Minerva: Metastasis is the best Half-Life game Valve never made

Half-Life 2 celebrated its twentieth anniversary final week, with Valve releasing a hefty replace to the unique recreation alongside a two-hour documentary that includes interviews and a peek at never-before-seen footage and idea artwork from the sport’s improvement.

As a longtime fan of the collection who considers Half-Life 2 considered one of my most formative experiences taking part in video games, the anniversary has me feeling some sort of approach: a bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone period of PC gaming and the group of aspiring artists, designers, and modders that sprang up round it. Half-Life 2 was the primary recreation I performed that impressed me to know extra not simply concerning the individuals who created it, however about how video games are even made within the first place. With that mentioned, I have to admit my love for the sport has waned considerably within the many years since its launch.

For as a lot as I initially fell in love with the sport for its sense of thriller and intrigue, there’s simply no extra thriller in it left for me. I’ve turned over each rock, scoured each floor, and hungrily accomplished each potential achievement in Half-Life 2 and its episodic follow-ups — some earlier than Steam achievements even existed! Which is why the user-created mod collection Minerva: Metastasis stays not solely my favourite tackle the Half-Life universe, however considered one of my favourite video games full cease. Greater than 17 years since I first performed it, I’m nonetheless completely enthralled by its sense of eerie thriller and alien menace. And with the latest anniversary replace to Half-Life 2, which incorporates each Half-Life 2: Episode One and Two, now’s as excellent a time as any to play it.

Launched between 2005 and 2007 as an episodic collection of mods to Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One, Minerva: Metastasis was developed by Adam Foster, an internet developer and hobbyist designer who gained notoriety among the many Half-Life modding scene for “Someplace Else,” a brief single-player marketing campaign launched in 2002 and set completely in Xen — the hostile alien dimension that serves because the setting for Half-Life’s finale.

After collaborating on a number of different modding initiatives that fell aside resulting from an overabundance of ambition, Foster selected a distinct strategy for his subsequent undertaking, one which made probably the most of preexisting belongings to create an authentic single-player story launched in episodic installments. “The goal isn’t to switch as a lot recreation content material as potential,” Foster mentioned in an interview with CVG in 2006. “As an alternative, it’s to inform my very own, apocryphal story set within the Half-Life 2 universe, and to truly launch one thing for the general public to play.”

Minerva opens along with your character, an unnamed protagonist clad in an HEV swimsuit, unceremoniously dropped on the shore of a mysterious island bunker within the Baltic Sea fortified by the Mix, the multidimensional antagonists of Half-Life 2. The sport doesn’t waste any time explaining what’s taking place; you’re pelted by Mix gunfire from the second you set foot on the seaside. Earlier than you possibly can even get your bearings, you hear the chirp of a dial-up modem as a timestamped message scrolls throughout the top-left nook of your display, commanding you to run up the facet of the seaside and take cowl.

Circling across the reverse finish of the seaside, you obtain one other message out of your mysterious, would-be benefactor. “I’m your Athena, you’re my bastard Perseus, and our Medusa for right this moment is that this island.” If you happen to couldn’t already inform, the message’s sender, recognized alternatively as “Minerva,” is a foul-mouthed megalomaniac with a penchant for mythological metaphors. Not a lot else is understood about them initially, except for the plain incontrovertible fact that they’re the closest factor it’s important to a buddy on an island overrun with posthuman stormtroopers prepared, prepared, and desperate to ventilate you on sight. With no different selection, you cost forward on the behest of this unusual ally with opaque intentions to unearth the secrets and techniques of this compound, why the Mix are right here, and the way the reply to each these questions may hook up with the broader Half-Life universe.

