I finished Black Mesa, a notable fan game or community mod that is a full game. It's good. But! …
It's a hugely impressive remake/interpretation of Half-Life, and a somewhat unconventional one at that: the chapters taking place in the research facility are almost dogmatically faithful to the original, while the remade Xen, originally only a couple hours long, amounts to practically an entire other video game appended to the end of Half-Life. And I guess in terms of mechanical focus that's what some players felt Xen was in the first place: low-gravity platforming (with fall damage!) didn't please a lot of people. I enjoyed the original Xen for that reason—alien world, alien gamefeel—but was interested to see what in the world Crowbar Collective had been up to in the eight years since releasing the first chunk of the game.
I've left a number of [comments](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/494-videogame-remakes-and-the-attitudes-surrounding-them/4) on this forum sounding like a cranky whippersnapper about remakes/remasters/I hate this whole glossary of terms etc etc. Black Mesa seemed more interesting, both for being a fan project (not beholden to consumer demands/interests), and for its [16-year development period](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_TcAxAKCAI).
The research facility levels are pretty good. The new graphics are detailed, but they don't overwhelm the art direction, and in fact lend a somehow new sense of scale and power to Black Mesa's interiors—something I think is one of the original game's biggest strengths. Among the liberties Crowbar Collective took with the design, several in this section ultimately seem for the better, like keeping the player from getting a gun until a bit after they do in the original, or cutting down the notoriously overlong "On a Rail" chapter (although I applied a mod to play the whole chapter fully remade, which I regret).
On the other hand, a few days after finishing it, I don't think I liked the new Xen a whole lot, at least not without reservation. The graphics are incredible: it's clear the team spent eight years developing this portion of the game. But at the same time, the more I think about how the new Xen looks, the smaller it becomes in my imagination. New Xen adds a lot of visual specificity to the wider Half-Life universe which makes it feel ultimately lesser. The levels also notably play like they're on Earth—it's got fantastical quarries and jungles, but they all have clear paths designed exactly for Gordon Freeman to walk and jump on. No weirdly wide open spaces, not much variation in jump distance, it all feels too constructed. The Interloper chapter takes a step toward fixing this with some less obvious platforming/climbing similar to the final area in Portal, but undoes that progress by allowing you the impression that Vortigaunt society is all just corded plugs and sockets, which compose far too many of the chapter's "puzzles." And every Xen chapter is three times as long as it should be, following the common game design of having the player solve three separate instances of some puzzle, even when the puzzle is not complicated enough to justify so many repetitions (which is every time).
I don't like the music much at all. Piano and strings and synth pads conspire to make it sound corny, like in a "whoa dude, EPIC.......!" way. The original music, while occasionally cheesy in its own way, was more understated and more successful at evoking a sense of place, which sense of place is imo one of the greatest things Half-Life has going for it.
They had an actor speak G-Man's lines in exactly the way he says them in the original. Felt weird.
Goodbye forever