Half Life surprised me with how immersive it is for a game that came out in 1998. Sure, there are barely enough polygons to go around, but the simple gameplay, uncluttered UI, and real-time events go a huge way towards making you feel like you’re inhabiting the space of the game. This game has no menus! Wild! Regarding the simple gameplay, here’s an exhaustive list of the things this game lets you do:

  • move
  • jump
  • wack/shoot gun
  • crouch
  • interact with object

I think it’s really cool how inventive the developers were able to be with the bare minimum first-person shooter mechanics. I guess Half Life is a first-person shooter, but it’s equally a platformer and a puzzle game. I guess the puzzles are pretty simple, all things considered, but they require a surprising amount of lateral thinking. There were a couple of times where I (probably poisoned by modern hand-holding) caved and looked up the way to progress through a level, only to find out that I had to jump into a big hole or interact with some part of the environment that I’d just assumed was inert scenery. The developers want you to think outside of the box of what you assume the game mechanics are and just try the thing that would work in real life, and I think that’s cool. This adds to the plot, in a way, because you have to do some pretty hardcore Feats in order to progress without ever being told what to do by other characters or the UI. It’s just like, well I’ve tried everything except jump into the scary pit, so here goes. It’s like first-person environmental storytelling.

On that note, the environmental storytelling is impressive. There isn’t a ton of dialogue and most story events just, happen, to you, which gives you a lot of responsibility as a player to be engaged in the action. Every once in a while you’ll see a security guard get pulled into a crack in the wall and get consumed by un unseen alien, which is really unsettling and well-done. The story beat where the scientists call in the military, only for the military to start opening fire on the scientists, and then half of the baddies you have to kill become the Feds… it was a really effective “oh shit” moment. I honestly wasn’t sure if I was going to like this game because I’m not a huge FPS guy, but I love how narratively driven this game is. It has levels in the classic sort of arcade sense, but they’re seamlessly cut together in such a way that it feels like a single continuous adventure, rather than discrete episodes punctuated by flashy cutscenes that do the heavy-lifting for the plot.

Half Life made me think a lot about game design. I was two years old when this game came out so I can only imagine what this was like to play for the first time. It’s neat to see how developers have always been innovating, because while in a lot of ways games have really advanced, there’s something about the relative simplicity here that is very very fun. It’s like the artisanal vanilla ice cream of video games. As someone who gets really into exploiting any complex system that a game has, it’s nice to play a game where there aren’t any and you just sort of… play the game, with no distractions or loss of momentum. I’m looking forward to eventually playing Half Life 2 to see how the developers expanded on the first game into something that is so highly regarded in the Internet Gamer collective consciousness.

[[ backlog master post ]]