Black Mesa

Possibly the greatest achievement in video games so far; the ultimate example of the purpose of the medium put into practice. Simply, Black Mesa achieves a near-perfect level of immersion brought on by intuitive design that gives the impression of free choice. This is distinct from something like Fallout: New Vegas, where, despite having a technically greater range of options, the player, due to the scope the game teases him with, faces walls that reveal an empty, incomplete piece of art that begs to be a tabletop RPG. Black Mesa only suggests that which is already contained within the game.

The clearest element of this is the intuitive level design, which makes it so that to face a wall the player would have to battle the current, something that could only occur if the player was already distracted, perhaps by having played through the game several times, or simply by not putting himself in the correct environment to avoid distractions; the success of the game is contingent on the receptivity of the consumer, something which is the case in every other good piece of art (it is not fair to question the verisimilitude of a sound film if it was watched without sound).

There are many other ways in which the game maintains this immersion. For example, the traditionally intrusive HUD is made organic by the way it is introduced, and the design is unintrusive enough that the player becomes accustomed to it as he might wearing glasses (something suprisingly rare). The adaptive music is programmed with a perfect sense of appropriateness for each situation while avoiding that repetition that so many other adaptive soundtracks suffer from. The player can adapt the arsenal to each situation so there is never the sense that something is missing. Of course, the graphics also support this, but I’m not under the delusion that these will hold up too long (if you think that Half-life 2 still looks “immersive” then I can promise you it only looks that way through your nostalgia). Finally, the oblique way in which the story is communicated makes it again possible to engage in a way more suited to video games (still different to other games such as New Vegas where the player must supervise the story as it enfolds linearly).