I try to play games in the mindset of the year they came out in (and given how many old games I play, this tends to be pretty easy). I played this game more or less blind, and within that framework the opening sequences were mindblowing. The tram ride has plenty of cool little worldbuilding details and bits of foreshadowing - both in the sterile recorded announcements and the background events - which you're likely to miss the first time because you're too busy taking it all in, or because you're like me and are testing out the controls, having this theoretical physicist amusingly bounce around like a hyperactive puppy on his way to work. But the point is that the game doesn't force feed anything to you: this all happens in real-time instead of in a cutscene and the world keeps on spinning whether you're paying attention or not. Just a few minutes later, you can discover a ladder in an elevator shaft that leads nowhere in particular - but it's there because it makes sense for there to be a ladder there. Several hours later, you can eavesdrop on enemy conversations to get a little bit more background on the story... or you can just interrupt them mid-conversation and shoot them full of holes before they can react. It's all delightfully immersive.

...until you wander close enough to a falling elevator to trigger the NPC dialogue of the people inside, having them take time out of screaming in terror to cheerily wish you a good morning. Because of how groundbreaking this game's ideas were, and how much intricate scripting is required to make something so immersive, one gets the feeling like Half-Life, more than most games of its era, is held together by duct tape - one only need to search for early builds of the game where NPCs would randomly drop dead for no reason to find evidence of this. It feels like the devs, much like the ill-fated scientists of Black Mesa, were experimenting with something they didn't quite know how to handle yet. And you know what? In the name of progress and innovation and art, I can handle that.

What I can't handle, however, is the fact that when you take its innovations out of the question, Half-Life's gameplay just isn't good. There are small things like enemies not giving any indication when they've been hit (which sends all boss fights into "what do I do and am I even damaging them" territory) and an abundance of 'gotcha' moments, but the biggest flaw is something more fundamental: this game is a mirror image of Mirror's Edge. Where Mirror's Edge had fantastic parkour mechanics but forced the player into functional but clumsy gunfights, Half-Life does the opposite: you have satisfying gunplay and great weapon variety but you're forced into numerous platforming-heavy sections in a game where Freeman's fancy high-tech suit seems to be made of an inside-out banana peel. The iterative level design works in theory, but it's built on top of platforming mechanics that feel so slippery and inconsistent that it feels less like organically-increasing difficulty than bullshit stacked on top of bullshit.

What's that you're saying? I can somewhat read lips so it looks like you're saying "skill issue" but I can't be sure - I can't hear you over the sound of the bugs. At least half a dozen times I randomly got stuck and unable to move, and on two of those occasions it happened right at the start of a chapter which autosaved, which meant that I had to reload from a much older save.

I can't decide if Half-Life is the worst great game I've played or the greatest bad game I've played. It's brilliant and unrefined, it's exhilarating and infuriating, it's a classic and it's a relic - and as a landmark in gaming history it's also an absolute must-play even if you're someone like me who engages with games as entertainment first and art second.