![]() ![]() Half-Life 3 could’ve taken us to all-new areas of horror for the series, and it’s a shame that it was pushed aside. The first felt like a lost X-Files episode with sprinkles of Stephen King’s The Mist, being a siege horror mostly focused on one location, while the sequel was closer to The Road and War of the Worlds, focusing on an apocalypse with unbeatable odds. Tonally, Half-Life 3 sounded despondent, a change much more akin to that between the original and 2 than 2 and its episodes. The mere idea of a rebellion, under those circumstances, feels even closer to impossible than it had before, and that narrow beam of hope would be closer to a slight blink at best. The American city would have reportedly been more akin to a prison camp, with everyone’s comings and goings documented and surveilled even more harshly than before. Half-Life 2 could’ve further explored Xen, the aftermath of the Black Mesa Incident, the implications of the Nihilinth’s death, their warnings of the G-Man, or the revelation of alien life among ordinary folk - thank god it didn’t. Valve used a time skip to give itself relative narrative freedom for the sequel, rather than being shackled by the story it had already told. One is set against the backdrop of a claustrophobic underground facility besieged by aliens, the other a dystopian Eastern Europe under the thumb of an interdimensional empire. The first and second Half-Life games couldn’t be further apart. That might have disappointed some, but it’s what I love about Half-Life. It ditches the cliffhanger entirely, choosing instead to tell a completely new story with a drastically different tone. Rather than venturing to the Antarctic in search of the Borealis with Alyx Vance following the death of her father, we would’ve awakened after a dream sequence to find ourselves 20 years in the future, with all of our friends dead. Last week, Valve reporter and prolific Half-Life leaker Tyler McVicker shared details on an alleged 2015 build of Half-Life 3 that was scrapped in favour of Alyx, and it’s significantly different from what we expected. ![]()
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