Half Life is a personally significant series for a lot of people, but VR is still very much a luxury product. So, I wanted to review the game, but not give spoilers of any kind. Please enjoy this review of an entirely unrelated game.

Shenmue is a hard game to discuss. The “it hasn’t aged well” and “it was revolutionary for its time” factors are nothing new when it comes to analysis of old games, but Shenmue’s status as the founder of an abandoned genre turns everything into a quagmire. Its ambition was to bring games into the realm of reality, with the gameplay challenges being the same as you might face in your daily life. In any other game about a martial artist avenging the death of their father, you would assume you’re about to beat up six stages of bad guys, but in Shenmue, you call the police by looking up the number in a phone book, picking up the phone, and using a rotary dial. You walk around town and ask people in town if they know anything about the killers, then go back home when it gets late so you can be in bed on time. There’s still combat, but if you want to get good at it, you have to train. Just like dialing a phone or going to bed on time, this isn’t something that just happens as part of the story: you have to decide to visit an empty lot and perform the move hundreds of times before attaining mastery.

If that all sounds incredibly boring, that’s exactly why we’re in this quagmire to begin with. If Shenmue’s goal is to simulate day-to-day life, it’s a success, but the question is whether that’s enough to make the game interesting. In turn, that’s what brings us back to the question of how well things age. The novelty of a realistic world was interesting enough to justify its record-breaking budget back in the nineties, but realistic worlds have now become so commonplace that they’re just uninteresting backdrops. This is why Shenmue’s legacy has become so tarnished: the core of its appeal relies on novelty instead of real player agency. There’s no meaningful decision making in almost any capacity. There are no story choices, and combat encounters are too simple to truly challenge your skills. It’s not that pulling open drawers and reading phone books are a small part of a larger whole, that really is the core of the game.

As horrifying as that sounds, it’s not that Shenmue is entirely without merit, boringness can actually have an appeal of its own. If creating a virtual reality was the goal, doesn’t it make sense to replicate some of the same quiet moments from real life? In doing so, the moments of excitement can stand out, like arriving in a new place or getting taken by surprise in a chance encounter. You have the time to appreciate all the details and experience the simple joy of standing on a street corner taking in the world around you. I wish I could play a version of the game that recognized how powerful little moments like that could be, and told a story that took advantage of the player’s sense of presence in the virtual space. A story could be told directly through those little details, letting the player grow in their understanding of the world and become a part of it naturally. This concept has been used to great effect in the walking-simulator genre, with titles like What Remains of Edith Finch entirely based around imparting a sense of history to players as they explore. Meanwhile, the combat could be greatly enhanced with enemies scripted to take full advantage of their surroundings, instead of standing stock-still waiting to get hit. F.E.A.R. showed how fun it is to go against enemies that would mess with objects in the same way you do, moving them out of the way and using the room’s geometry to gain the advantage. Changes like these could tie the story presentation and combat together with a theme of being mindful of the things that surround you, whatever that may entail.

As nice as those ideas may sound, it’s not fair. Shenmue came out in 1999, and it was the starting point for generations of narrative games that experimented with those ideas. F.E.A.R. came out an entire console generation later in 2005, and it’s still unique in how well enemies respond to their environment. Suggesting specific changes is futile without an understanding of the developers’ limitations, and there’s a chance that the changes could have unforeseen consequences. The point isn’t that Shenmue could have been good from a singular change, but from a general evaluation if the game was enjoyable outside the context of technical novelty. It’s inevitable that games will look worse over time as graphics technology improves, it’s inevitable that game design methodologies will continue being refined, but interactivity will always be the essential core of the medium. I hope developers don’t lose sight of this as they pioneer new ways to play games, and we can look back fondly on the titles that impressed us without having to say “well, it was good for its time”. I would hate to see the games that broke the technological boundaries of our time end up like Shenmue.