The Half-Life franchise has experienced an unexpected burst of life in 2020. Within the realm of official works, Half-Life: Alyx, a VR interquel, was announced a few months ago and is due to release on the 23rd of this month. However, Alyx runs into an obvious problem: it’s a VR game. Plenty of people will be priced out of being able to play it, and even then, they’d have to go through the trouble of creating the ideal environment to play it. Yet there is a new Half-Life thing for people without VR to enjoy, called Black Mesa.

Black Mesa is a full modern remake of the very first Half-Life, made by the Crowbar Collective with Valve’s official blessing. The game originally started as a mod in response to Half-Life: Source, which was a version of Half-Life that was officially remade in Valve’s Source engine. It has since gone on to be its own standalone thing, built on newer versions of the Source engine, hitting commercial release in Steam Early Access in 2015.

While the game follows the same plot and general direction as the original Half-Life, there are a lot of things that were tweaked due to being on a newer engine. As expected of a remake, old places get a whole new HD shine that is nice to look at. Level design is tweaked due to differences in engine physics between Half-Life: Source and newer versions of Source, while enemies with smarter AI stomp around. The game also adds in some more narrative stuff to better establish the links between the first two Half-Life games.

The most notable change Black Mesa does is with the final part of Half-Life. Toward the end of the original Half-Life, Gordon Freeman is transported to the alien world of Xen… which is considered by many to be the weakest part of the game. In remaking Xen, the Crowbar Collective flat-out redesigned it. Xen was enough of a unique issue for the team that this portion of the game didn’t hit Early Access until December 2019.

Now, it has all come together out of early access as of March 6th. If you’ve never played Half-Life but want something with more modern sensibilities, or if you just want to hop on the new wave of Half-Life content, Black Mesa is something to check out.

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