Black Mesa’s sprawl of labs and industrial plants now feel, more than ever, like living working spaces, and their lonely silos and subterranean chambers now achieve an awesome scale more befitting their air of mystery.
How has this misty-eyed hyperbole been achieved? Certainly the gloss of a newer engine, with its higher polycounts and crisper textures, is of no small benefit - but Crowbar Collective’s changes go far beyond this surface: their levels are judiciously restructured to expand upon the premise of the originals, adding complexity and credible detail. At the risk of making exactly the sort of claim which normally prompts me to close browser tabs: it feels like they’ve given me back a bit of my childhood. The Crowbar Collective, Black Mesa’s ragtag of part-time developers, working on this project for over ten years, haven’t simply rebuilt the game anew in a fancier engine - they’ve done justice to the imaginative response the original game provoked in 15-year-old me. So when I say Black Mesa is every bit as good as the Half-Life I remember playing 17 years ago, you’ll understand that I’m praising something much greater than an act of recreation. 22 years of brain death has sneakily uprezzed my recollection of the original Syndicate, for example, transforming it into a glorious cyberpunk cityscape that its crude, mud-paletted pixels have never really deserved. This is doubly true of moments from a distant childhood, a time when experience was already enlarged so dramatically by the imagination, when the emotional significance of toys, or books, or games far exceeded their actual sophistication - and it is these responses which then endure in memory, rewriting the reality. If the past is another country, then it’s one under constant mnemonic invasion from the present. An incomplete release of the project was made available on Steam for free last year, but the Early Access incarnation is a more polished, ongoing, funded development, with additional chapters planned, multiplayer, workshop integration and modding tools. This week we’re back in Black Mesa - the classy fan remake of Half-Life 1 in a hybrid version of the Source engine which was used for its sequels. Each week Marsh Davies latches onto Early Access like a brain-eating alien parisitoid and slurps up any stories he can find.
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