December 26, 2023. The first time when I playthroughed Black Mesa, an outstanding piece with a rich backstory. While much has been written about the development journey, I won't bother you with it. Instead, I'll share a brief reflection on how it felt for an old-timer to play on the brink of 2024.
Given:
- I'm a player in my mid-30s, having been playing since the mid-'90s.
- Played Half-Life 1 in the late '90s, but never got past the first chapter. The game was a bit hard for me to comprehend back then.
- Tried Black Mesa in 2022, refunded it after 1 hour of playing, considering it boring.
- I played Black Mesa: Definitive Edition (2020)
The first impression
I didn't remember how I perceived the game in 2022, but when I launched it now, I both liked the graphics and was discouraged a bit. The art direction was superb; I could see that immediately. But the graphics? I've never been a graphic-win-them-all person, so to me, everything looked just nice, except for the moment when I saw textures a bit closer than a mile away. In my head, the number of polygons around me plus the color palette and animations did NOT match the quality of textures. They were blurry, as if I were playing the original Quake 2, while everything else was better than in Q2. Weird.
However, it didn't spoil the fun and I got used to it quickly. At some point, I remembered that my beloved boomer shooters (modern games that mimic old shooters from the 1990s and early 2000s) often combine varied graphics styles! Hey, that means Black Mesa did it way before this trick became mainstream.
By "mainstream" I mean the renaissance of boomer shooters that began around the Dusk release in 2018, while Black Mesa's release was… Well, they released the full-scale game with the Xen portion came out in 2015, but its graphics were updated in 2020. So, I can't say for sure whether the "combined" graphics were part of the 2015 release or only appeared in 2020. It's entangled, but you get it, right?
Whenever the date was, Black Mesa's visuals still looked gorgeous, especially for fans of boomer shooters. People who are, for medical reasons, forbidden to play games with graphics worse than in Cyberpunk 2077, must bypass this game. And drop reading this text, too.
These were the first 10 minutes of gameplay or so. What happened next, I called...
The Grand Realization of Greatness
This time I didn't feel bored at all. The game started smoothly to me and I was eagerly exploring all nooks as the game appeared to be rewarding for exploration.
The plot and its dynamics felt just right to me; not too (shabby?) slow, nor extremely fast-paced.
The more I played, the deeper I delved into how the world they had built for me. All those little details in the environment suspended my disbelief effectively, so I had no doubt whatsoever that I was at an actual facility where real human beings worked.
Level design, coupled with a sequence of events, made a perfect flow to fall into. Skirmishes, exploration, catching my breath, fights again, new pieces of lore from survivors, rinse, repeat.
At some point, I intentionally stepped out of the flow to analyze what I'd been experiencing so far. I noted some thoughts and moved on. I repeated that exercise many times till the closing titles to be able to make a verdict. It was short: the game was a masterpiece.
I know that Black Mesa is NOT Half-Life per se, but it IS at the same time. Core mechanics and sequence of events, levels and weapons, all the pieces follow the OG role model, even though differ from it in nuances. I've always known that HL was a groundbreaking game, a piece of art that pushed the industry so that it made a huge leap forward. Known, but never understood fully. By playing Black Mesa, I realized everything.
The way the enemies are introduced, the difficulty curve, the gunplay, the sense of progression. Gameplay twists like removing all weapons somewhere in the middle of the game or sudden shifting of counterplay tactics when brand new enemies and/or environments appear.
All the things that are now pillars of a first-person game were cemented in HL, indeed. Again, I knew about it, but never got to that conclusion myself. The revelation was as massive as a shock, if not more so.
The perfect campaign, but
To the moment when things escalated and the tanks on the streets became ordinary, I thought it was gonna be the climax of the story, just with a grain of the Xen world as a final accord. It seemed to me that Black Mesa may become my new number 1 among FPS campaigns. Oh, boy, I was naive.
The campaign was at its prime then yet far from the climax. Yes, the duration that ended up way longer than I expected was a sort of treat, but I started running out of steam; slowly, but firmly. The Xen world astonished me at first, trying to prematurely atone for its sin of tediousness that awaited me.
I beat the game. Finished, done. Felt a kaleidoscope of emotions leading to closure at its summit.
Alas, the length of the campaign was too much for me. That's the sole reason Black Mesa didn't top my list of FPS campaigns, leaving the top dog intact. To me, the best FPS campaign is still Titanfall 2's, but that's the whole other story…