Wow, look! Nothing!

I’ve never really liked Half-Life 2 — maybe I’ll get into that in a later post — so I didn’t expect much from the episodes. They’ve always remained as the bailey to the motte for a lot of fans, I’ve noticed, who I’ve told I didn’t like Half-Life 2. The episodes are where Half-Life 2 really gets good, they’ve told me. Of course, I’ve been told in equal measure that the episodes are where Half-Life 2 gets bad, and that’s the exact kind of fandom splitter that makes my ears perk up. Not liking something and then hearing that the sequel to it is both loved and reviled by the original fans may as well be the recipe to getting me to immediately buy a game. Besides, they’re only a dollar each, and they come with Deathmatch. They come with Lost Coast, too, but, you know, they come with Deathmatch.

And Episode One is kind of boring.

So little actually happens! Episode One, broadly speaking, is a rehash of the citadel section of Half-Life 2, a singular “wait for the elevator” section, and then about two city blocks of walking in a straight line before you do an escort mission. Valve was seriously crunching to get this out in time, and they still ended up missing their projected release date by nearly a full year. I have no idea how or why they thought they were going to be able to publish a new episode every three months. Even with all of the reused assets and an existing storyline to continue off of, expecting your developers and designers to be able to drop two hours of a playable game every ninety days is ridiculous. With such an inherently silly backing concept, it's a bit of a miracle that the two episodes ended up releasing at all.

Actually playing it is a bit of a hassle. I really didn't care for the constant "stop what you're doing to stand around while characters talk at you" interruptions in Half-Life 2, because you could usually at least skip traditional cutscenes. Episode One spends a lot of time in its earliest stages asking you to patiently wait while characters have revelations next to you. Stand around while Alex figures out how to get you across a gap, stand around while Alex hacks a door and admires the scenery, hang around while Alex downloads some data off of the Combine mainframe. The actual combat offers some clever setpieces, at least — letting you go wild with the empowered gravity gun again, some incredibly dark areas littered with zombies, Combine fights on long, open streets where you get supported by rebels on the rooftops — but it takes a long time before those get going, and each of those has an equal and opposite "finagle cars on top of antlion hills" section.

Episode One is written kind of annoyingly. A friend of mine blames Erik Wolpaw for this, and I suppose that makes sense; I think the strongest facet of Half-Life 2 is unarguably its aesthetic, followed closely behind by its writing. I’ve never loved how reliant on lore and supplementary materials Half-Life 2 is for getting any context into any of what’s going on, but I respect it. I think it’s a pretty interesting and bold idea to throw just about everything from the beloved original out in favor of starting from a blank slate with the sequel. Episode One, by contrast, starts about two seconds after the ending of Half-Life 2, and largely plays everything straight from there. In itself, I can't find a problem with the overarching plot. I don’t, however, care for the characters.

There’s something very infantilizing about the way characters talk to Gordon in this, especially Alyx. I don’t know if she thinks Gordon hit his head or something, but the talks to him the way that she talks to Dog. You open a grate cover or do a puzzle about as complicated as fitting wood blocks into shaped holes and she drops everything to cheer you on. “You’re so smart, Gordon. You’re such a smart guy. I love smart guys. Smart guys are the best. You’re such a smart, smart boy.” Enough! I know we’re writing with the intent to appeal to people who unironically called the last game “the thinking man’s FPS”, but this is too much. The whole “zombine” bit is also so obviously written with the intent to become a meme, which is a trend that continues well into Episode Two. Given what Wolpaw has written since, I think blaming him may actually be a fair assessment.

Exit 17 is an incredibly underwhelming end to an already unimpressive episode. It's not hard to imagine the dev team huddled around a table late into the night, desperately trying to figure out how to end the game, and then someone yells "fuck it, make them do the same escort quest five times". Five times. With some minor changes to the route, mind, but five times all the same. A door gets blown open, an exit gets blocked, mines get dropped. I can appreciate them attempting to use every part of the animal, so to speak, but there really just isn't enough to go around. The entire level is one small parking lot and a warehouse roughly the same size as the parking lot. The Combine barely even make an effort to stop you. They put two guys in through the top window and assume that they won't both get immediately gibbed by Gordon Freeman. The whole section is like trying to feed a family of five with a single potato. Sure, you can divide it five ways, but all that's gonna accomplish is keeping everyone hungry. Either you need to get more potatoes, or you need to limit the number of people you're feeding. You can't have it both ways. If your only goal is to make the game last longer, you may as well just put the player in front of a locked door that won't open until fifteen real-world minutes have passed.

It's certainly not bad, and I imagine that it being shorter than Forrest Gump is pulling a lot of weight in making me not dislike it. It's okay. There's ultimately so little here that it's impossible to really love it or hate it, and that might be the strongest condemnation of all.

Thank goodness Valve got all of those vehicle sections out of their system, so I definitely won't have to worry about them in Episode 2!