I know it’s been quite a while since I last posted. This summer has been quite busy, and while I’ve found occasional time to squeeze in some gaming, I have had very few opportunities to sit down and bang out a blog entry. That said, I’ve been hard at work on my backlog every chance I get, and I somehow managed to play all the way through Black Mesa. This review is something I wrote a while back and polished up, so be wary that it may be a little rough around the edges.

Black Mesa

Half-Life 1 is a certified classic. Often cited as one of the greatest games of all time, its influence is on par with the likes of Doom and Halo. That being said, it’s absolutely horrendous to play in 2026. On a modern monitor its graphics somehow manage to look simultaneously too pixelated and too high-res. The puzzles are unintuitive (how on earth do I know if I can turn a particular valve or if it’s just there for decoration???), the combat is tedious, movement features like the crouch jump are unwieldy, and the gunplay is nothing short of paleolithic. I’ve spent plenty of time forcing myself to play Half-Life 1 and my conclusion is that the game is simply too archaic for me. I’m tired of getting totally lost in the ugliest levels I’ve ever seen, my only break from the monotony being firing hideous peashooters at the most obnoxious enemies ever made.

That said, Half-Life is a hugely important game, and it sets up the story for Half-Life 2, another massively important work that I have yet to consume. This is where Black Mesa comes in. It reworks almost everything about the original Half-Life, keeping roughly the same plot, tone, and layout. The puzzles are improved, the enemy AI and health are reworked, and the entire Xen section of the game has been redesigned from the ground up to suit modern audiences. The game is a technical masterpiece and in my opinion does an excellent job making Half-Life far more approachable for people like me. It fixes most of my complaints with Half-Life without changing what the game fundamentally is.

Even with all these changes, I still found it difficult to enjoy Black Mesa. The levels are very long and the combat encounters are still fairly uninteresting. Levels that served to advance the plot such as Black Mesa, Surface Tension, or Xen were all fun, but it felt like I could have received the main idea without spending 20 minutes crawling around in vents and tunnels. Levels like On a Rail or the freezer section of Office Complex can’t be described as anything other than a painful slog. Cutting out this content feels like it would be doing the original Half-Life a disservice, but it definitely was not for me.

At the end of the day, I would not say that I had “fun” playing through Black Mesa. It’s an incredible project that does a great job making Half-Life more playable to folks like me. Unfortunately, playing the game is an exercise in understanding how far video games have come. To “fix” this would be to strip away what made the game so important and although I didn’t really enjoy my time spent with it, I’m glad I decided to play this one.

What’s Next?

This game took me about 18 hours to beat, which is a little longer than my original 15-hour estimate. Next up on the list is Half-Life 2, a game I am incredibly hyped to play for this blog.I’ve already managed to log a few hours in this one. While I was a little skeptical, I have really come to appreciate the game’s innovation and gameplay. Zooming down Highway 17 on a dune buggy or attacking Combine soldiers with Antlions is incredibly engaging and improves almost all my complaints about the original game.

Here’s a list of everything on my backlog along with estimates of how long it’ll take me to beat them. You can see the full list here. See ya in a few weeks.

• Half-Life 2: 5/13 hours
• Elden Ring: 19/60 hours (optimistically)
• Doom: The Dark Ages: 15 hours
• Fallout 3: 10/22 hours
• Red Dead Redemption 2: 50 hours
• System Shock: 2/17 hours
• Callisto Protocol: 10 hours
• Armored Core VI: 17.5 Hours
• Control: 2/11 hours
• Remnant 2: 18 hours
• Robocop: Rogue City: 12 hours
• Metal Eden: 8 hours
• Armored Core 3: Portable: 4/12 hours.