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 sport alongside a two-hour documentary that includes interviews and a peek at never-before-seen footage and idea artwork from the sport’s growth.

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 means: 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 sport 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 need to admit my love for the sport has waned considerably within the a long time 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 good 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 fully in Xen — the hostile alien dimension that serves because the setting for Half-Life’s finale.

After collaborating on a number of different modding tasks that fell aside resulting from an overabundance of ambition, Foster selected a special method for his subsequent mission, one which made probably the most of preexisting property to create an authentic single-player story launched in episodic installments. “The goal isn’t to exchange as a lot sport 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 really launch one thing for the general public to play.”

Minerva opens together 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 occurring; you’re pelted by Mix gunfire from the second you set foot on the seashore. Earlier than you may 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 seashore and take cowl.

Circling across the reverse finish of the seashore, 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 in the present day is that this island.” Should you 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, other than the plain incontrovertible fact that they’re the closest factor you need to a good friend on an island overrun with posthuman stormtroopers prepared, keen, and desirous 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 would possibly hook up with the broader Half-Life universe.

Minerva: Metastasis isn’t like plenty 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 Developed, the majority of Minerva’s story is conveyed fully via textual content messages despatched by the participant’s unseen companion. The tone and elegance of Minerva’s writing is closely indebted to the work of the late Scottish sci-fi writer Iain M. Banks, who Foster has praised for a mode of writing that hides large quantities of knowledge in barely ambiguous sentences that require keen-eyed readings to totally 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 continually 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 just isn’t a man-made intelligence, neither is she fairly what you’ll conventionally describe as “human.” She’s… nicely, one thing else. A “secret third factor,” if you’ll. Minerva is a main instance of Foster’s layered method to writing that gestures towards solutions with out outright stating them. For me, a vital 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 one more reason 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 method to designing Minerva’s ranges was nearly the precise reverse: creating plausible environments with appropriately proportioned constructions 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 via 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 supply 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 supply extra particulars concerning the character, however enmesh her significance extra deeply into the occasions previous to Half-Life and Half-Life 2.

Whereas not crucial to understand the plot of the sport, I nonetheless extremely advocate studying via the positioning in case you, like me, respect deftly written world-building via epistolary fiction. “Know-how and violence are a woman’s finest associates; energy is everlasting delight” is a line that’s lived rent-free at the back of my thoughts for nearly 20 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 Useless and Portal 2 following that sport’s indefinite postponement.

There’s nonetheless part of me, to today, that will fortunately take both a brand new, Valve-sanctioned Minerva or Minvera-inspired sport over Half-Life 3 at this level. Given the frankly infinitesimal probability of both situation bearing out, I’m simply joyful to have the ability to replay the sport in spite of everything these years and be left to think about what different unusual and threatening 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 cost on Steam.