Black Mesa

Let me start by saying, I am in no way trying to say this game is anything short of an achievment. I really didn’t like this game, but it’s due to my own personal opinions and my very subjective point-of-view. I feel bad for shitting on something that was made exclusively by talented and passionate people with the kind of determination that can stick with something for over a decade. This is not a AAA company making a paint-by-the-numbers product to be churned out and monetized. This is a product of love for a beloved title from days gone.

Black Mesa originally started as community project to port the original Half-Life to one of the newer versions in 2004. I imagine the team got done playing Half-Life 2, looked at all the modding tools they had, and thought, “Yeah. We can make Half-Life look like Half-Life 2.” By 2012 they had all but the nearly-universally panned Xen levels completed. This was the point where I first played Black Mesa: before it was a commercial product, and was just a mod you could download for free.

I found it immensely more approachable than the original Half-Life. But despite the graphical update, the better controls, and more fluid gunplay, I still didn’t feel like there was anything special going on. At the time, I remember thinking there was marginally more story than the original Doom. Which is something that might incense some people, but just because your game has a cinematic opening, and several interesting set pieces, doesn’t mean you have a story. And while I agree that any amount of opening is more story than what Doom got, once you actually step back and look at the plot of Half-Life, there’s just not that much there. Gordon Freeman goes to work, his bosses have him open a portal to allow alien invaders, the government comes in and tries to contain it by killing everyone, then it’s revealed it was all orchestrated by some mysterious cabal of other people, who are also—presumably—aliens. And I didn’t even get that last part in my first run-through of Black Mesa mod because they didn’t have the final levels in yet.

That’s what stuck with me about that first playthrough of Black Mesa: how utterly inferior the story was to Half-Life 2. I loved the story in Half-Life 2. Valve did a remarkable job at establishing this world that’s under the boot heel of some mysterious alien force. They left so much room for interpretation of what exactly the aliens were doing, and what they wanted the human populace for. As well as opening the door for exploring more of what these secret scientific mega-corporations, Black Mesa and Aperture, were doing and their role in the downfall of humanity. Not to mention how effectively they kept the player on the edge of their seat with absolutely brutal cliffhangers. Which ended up working against them, but we’ll get to that when I talk about Half-Life 2. But then I got to Black Mesa, and it was more like a sci-fi B movie. It felt like a barebones script that was only there to tie-together mediocre set pieces. I will certainly grant the game that the set pieces were anything but mediocre in 1998, but by 2012 I’d played Uncharted 2 where you’re on a train racing through the Himalayas and you destroy a helicopter with a tank turret that is being transported on said train. I’d played God of War 3 where that opens with Kratos ascending Olympus on the back of a titan that is actively fighting Poseidon. The set pieces in Black Mesa felt like they’d been made in MS Paint by a grade-schooler by comparison.

I deleted it from my steam library, thinking I’d give it another shot when it finally got a full release, not realizing that wouldn’t be for another 8 years. Black Mesas journey is actually quite an interesting one. It was one of the original items that received approval to the store page via Steam’s “Greenlight” feature back in 2013. I also found it quite interesting how it was blessed by the Valve team. Where any other publisher would be suing such a successful project, or sending DMCA takedown requests so they could make their own much shittier remake, Valve encouraged Crowbar Collective to turn it into a full commercial so they could utilize the best options available to them.

After what I have to assume was an arduous and exhausting development process, Crowbar Collective finally released the final version of Black Mesa in 2020. I’ve tried to play it probably once a year since then. Each time I would make it about halfway through before I got bored and shut it off. At this in my life, shooters, whether they be first-person or third, fall into two camps: narrative or action-focused. On one side of the spectrum you have Uncharted, which has what I would call middling gunplay and fist-fighting, but is paced around these jaw-dropping setpieces and beautiful climbing sections. On the other side of the spectrum, you have Doom (2016) and Doom: Eternal which has this blissful combat balanced on a knife’s edge at the higher difficulties. Black Mesa falls closer to the Uncharted side of the spectrum, but still conforms to the same gameplay principles of classic 90’s FPS titles that Doom (2016) does. To my modern sensibilities this leads to some cognitive dissonance where I’m never really sure what kind of game I’m playing. I’ll go from being mildly entertained that I just used a giant tesla coil to gib a giant, deadly alien, that an MIT grad has no business confronting, to feeling light excitement at taking down a squad of military soldiers with my experimental energy weapon. But at no point am I marveling at a AAA set piece like Uncharted, or bathing in endorphins after killing a Cyberdemon like in Doom. And every time the flow of the game is broken for even an instant—which happens a lot—I’m thinking, “This is the greatest game of the 90’s…? This is what everyone won’t shut up about?”

