Half-Life's raytracing mod is great because it makes the game look old in a new way

rockpapershotgun.com:

A new Half-Life mod adds raytracing to Valve's venerable first-person shooter, a shiny slap of 2023 lighting technology in a 1998 game. I normally think such anachronistic upgrades look awful but this one works for me. Rather than just slam fancy modern tech into an old game, the mod wants to change the whole look. And it succeeds in a surprising way: by making the rest of Half-Life look older.

The Half-Life: Ray Traced mod builds upon Xash3D FWGS, an open-source replacement engine, by adding real-time path tracing. This fancies up the game's lighting with more dynamic shadows and reflections, volumetric lighting, and all that. Light fills rooms, niches are appropriately shadowy, spinning fan blades and grates cast exciting shadows, glass refracts objects behind it, god rays beam down, signs and slimes glow, reflections capture everything around them (including Gordon himself), our boy casts his own full-body shadow, a few areas have added dramatic lighting, and so on. It's not the fanciest or most realistic raytracing, but it has a clear effect.

I dislike most modern makeover mods for old games. HD texture packs which overwrite intentful and suggestive detail with high-def noise. New models which replace charm with 'realism' or turn Alyx Vance into some sort of Leather Goddess Of Phobos. Raytracing mods which make every surface gleam. Post-processing shader tools which just agh. They might bring higher pixel density, polycounts, and other big numbers, but they typically break a game's style and make it look unlike itself (the phenomonal Resident Evil 4 HD Project is a rare exception). I like this mod's unusual approach to that problem.

At its best, the Ray Traced mod is dirty and murky and grubby and pixellated. The