Raising The Bar

The subtle, hands-off storytelling of HALF-LIFE 2 is still hard to beat.

- Andy Kelly

The magic of Half-Life 2 lies in how it tells its story. In most games developed in the early 2000s you’re forced to endure endless exposition about the world and the state it’s in – usually in the form of cutscenes. In Half-Life 2, a few scraps of old newspaper stuck to a notice board achieve the same goal; and in a much more evocative way. In the secret laboratory of eccentric scientist Isaac Kleiner, this entirely missable detail refers to a “seven hour war”, Earth surrendering to the invading Combine, and villain Wallace Breen being declared administrator of Earth.

It’s everything you need to know in one unassuming texture file – but also, importantly, it leaves enough of the finer details out to let your imagination run wild. This is more effective than an elaborate, expensive cinematic showing the Combine invasion of Earth would ever be, and puts you on a level playing field with Gordon Freeman. Having just been yanked out of stasis by the G-Man, he knows as much as you about this bleak, Orwellian nightmare world; that is, ‘not much’, which only adds to the unsettling mystery of how Earth ended up like this.

This kind of environmental storytelling continues throughout