Valve just gets game design. They fully understand how to get a player to keep pushing through their game - by cutting up chapters into short segments, they take you through different environments in quick succession, slowly building upon your arsenal while introducing new enemies or story tidbits. For the most part, this game is paced perfectly, it is almost always clear where to go (which is a pretty big deal for a game in the late 90’s), the gunplay is so satisfying yet challenging, there’s no real handicap to your weapons, and it makes certain encounters that much more tense. The storytelling is super impressive (especially the ending for me), I found that the story was quite deceptive, which other people don’t really point out, but I am pretty stupid. Some events are kind of ridiculous like the assassins, but for the most part the game does do well at replicating how an event like this would unfold in the real world - I love the whole idea to do with the marines, it kind of shocked me the first time. While there are moments of unrelenting tedium or just straight up boring chapters like “On a Rail” or the infamous “Xen”, the bigger problem for me was the steep difficulty spikes that randomly occured, which are not only frustrating, but fatal to the game’s overall pacing at times - say if you accidentally run out of ammo at a specific point you might have to restart that section from an old save - something which, as I pointed out, is crucial to what makes Valve games so good (and fun). But even with that, Half Life is still a brilliant experience, and a game that I feel everyone needs to play, to gain an understanding of how Valve continues to evolve with each new game they make.