Half-Life

Sure, an old-school FPS might seem like a bit of a diversion after those Resident Evil games, but there's a method to my madness (that I'll get to later).

I played this on Steam in a whole bunch of resolutions and FOVs (I was... encouraged to mess with the settings a bit)

I enjoyed this game when I played it for the first almost a decade ago and I enjoyed it just as much a second time around. Though, to be fair, this isn't (exactly) my second time going through all of this. I watched that HLVR thing that wayneradiotv made back when that was blowing up across my part of the internet, and I've watched through the earlier parts of Freeman's Mind maybe a half-dozen times so everything up until Xen is pretty firmly lodged into my memory.

When I last played this in 2012, I had to make do with 1024x768 to get a playable experience

Given how familiar I am, then, it was no surprise to me that I still had a great time playing through all this. Playing it on Hard was maybe a mistake because it mostly just turns enemies into bullet sponges, but given all the survival-horror I've played lately that honestly didn't take much getting used to.

I don't really know what else there is to say about this game, to be honest. It's a classic. It's got a good progression of enemy-types, some cool setpieces, a few puzzles, and some really great atmosphere.

 I died during the final boss fight so this final G-Man sequence wasn't quite the dilemma he made it out to be

Despite loving this (and a lot of other Valve games) I've never played more than an hour or two of any of the sequels, so part of the reason I'm playing it now is to give me an excuse to revisit those as well. Why now, though, in the middle of my Resident Evil runthrough, you might ask?

Well, what started as "I'll play all the Resident Evils" turned into "I'll play all the Resident Evils and Silent Hills to see how they compared through the years" but has now morphed into "I'll play just about every major horror (and horror-adjacent) thing I can from the past twenty-odd years, in chronological order" and Half-Life was next on my list after RE2.

It's not exactly a "scary" game, per se, but it does have a lot of horror aesthetics and a number of jumpscares (largely involving headcrabs) that helped keep me in the same sort of mindset as I had during RE, to some extent at least.

Up next on my horror to-do list is Silent Hill, which is a far more traditional spooky experience, but given how some of the other games I've got planned seem to get more action-y as they go on, having this seminal shooter as a fresh point of comparison should prove interesting.