The initial oppression and bullying of the railway station. Using the classical Hero's Journey model (the underpinning structure of every adventure story and fairytale you've ever read), Half-Life 2’s set-pieces, story developments and action-escalation are a carefully structured set of trials and learning experiences – as emotional as they are mechanical - which develop the player/Gordon from isolated outsider to accepted but over-faced rebel, to proto-warrior to leader to borderline messiah. Through Half-Life 2, Valve insightfully, invisibly sculpts the player a mould in which to pour their own unconscious character development. It is the player’s lack of comprehension. In fact, pushed forward through time and space by at least 10 years and a good few miles, Gordon’s initial bamboozled shock and awe doesn’t just reflect the player’s lack of comprehension. Unlike the original Half-Life, which casts the player as an established Gordon in a world he knows, the sequel avoids any such player/character disconnection by having the experience and knowledge of one directly mirror that of the other throughout. It’s about more than letting the player fill in the gaps. His dearth of dialogue not a failing of narrative, but rather a deliberately hollowed conduit through which the player threads their own persona into Half-Life 2’s hostile world, Gordon is a container for the player’s experiences, reactions, and internalised responses. Unlike in most action games, you’re not playing the hero character. I very deliberately say “you” rather than “Gordon” there, because that’s the genius stroke that really amplifies City 17’s palpable realness. City 17’s railway station might be defaced by the brutal deco surrealism of Combine technology, but in every other sense it’s a familiar place. There’s just an unsettlingly alien normality. No lengthy ‘In a time of war…’ cinematic, detailing a bombastic tale of humanity’s fall in lurid detail. There’s something obviously different about Half-Life 2 from the opening moments. That’s why it’s still the best, and that’s why I’m still playing it. The fact is that Half-Life 2 still executes its concepts, conceits and mechanics more effectively, deftly, and powerfully than almost any of its imitators have in the 10 years since. It’s no aged benefactor, thanked yearly at the annual commemoration ceremony before being shuffled off back to the care home. You see while Half-Life 2 undeniably laid the foundations for a staggering proportion of the then-future of game design - genre be damned – it is no mere historically lauded precursor. I say this not with nostalgia, or spurred on by a curmudgeonly knee-jerk against the smoky linearity of the modern military shooter (in truth, a dominant genre now only in the minds of those still affronted by its last-gen ubiquity).
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