Play a puzzle game

Nigger what the fuck are you even on about

1 had a beautiful simplicity. 2 is still atmospheric (especially the old labs), but it loses something with all the set pieces of giant moving rooms and rapidly changing platforms and shit, with a grand scale facility that suddenly doesn't seem as plausible.

>in exchange for...
character development. Having some insight in Chells and Galdos backstory made me actually appreciate the characters. The turret opera finale made me tear up

>its actually just an inventory management game

your opinion is worthless and no one gives a shit about it
you couldn't be more wrong

Wheatley was definitely a bit too much. The passive aggressive jabs and minor absurdity of GlaDOS from 1 is definitely playing their hand closer to the chest.

I agree.

>what was the x ingredient
Kelly Bailey

The sidekick thing ruined HL:A for me. Turning voices off made it way more enjoyable. Portal 2 does have cringey humor like Alex though

The engine is practically built for smallish rooms with an eerie atmosphere that feel more open than they actually are. Bums me out that the only Source adventure games are Dear Esther and INFRA, and only INFRA is any good.

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someone on here coined it as I think "sinister mystery"
HL2, TF2, and Portal all have this thing where you get the sense that you're being deprived of the big picture, and none of them fully explain it. TF2 has these super high tech cavernous facilities and you have no idea what they're being used for. Portal has had some kind of catastrophe that you've just missed. Gordon is openly a pawn in the games of beings he has zero understanding of.

Eventually TF2 explained everything in their comedy comics and Portal 2 came out which went in a similar direction, more about comedy and more open to explaining what's going on and substituting atmosphere for character interaction. I've grown to appreciate both but when they came out it really felt like there was something subtly wrong with them when they first came out.

I think this is also why a lot of people obsess over "lore" games, albeit I think they all fuck up by playing into their mysteries very deliberately instead of leaving it up to a certain interpretation like valve did.

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That's really a keen observation. I can agree with all of that and felt the same, even if I didn't know how to verbalize it.

The backstory never mattered, Portal 1 told you everything you needed to know in order to empathize with Chell and hate and/or fear Glados. The blanks were filled in by your imagination and some environmental storytelling. The most effective aspect of Portal 1 is this dawning realization that you're truly alone, the feeling of total isolation on the guts of this impossibly huge seeming facility, where you don't know whether the outside world even exists. Portal 1 worked because it was so simple.

Valve's go-to writers are comedy writers, and they wanted to be able to write characters. I think they've actually gone over this before, part of the problem with a silent protagonist tromping through dangerous abandoned environments is that the writer doesn't get to do anything for long stretches of time.

This has been an ongoing trend for awhile and while there are conversations from Russell I liked, I agree that the complete unwillingness to leave the player completely alone for long without either him or Alyx talking in your ear about the situation made the game feel less like Half-Life.

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>That's not supposed to be like that.