Thread:Follow Doctor Freeman/@comment-32333285-20190523194329/@comment-31377280-20190604014902

Well, Half-Life's more about the atmosphere and mood than plot; the first one is a simple story of a research facility going in out of its depths with dangerous test experiments, opening a space-time breach prompting alien species to invade. HL1 does cover some themes of distrust of rapid scientific advancement. In the sequel, an alien species called the Combine have conquered the earth, drained it of resources, and left cybernetically modifeid/brainwashed humans to continue the regime there. That brings up comparisons to colonialism, which would be a tired schreed were it not for how HL2 takes place in Eastern Europe and how the Combine have parallels to National Socialist and Communist regimes, which is appropriate since second world powers have most prominently practiced colonialism in the 20th century; I've been reading a lot oof history books about that sort of thing recently.

But, again, most of the pull is in the setting and atmosphere; the characters and series of events are nice and all, but the appeal lies mostly in the technical attention to detail andenvironmental storytelling, as opposed to a straight narrative. Portal 2 (and even Team Fortress 2) have better writing as far as characters and dialogue are concerned.