Half-Life 2's Hands-Off Storytelling Is Still Unmatched
Half-Life 2 is set in a dystopian city cruelly governed by an oppressive alien dictatorship. City 17 is 1984's Airstrip One with an uncanny sci-fi twist, and one of the most richly evocative settings in video game history. But while most games love beating you over the head with exposition to impart their mythology, Half-Life 2 stood out—and still does—by taking a much more elegant, hands-off approach to its world-building.
A major event in the Half-Life timeline is the Seven Hour War. This conflict ended with our planet being conquered by an invading extraterrestrial force known as the Combine—and it's in the aftermath of this brutal occupation where we join Gordon Freeman. In other games, the Seven Hour War would be relayed to you through an elaborate cinematic cutscene or a playable prologue mission where you witness Earth's conquest first-hand.
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But perfectly illustrating Valve's restrained approach to storytelling, everything you learn about the Seven Hour War, you learn from an entirely missable cork board in Issac Kleiner's lab. On it is pinned a collection of newspaper clippings from the war, including one that reads, simply and chillingly, EARTH SURRENDERS. It's remarkable how vividly this paints a picture of what happened on Earth during Freeman's long absence.
It tells you everything you need to know in a brilliantly subtle, unobtrusive way. But more importantly—and this is something Half-Life 2 is consistently great at—it also leaves enough unexplained to fire your imagination. The first time I saw these clippings my mind was flooded with images of what this conflict might have been like, which I found infinitely more compelling than just seeing it, or having a character
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