trees, and how they can integrate with the act of play. Thanks for reading.