The Valve-approved fan remake wants to right Half-Life’s lone wrong.
Many gamers consider Half-Life 2 to be Valve’s greatest achievement and one of the best games ever made. I, for one, have always preferred the original Half-Life. With no disrespect to Alyx, Dog, or the gravity gun, the mystery of the Black Mesa facility, the slow onion-peeling reveal of one weird layer after another, the mystery of the G-Man and, lest many forget, the two endings(!) that the original delivered always left a more lasting impression for me. But what knocks Half-Life 1 down a peg for a lot of folks – and this is hard to argue against – is a particular part of the campaign: Xen. The alien dimension is placed right near the end of Gordon Freeman’s Excellent Science Adventure, and it was…a let-down, for sure, after the GOAT-quality experience up until that point.
Black Mesa: Xen seeks to right Half-Life’s lone wrong. The community-developed remake, Black Mesa, has been a multi-year effort, and the pre-Xen part of the game has been available on Steam Early Access for four years now. The Crowbar Collective team is finally almost ready to finish the job with Xen, which fleshes out the alien portion of the story with an aim to make it stand up to the rest of Valve’s masterpiece. The beta I played includes three chapters from the brand-new levels. That slice is due for an imminent public release, if you’re curious.
ABOVE: Watch the opening minutes of the new Xen chapters in Black Mesa, the Valve-sanctioned Half-Life 1 remake.
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The new Xen is no literal walk in the (extraterrestrial) park.
The beta consists mostly of exploration gameplay. The long-jump ability built into Gordon’s HEV suit is put to liberal use here, but what’s bound to jump out at you first is the color palette. Purples, blues, and greens abound, in sharp contrast to the grey that dominates a lot of the Black Mesa facility in the front end of the adventure. A couple of the jumping puzzles even managed to stump me for a few minutes, which I appreciated; the new Xen is no literal walk in the (extraterrestrial) park. There is danger, yes, but in the three chapters on offer in the beta, it’s a whole different feel and pacing from the non-Xen chapters.
Admittedly I didn’t have time to replay all of Black Mesa/Half-Life in order to carve the most organic path into Xen possible, but my sense and seared-into-my-brain memory of one of the greatest games of all time tells me that Xen will fit nicely into the overall Half-Life arc. That’s important to note in a project like this, given the stakes. The Crowbar Collective has the burden of both Valve’s blessing on the project and years of fan hype and expectation buildup. Not to mention the fact that they’re all die-hard Half-Life fans themselves and are giving everything they can to making Xen a worthy addition to a classic.
ABOVE: Check out nine minutes of exploration gameplay from the new Xen levels.
See for yourself in the gameplay clips above, and in the meantime we’ll be keeping a close eye on Black Mesa: Xen’s progress.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.
