Roads to Safe Places

After finishing the Black Mesa mod I've been playing a couple of Portal and Half-Life Mods last week. 

This is the most fun kind of fanfiction I have yet to experience. 


Minerva: Metastasis - you are a reprogrammed combine soldier dropped into a combine... facility by an IA called Minerva who is guiding you and exploring with you. It is never revealed why she is doing this, or why this island is important.
I liked this mod. It's entertaining, challenging but doable and it has a good story, though I did get stuck several times, especially towards the end. Ever since I found out that this is not so much an alternative story but an ongoing subplot set in multiple instances of the HL universe I'm looking forward to playing the other mods in this series. 



Dear Esther - I played the free version of this. This is not set in the 'verse at all as far as I can tell. This is a short interactive epistolary novel. You are an injured person visiting an island narrating haunting, almost poetic letters to Esther in voice-over. 
As excited as I am about this walk-in novel I think that it might be a bit overrated. I really enjoyed it, the idea is neat, the execution works, the score and language used beautiful, but even though the mechanics compliment the story well they get annoying really fast and I can't see myself playing this a third time to get more story lines. You are injured, which means that you don't move very quickly, which means that you're exploring this island in slow and bumbling real time. The map has edges which kill you without any discernible reason. There does not seem to be an autosave function, so if you, say, fall of a mountain, you don't die, but you have to climb the entire thing again. 



Portal: Unity - I am not sure what to make of this. It is fun, but that is because it basically is Portal, just with less convincing voice acting by actors you can hardly understand and a confusing plot. I am not a big fan of the power dynamics in this game, since you are a female testsubject tested by a male AI who has captured and imprisoned a woman. 
The difficulty curve is very strange - I completely breezed through the first fifteen or so chambers but then got stuck several times, especially in one chamber that has floating platforms and is suddenly very hard and unforgiving of bad timing, which I always have. 



Portal: Prelude - more challenging than the others, and so far I am not convinced. You're a white blonde female testsubject being tested by two dudebros who spend the time you spend in your seethrough cubicle in the beginning to comment on your physique and how great your ass is. I'm not sure that I want to play this if the power dynamic stays this creepy. It's also quite difficult, requiring more precision than I have a lot of the time. I'm considering giving this one a miss. 



CWTH - "Chell's Way To Home", a Russian mod which is in Russian and which takes off after the end of Portal I. It's fun, but the Russian narrtors speak to quickly for my A1 abilities to grasp and the English subtitles get replaced with closed captioning, which makes it harder to follow. At the moment I'm stuck in one chamber very early on and I'm guessing it's because I cannot jump well enough. 


The Citizen - You play a citizen from city seventeen. I really like the beginning, in which you are vulnerable and defenseless, and I would have enjoyed this more if you didn't join the resistance, suited up and got a personal arsenal. Other characters start calling you Gordon and the game seems to forget that you aren't Gordon Freeman. My motivations are not clear, and I don't really know who my character is. We don't really find out, either.