all games end with the destruction of the known universe when the player ‘beats’ it and cuts the power
it’s only natural the game recognize the reality it lives under
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No that’s like the hack premise of every 4th wall breaking indie game and by the third time your eyes roll back into your head and you see your brain twist in the wind.
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well you don’t need to write it on a piece of paper and hand it to the player
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This is also known as “the original Mass Effect 3 ending was good” theory
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i may have a tendency to extrapolate trends based on a small sample size but i suppose the main example i was thinking of was The Beginner’s Guide (in which the narrator specifically talks about Source and its propensity for clean cubic environments), with other abstract first-person games like Kairo and Antichamber floating in the back of my mind. not exactly sure if they used Source but the vibe was similar enough.
i’m kinda grasping at elusive feelings here but something about the citadel aesthetic in particular rings very “contemporary visual design” (or something else that sounds good in a university brochure) to me, with the emphasis on wide perspectives, very lean, tall twisted lines, high contrast light sources, geometric angles. the elements are primarily suggestive rather than having any clear purpose, and so it’s never quite a tangibly real location. i kind of hate how much it does for me lol. combined with Breen’s articulate monologues it seems to send a signal of “that’s right, i’m talking to you, an intellectual” which makes me feel coddled and appreciated despite the fact it isn’t saying anything especially interesting. which is kind of a microcosm of Half-Life 2 as a whole.
it seems to me that so much of the game’s thought and polish has gone not into the mechanics or any specific thing you’re asked to do, but into the small-scale pacing, including the vistas and vignettes which constantly frame the action as you turn each corner. on my latest playthrough it reminded me of @thecatamites’ comments about Ghost of Tsushima, in that it’s almost impossible to take a bad screenshot. everywhere you look is perfect wallpaper material, using light tastefully to guide the eye, prompting you to contemplate something beyond what you’re actually seeing. it’s very impressive but also, in its persistent neither-here-nor-there-ness, a little boring.
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The startling thing about the Citadel is that the whole game the Combine are presented as being radically utilitarian, and then you get to the inner nexus and in its austere vastness it’s basically a work of art, in the “exists for itself without function” sense.
I think all of the golden age Valve games (HL1, 2 and Portal) involve this paradox in their settings. The Black Mesa and Aperture Science complexes are also vast and beautiful beyond any reasonable corporate necessity. Is it that functionalism taken to its logical extreme becomes art, or was the function all along merely a pretext to justify and fund the art?
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Relevant: I started playing a “game”/glorified mod called G-String which is on steam for like 18 bucks. It’s a Sourcemod that’s been developed over 10 years by one person and it is in essence the ultimate HL2 fangame.
A long while back I made an sb thread about HL2 singleplayer mods and the in course of doing so I played a lot of HL2 singleplayer mods. They run the gamut from essentially map packs to killboxes to puzzle and adventure games, all sharing a particular aesthetic and kinesthetic consistency due to using Source and usually reusing lots of HL2’s art assets.
G-String is the apotheosis of these mods. On the one hand it is almost a hilariously slavish remake of HL2’s primary beats. You’re on the run in a dilapidated city from masked cop guys that send little floating sphere bots after you. You get a hammer to smash wood. You have telekinesis which is just the gravity gun reskinned as your hand. You turn valves (lol) and raise water levels and crawl through air vents. You jump between islands of debris in areas flooded with toxic waste. You have a “biosuit”. etc etc etc.
But the game uses all its own art, and so while HL2 (and near all its mods) are preoccupied with that preternaturally clean look, the much more aggressively cyberpunk G-String is an insane riot of detail density and saturation shoved into urban decay. Holograms and neon and full-color intense wallpaper patterns and Renaissance portraits and your HEV suit talks to you in Korean and tons and tons and tons of unique graffiti everywhere. The guns are almost disorienting when they shoot and the machinegun doesn’t suck. Also you can see your feet (attn @boojiboy7).
It is just extremely weird to see a game so mechanically similar to HL2 and yet so radically different-looking while yet still looking uncannily similar because Source. As the work of a single person it’s pretty stupendous. Taken on its own merits it’s not great or anything, but… but… I think I love it.
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Blessed.