And what must have been my fifth or sixth attempt at finishing this game, I finally gritted down and forced myself through, no matter how bored I got, to see the credits. And it was so much worse than I thought it would be. It’s become tradition for me that everytime I fire up an attempt to play Half-Life I hit “New Game” and get up and make a cup of coffee. I hate the opening tram section, and if I sit through it my patience is whittled down to a nub before I’ve even picked up my crowbar. So my Half-Life playthroughs open with the game waiting for me to get off the tram. After which I sprint through to my HEV suit and into the test chamber, completely ignoring all the little odds and ends you can fuck with that I’m sure a lot of people spent entire days of their lives making.

And this playthrough was the first time it really sank just how dated the design of this game had become. You are given no direction on where to go or what to do. You are just plopped inside this little underground office space and left to your own devices. It’s not unheard of that a game will just put a player in an unknown space and encourage them to explore and experiment. I would even go as far as to say those are normally my favorite kinds of games. No hand-holding. No sitting around waiting for someone to explain to me that I should stick the enemies with the pointy-end. But in Black Mesa, you are shown this dull, drab, underground office space that is just big enough to be annoying to navigate. And what are your rewards for taking the time to poke in every room? You get to destroy someone’s lunch in the microwave, get a security guard in trouble by pushing the alert button, and hand someone toilet paper.

This is the limbo Black Mesa is stuck in. The game looks great. They put so much care into environments and textures. There is an astonishing amount of detail, and it’s made even more astonishing when you realize it’s in something that was originally a mod. It fits in perfectly with it’s AA shooter contemporaries, even looks better than a lot of them. But then once it comes time to actually play I’m instantly transported more than 20 years in the past, and suddenly I’m playing something from 2004. Not 1998, mind you—they did update the gameplay enough to at least be on par with Half-Life 2. This temporal whiplash happens over and over and over again. And I found it to be positively exhausting. “Wow…look at how pretty this area is! I don’t even see any repeating textures! This must have taken so much work… man, bigger studios today would have just used AI to make all this…wait…where am I supposed to go?” and then 5 minutes later I’m thinking, “FUCK! Where the hell in this mess of a level am I supposed to go?! What tiny fucking vent did I miss that I’m supposed to crawl into! Wait…am I supposed to stack these fucking barrels to get up there?! This wasn’t even fun when it was when Half-Life 2 did it!! There’s a reason no one has fucking physics puzzles any more!” Rinse and repeat about 100 times, then you have…the Xen levels…, then it’s done. By the end I just kept saying to myself, “It just keeps going…why does it just keep GOING?!”

It started to dawn on me that the Crowbar Collective probably didn’t just redesign the final few chapters of Half-Life. They probably padded the living shit out of them. It seemed like every door I needed open, every path I needed to traverse, every every shaft I needed to climb was accompanied with a set piece. And not always good set pieces. By my reckoning, there’s 2 kinds of set pieces in Black Mesa: boring ones, and annoying ones. The boring ones didn’t really bother me. They were interesting enough they were able to keep my from quitting the game most of the time, but the annoying ones really got under my skin. And the longer the games goes on, you find less and less boring ones, but more and more annoying ones. And Xen was when the game hit PEAK annoying set pieces. I couldn’t kill more than a few enemies before I was blocked by the need to crawl some more fucking vents to find a cable to plug in, or a button to push.

And what really got under my skin about all this was how damn good these levels looked. Crowbar Collective had been killing it visually through out the levels that they were staying faithful in, but once they were let off their leash to just go wild it got even better. So my eyes were saying “modern game, modern design” but the amount of stalling progress and sloppy pacing kept pulling me back to the early 2000s shooter. That cognitive dissonance I mentioned early had reached a fever pitch. It felt like such a shame, because you’d think once they were no longer beholden to levels that were 20 years old they could up the ante and start making something I really enjoyed. But instead it was just more of the same, which I suppose could have been by choice. The Xen levels, for better or worse, do feel like Half-Life levels. It’s fairly remarkable that these levels were made decades later by a completely different team, but still feel so consistent with the rest of the game.

By the end of the game, I felt so off and confused I felt compelled to go back to the first game, to see exactly what were Crowbar Collectives decisions in the 2010s and what were Valve’s decisions in the 90s. And after doing so I’m left wondering: what exactly was Crowbar Collective trying to achieve? The remake is faithful to a fault in some places, but is rebuilt from the ground up in others. If you’re going to redesign it entirely, shouldn’t you add a real goal for the player? The original Half-Life got away with not having a real goal or drive for the player by being so new and fresh and having some of the best pacing in the genre up to that point. Black Mesa smashes that pacing on the ground and spits on it, then proceeds to tread water in terms of game design for its entire runtime. Without a mystery, an emotional stake, or some kind of gameplay progression there’s just force other than my own need to see the game through to get me through the shitty parts of the game.

Half-Life was made to innovate and to impress. But why was Black Mesa made? It accomplishes so much, but to what end?

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