yeah it’s… longer than 15 hours. I’d say closer to 22-23? it really really depends tho, I guess it’s 15 if you know where to go, but part of this game’s charm is how dizzyingly confusing and dense the level design is. I lost a lot of time exploring branching paths, which are fairly numerous and at least one of which even spans separate loading zones, and I also spent a lot of time stuck at impasses, just exploring and trying different things before eventually resorting to watching a video walkthrough. the set design is detailed enough such that I rarely found this tedious – instead, I ended up finding more secrets and interesting bits of architecture and other details that I would have otherwise overlooked.
but it is ridiculously lengthy even on a second playthrough. it’s notable because that’s probably my biggest criticism of half life 2 itself. g string is somehow even longer but feels less spread thin with comparatively less sense of redundancy.
chapter 4 after 6 hours sounds about right. some of the mid to late game chapters move a little more briskly but ymmv.
My main memory of Half-Life 1 was how absurdly too long it was (I believe when I first checked in how much was left in the game I was only maybe 25% of the way through it) so this all feels like it tracks.
and for some reason the black mesa remake felt the xen chapter needed to be as long as the entire game up til then was. as tedious as it is I can’t help but admire how much that part despite being all new does feel like a never ending 90s pc level
Turns out the best thing you can to do to fix videogame sewers is to make them feel like a purposeful exploration of an emotional state where you keep seeing the world go to hell way above your head and are completely powerless to do anything about it
Black Mesa is prettttttyyy gooooood. Feels like a tasteful remake where there are significant changes made to emphasize the aura of the original, which is the only way a remake ever seems interesting to me. There are things to critique, either as improvements or needless complications, but it certainly has a character of its own. In a lot of ways I think of it as like a dark gritty reboot of the original vision (which was pretty dire in its own respect), which sounds kind of whack, but the realism that they are creating to depict the world and its drama brings it all together I think. What Black Mesa does really well I think is creating an impression of Black Mesa Research Facility as a physical space that is used and lived in. Really love that.
I just arrived at Xen and really liked all the previous chapters. The part when you arrive at the Lamda Core and see a crew of scientists and guards huddled in a central control room, and they trigger the turrets to kill you because they’re so jittery, but then greet you as a group… that was awesome.
I hated it when it first came out because it required too many actual shoot man game skills to complete the military segments.
I really enjoyed my recent playthrough of it, partly because I now understand how critical using burst fire is for the SMG, but it’s possible they also tweaked the soldier AI to not be quite so merciless in the intervening years.
I thought the marines in the original half-life were always wildly aggressive and accurate, and the SMG at least felt super inaccurate or weak. But yeah the SMG in Black Mesa works really well with controlled bursts, I think it’s finally a satisfying gun to use.
The SMG in the original half life was just a grenade launcher as far as I’m concerned. The secondary fire was ridiculously more effective than the pea shooter part. You could pop out of cover, right-click once and instantly erase two or three marines
The crossbow has that physics ragdoll pinning. Pulse rifle feels great but has no ammo capacity. SMG probably functions better than HL1s but feels worse.
If you look at the HL2 beta that game was supposed to have a massive arsenal with a fire extinguisher and everything from HL and a whole lot more.