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You gonna post any screenshots of this supposedly visually interesting game or
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I’ve been playing G String as well. As the internet rumor has it, it was developed by one Japanese woman who spent 12 years and 30k work hours to get it done, and hell, I can believe that, since the most intriguing part of the game is how it recontextualizes Half-Life 2 as a game about the creator’s own struggles with the woman’s role in the modern world and how bleak the future seems to be. It’s the same classic elements of the puzzle you know well from Valve’s work (exploring a totalitarian metropolis, sewers with physics-based puzzles, helping out the resistance, being chased by a flying vehicle, “the ground is lava” platforming sequences…), but twisted into something deeply personal. Half of the rooms comment on sexualized feminity in bitter ways, half of the enemies are disposable gynoids (some of them sexbots) who couldn’t take it anymore and began an AI uprising (indelible images of broken slender bodies among dead pigs), almost every scribble on the wall is like screaming into the void about how screwed up we all are. A lot of the writing is pretty obvious or flimsy, but the game keeps quiet most of the time and allows you to just take in these spaces which don’t feel just like physical spaces but, I don’t know, records of intense emotional anguish from a woman trying to make sense of the hell she lives in. And the intricate, demanding level design has you constantly paying attention to every single detail (often even rewarding it with an alternate level – only a passion dev could put so much effort into these only to hide them cleverly), there’s a LOT to take in from every play session.
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This sounds awesome. Wow thanks for posting about it you two. Interesting to hear it is developed by a Japanese woman because the game advertises its Korean protagonist pretty front and center. I wonder if that has much of a presence in the story or anything else in the game.
Wow you made it sound a lot more interesting than I did.
I didn’t mention anything in my little write-up about the constant presence of sex without any sexiness (it is called G-String, after all…) I guess because I don’t know what to make of it yet (I only just got to the third chapter out of 15 - this is one long game!). But your thesis is compelling and bears out in my experience so far.
If the creator really is Japanese that would be interesting for two reasons: one, the very marked Koreanness of the protagonist (is this a simple fantasy by a bored/trapped person about inhabiting the Other, or maybe an attempt at empathy for someone hated by the reactionary elements of her culture?); two, the fact that to my mind inarguably the best HL1 and 2 mods were made by a Japanese guy named Koumei Satou.
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Chapter 3 is where I became confident in this reading, I think (and started suspecting the nationality of the protagonist was chosen precisely for the reason you mention)? It’s like a more human and palpably felt take on the story of GLaDOS. Female-voiced AI (misgendered in HC e-mails, curiously enough) leading an uprising of robots that were mostly designed as nannies and sexual partners. Myo’s biosuit making both factions perceive her as an enemy. AI telling her that they’re “both the same” in the finale and begging her not to side with their shared oppressors. Combined with all the repeated visual motifs on the walls, it’s a suggestive and compelling picture.
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https://www.runthinkshootlive.com/posts/text-interview-with-myohyo/
Who are you?
Just another modder who wants to create an interesting experience for players.
That’s very vague. Is there nothing you can tell us that would help relate to you?
I’ll let the work speak. That’s who I am.
What’s with the name?
I get that a lot… Well I want everyone to believe whatever they want to believe regarding the title. Of course it has a meaning to me but it might not be the same to the player. One thing’s for sure: it has nothing to do with clothing.
Sorry but I think that is avoiding responsibility. Yes, all titles can mean different things to different people, but since you gave it the title there must be a meaning that relates to the end product. Can you tell us what it means to you?
Sorry, it’s like Eraserhead for David Lynch, I’m not telling what it means to me. If this will be about responsibility then it’s everyone’s responsibility to make of it whatever they want. It’s how it works- people get out what they put it. I know minds, especially Western minds find comfort in concrete, clean cut explanations but this time that won’t happen. In fact that never happens, we just ascribe meaning to things, and when we all agree on a certain meaning it feels good, we all feel normal then, but it’s just smoke and mirrors- like this title.
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with apologies to the artist this thing is obviously fascinating for it’s context alone even prior to content. scifi filmmaker turned rabid ahab mapmaker.
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wfuck this is incredible
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This seems cool as heck yeah.
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Who is this dickhead interviewer lol
I was streaming this to discord last night and the Lynch references were obvious to the point of homage. In general this game is crammed with references to bleeding edge cyberpunk/body horror/psychodrama books & movies, but somehow it is also just a Half-Life 2 expansion pack. It is really something special
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if anyone is interested in g string, I highly, strongly recommend it.
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