![]() ![]() ![]() While Black Mesa largely keeps within this tradition, there’s now a slight discomfort with how realistically such things are rendered - the agonised, corrupted body of a headcrab zombie is frighteningly grotesque in a way which its lower-poly predecessor couldn’t really manage. Half-Life has always had a slightly lighter tone than those later games, though - a knowing Hammer Horror hamminess that glories in the sci-fi gibber of a “resonance cascade scenario” and mischievously enjoys yanking scientists into vents, only to disgorge them again as a shower of bones and a separate, perfectly intact brain. Here it has been further expanded, physically and audibly: though the layout is broadly the same, new laboratories and offices have sprouted along the route, many offering new conversational vignettes between the scientists therein.Ī lot of this new dialogue is pretty funny, too, with sly nods to its sequels. The opening levels, which see voiceless protagonist, Gordon Freeman, clock in at the Black Mesa research facility, suit up and take part in an ill-fated experiment which allows the hordes of Xen to invade Earth via an interdimensional portal, remain an example of measured scene-setting that few games, let alone shooters with slightly absurd sci-fi premises, would have the gumption to pull off. Black Mesa’s sprawl of labs and industrial plants now feel, more than ever, like living working spaces, and their lonely silos and subterranean chambers now achieve an awesome scale more befitting their air of mystery. How has this misty-eyed hyperbole been achieved? Certainly the gloss of a newer engine, with its higher polycounts and crisper textures, is of no small benefit - but Crowbar Collective’s changes go far beyond this surface: their levels are judiciously restructured to expand upon the premise of the originals, adding complexity and credible detail. At the risk of making exactly the sort of claim which normally prompts me to close browser tabs: it feels like they’ve given me back a bit of my childhood. The Crowbar Collective, Black Mesa’s ragtag of part-time developers, working on this project for over ten years, haven’t simply rebuilt the game anew in a fancier engine - they’ve done justice to the imaginative response the original game provoked in 15-year-old me. ![]() So when I say Black Mesa is every bit as good as the Half-Life I remember playing 17 years ago, you’ll understand that I’m praising something much greater than an act of recreation. ![]() 22 years of brain death has sneakily uprezzed my recollection of the original Syndicate, for example, transforming it into a glorious cyberpunk cityscape that its crude, mud-paletted pixels have never really deserved. This is doubly true of moments from a distant childhood, a time when experience was already enlarged so dramatically by the imagination, when the emotional significance of toys, or books, or games far exceeded their actual sophistication - and it is these responses which then endure in memory, rewriting the reality. If the past is another country, then it’s one under constant mnemonic invasion from the present. An incomplete release of the project was made available on Steam for free last year, but the Early Access incarnation is a more polished, ongoing, funded development, with additional chapters planned, multiplayer, workshop integration and modding tools. This week we’re back in Black Mesa - the classy fan remake of Half-Life 1 in a hybrid version of the Source engine which was used for its sequels. Each week Marsh Davies latches onto Early Access like a brain-eating alien parisitoid and slurps up any stories he can find. ![]()
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