Minerva: Metastasis isn’t like a number of different mods of its period, in that it, nicely, truly prioritizes its writing. Impressed by Bungie’s sci-fi shooter Marathon, in addition to the “Cortana Letters” ARG created to advertise Halo: Fight Advanced, the majority of Minerva’s story is conveyed completely by means of textual content messages despatched by the participant’s unseen companion. The tone and magnificence of Minerva’s writing is closely indebted to the work of the late Scottish sci-fi creator Iain M. Banks, who Foster has praised for a mode of writing that hides enormous quantities of knowledge in barely ambiguous sentences that require keen-eyed readings to completely parse the true weight of their that means.

The character of Minerva, whose nature and motivations are step by step revealed over the course of the sport, is the place Foster’s strengths as a storyteller actually shine. Initially an aloof, taciturn taskmaster who delights in always thrusting you into mortal peril as readily as she chides you for not heeding her exact directions, Minerva step by step drops her guard because the plot unfolds, revealing her to be as a lot a sufferer of circumstances past her management because the protagonist themself. Earlier than you ask, no: She shouldn’t be a man-made intelligence, neither is she fairly what you’d conventionally describe as “human.” She’s… nicely, one thing else. A “secret third factor,” if you’ll. Minerva is a major instance of Foster’s layered strategy to writing that gestures towards solutions with out outright stating them. For me, an important high quality of any enduring artistic work is a level of interpretative ambiguity, and the story of Minerva: Metastasis greater than qualifies in that respect.

Minerva’s stage design is but another excuse why it stands head and shoulders above different mods of its time— and even arguably Half-Life 2 itself. The place Half-Life 2’s ranges have been designed to be gameplay-friendly environments first and architecturally believable areas second, if in any respect, Foster’s strategy to designing Minerva’s ranges was virtually the precise reverse: creating plausible environments with accurately proportioned buildings and areas first earlier than implementing gameplay later.

As an alternative of counting on horizontally sprawling, immense maps that stress the Supply engine’s space capabilities to its max, Minerva’s environments are small however extremely dense, guiding the participant by means of a number of pathways that incentivize them to circle again and discover beforehand unexplored routes, making the utmost use of every stage’s potential earlier than continuing downward into the labyrinthine depths of the island’s inside. Mixed with rigorously choreographed enemy placements and intuitive environmental puzzles, Minerva delivers a moment-to-moment expertise that’s as propulsively difficult as it’s narratively participating.

As if that weren’t sufficient, Foster went as far as to create tons of varied ephemera exterior the sport that provide extra depth to his “apocryphal” tackle Half-Life. The mod’s web site accommodates extra messages written by Minerva herself, in addition to different paperwork and emails, that not solely provide extra particulars concerning the character, however enmesh her significance extra deeply into the occasions previous to Half-Life and Half-Life 2.

Whereas not vital to understand the plot of the sport, I nonetheless extremely advocate studying by means of the positioning when you, like me, respect deftly written world-building by means of epistolary fiction. “Expertise and violence are a woman’s greatest associates; energy is everlasting delight” is a line that’s lived rent-free behind my thoughts for nearly twenty years now.

Foster had initially deliberate on two different chapters of the story, with the second installment, Minerva: Out of Time, set in a snow-capped coastal city with a semi-open-world design impressed by 2007’s STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Nonetheless, these plans promptly went out the window when Foster introduced he’d been employed by Valve shortly after Minerva: Metastasis’ launch, initially to work on the corporate’s then in-development Half-Life 2: Episode Three earlier than transferring on to work on Left 4 Lifeless and Portal 2 following that recreation’s indefinite postponement.

There’s nonetheless part of me, to at the present time, that will fortunately take both a brand new, Valve-sanctioned Minerva or Minvera-inspired recreation over Half-Life 3 at this level. Given the frankly infinitesimal probability of both state of affairs bearing out, I’m simply completely satisfied to have the ability to replay the sport in any case these years and be left to think about what different unusual and dangerous adventures Perseus and Minerva stand up to after the credit roll. Within the absence of solutions, one should study to be content material sufficient to like the questions themselves.

MINERVA: Metastasis is on the market to play without spending a dime on Steam.