Look, we all want a third installment in Valve’s iconic Half-Life series. But the sad truth is, it’s almost certainly never going to happen. As such, we’re stuck with the first two (as well as the VR game Alyx). But that’s a good thing, because Half-Life 1 and 2 are exemplary first-person shooters. So loved is the series, that fans continue to tweak and mod Half-Life and Half-Life 2 to their own ends.
Take Team Vestige over on ModDB (via PCGamesN), which has taken the legendary sci-fi FPS and turned it into a horror experience. Called “Disrepair,” this mod for Half-Life 2 sees the player slip into the hazard suit of a Combine worker who’s been sent to investigate and photograph the radioactive anomalies that have cropped up around the Black Mesa facility.
What ensues is a short but creepy experience, not too dissimilar to the likes of Slender: The Eight Pages. The player is tasked with photographing several pieces of artifacts around the infected building, while ominous sounds drill into their ears. It also has a slight SCP vibe about it, in that internet-urban-myth kind of way. You can see YouTube user Farawaygaming diving into “Despair” above.
Take that, Ravenholm!
When you think of Half-Life, you probably don’t think of the word “horror.” While the games do have their more unsettling moments (the Ravenholm section in HL2 springs to mind), it’s not a franchise known for scares.
That’s why this Half-Life 2 mod, and others like it, are so interesting. They take something that has a very distinctive aesthetic about it and turn it into something that’s fairly unsettling. With the tunnel vision-style lighting, black and white graphics, and the eerie tones of this darker side of Black Mesa, Team Vestige is just one of many reasons people keep returning to the Half-Life games after all these years.
