To go where people don’t go anymore.
We don’t go to Ravenholm
Atmosphere is one of the most important and
one of the most underestimated parts of a game. A great atmosphere can do a LOT
for a game – improve its gameplay, make it more memorable, give it a greater
sense of identity and so on. I’ve spoken about the game’s excellent atmosphere
and Ravenholm shows us one of the game’s other elements, the variety in
atmosphere which is consistent yet changes things up rather often.
This
chapter is choke-full of said atmosphere, a very different atmosphere from the
prior chapters as it focuses more on isolation and combat with mindless
creatures, in a setting with no direct backstory but with plenty of subtle,
silent backstory. Ravenholm is a zombie infested town that you have to trudge through,
with the aid of a rifle-wielding priest of questionable sanity – a character
who, despite appearing for only one chapter, manages to have more character,
personality and untold backstory than most protagonists around.
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| Title screen - ver 3. |
I’d
have to take a moment to appreciate games that do this simple thing – having a
dynamic main menu screen. I haven’t spoken about it yet, but Half-Life 2’s main
menu changes every few chapters to depict the setting of where you currently
are. During Point Insertion and A Red Letter Day the background depicted a
square of City 17, with Combine Civil Protection roving about; during Route
Kanal and Water Hazard the background depicted a waterway with the occasional
Hunter-Chopper flying overhead; and now, during We Don’t Go To Ravenholm the
background depicts the silent and dark rooftops of the town, with the
occasionally zombie lurking about. The great thing about these menu screens is
that they keep you within the atmosphere of where you are in the game, it’s a
simple thing but it, in a sense, doesn’t let you ‘leave’ the feel of the
chapter – such as the dark corners and shambling horrors of this chapter.
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| The only good headcrab is a dead one. |
The
entirety of this chapter and the enemies present within it showcase the sheer
power of great sound design, its present before but especially pronounced here
– wherein taking a break, and getting the opportunity to not hear the moans and
cries of zombies will let you hear the distant chirping of birds. Not much
needs to be said about the sound design of the various zombies, each horrifying
and bizarre in their own way – combined with the heavy, satisfying sounds of
your firearms for one visceral experience. In a sense this chapter, and indeed
most of the game, would have fallen flat without the sound design. Remember:
silence makes sounds all-the-more poignant, silence makes music stand out more
and silence gives each sound a sense of depth. Combine all of that with the
little, but now iconic, sounds and beeps of the game – such as the ‘error’
sound or the beeps made by cycling through your weapons.
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| Drop car, kill zombies. |
This
chapter is more horror oriented, as a zombie infested town might suggest,
though the actual horror of it is rather counter-acted upon by the nature of
the game and its general pace… something the developers clearly noticed early
on, because the chapter also doubles up as the playing ground for the newest
and most important addition to your arsenal – the Gravity Gun. There’s a reason
most of the chapter combines the standard, slow and shambling zombies with a
variety of objects begging to be thrown at them, such as sawblades, gas
cylinders, cinder blocks, explosive barrels, normal barrels and paint buckets.
A lot of the horror built up fizzles away when you send a zombie flying owing
to a Gravity Gun propelled radiator to the face.
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| EAT RADIATOR! |
However,
the Gravity Gun is essential as you won’t get enough ammo to deal with the
hordes of zombies that roam the streets and thus have to use your environment
to deal with them, and the environment goes beyond that of interactive objects
but also includes various traps setup by the aforementioned priest-of-questionable-sanity
which you use to deal with masses of zombies and to traverse the chapter.
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| Fast Zombies are all too happy to shamble up pipes to claw out your face. |
In
true Half-Life fashion, the game won’t let itself devolve into a monotone and
soon mixes things up greatly by adding in two different kinds of zombies
created by two different kinds of headcrabs. They completely change the playing
field and can even change how you deal with otherwise normal circumstances –
which also means that the meat of things is going to be in the elaboration on
new enemies below. Yes, both of them manage to bring back the feeling of horror
and tension built-up at the very start of the chapter.
The
most interesting part of the chapter is the final bit, which involves a
somewhat dreary trudge through a mine shaft – one which’s purpose is
questionable, since it’s filled with rather boring, easy but time-consuming
encounters, as well as a lengthy upward (and easy) walk… but it’s important
since, by the time you emerge from the mine shaft you find that the sun is back
up and you embrace light once more. Those parts exist because, on your first
time through, you will likely approach it in a slow and cautious approach, thus
causing you to spend time in the darkness of this part and thus making the
return to light rational and satisfying. But the chapter isn’t over, in another
instance of using a short bit to have you transition to the tone of what is to
come next, you encounter Combine snipers holed up in various buildings, who can
only be killed by lobbing a grenade to greet them and the different kind of
Combine that you will be facing now, the Overwatch – the real meat of the
Combine force. This short bit helps set up the next chapter(s), and fill in
some wordless backstory to the world.
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| Into the light. |
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| Welcome to the light. |
Ravenholm
is easily the chapter people recall the most, fondly or otherwise, from the
game and this is owing to the complete change in pace and combat, the addition
of the Gravity Gun and the thick atmosphere of dread and isolation. The chapter
manages to be creepy and filled with tension without marching down a dreary
road of jump scares and monotonous encounters.
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| Hmm... |
Arsenal
Gravity Gun
Boy-oh-boy, the magnum opus of the source
engine is now in your hands. As mentioned before, it takes your control over
the environment up several notches by letting you pull in objects from afar and
throw them with deadly velocity. It’s truly only mandatory in combat for this
chapter, but it a consistently hyper-useful tool for the rest of the game. It’s
fun and you can kill Combine by throwing toilets at them.
Shotgun
Oh boy, finally. The shotgun is your first
and main means of direct ‘face to face’ combat, since being in an enemy’s face
is the most efficient place to use it. It deals a whole lot of damage at
close-range, making it your appropriate response to an enemy being in your
face. It’s also a whole lot of fun to use. It gives you the means to instantly
‘execute’ enemies close to you with a well-placed shot, changing the dynamic of
firefights a fair bit since getting close to an enemy is a viable option now,
especially when dealing with the Pulse-rifle wielding Combine, who will
generally want to tear your apart from a distance.
Pulse rifle will be covered in the next
part, since you don’t really get to use it much here.
Enemies
Fast Headcrab
As the name suggests this is a much faster
variant of the normal headcrab, and indeed it is faster in all respects; it
attacks faster, it moves about faster and is also a bit more silent – on the
whole a more annoying variant, but it creates a kind of zombie bearing the same
adjective.
Appearance
wise it is a more ‘spidery’ variant of the normal headhumper, with longer,
thinner limbs and a less ‘pudgy’ demeanour. It’s basically a not ‘ugly cute’
but just ugly variant of its normal kin.
Fast Zombie
As the adjective suggests, it is the polar
opposite to its slow, shambling brethren. Polar opposite in more than speed,
since it jumps at you, sprints straight at you and is capable of scaling
buildings – so you can’t even use the environment to avoid them, and that is
the general trend of these zombies – you can’t avoid them, making encounters
with them of the direct confrontation kind. They also tend to shriek a whole
lot while they try to tear off your face, and these shrill shrieks and roaring
groans help amplify the general trend of immense tension that accompanies
encounters with them. They’re also incredibly durable on Hard, unless you aim
for their head – which might be easier said than done considering their
aforementioned speed. They do less damage than their shambling brethren, but
they attack faster and will generally attempt to swarm you, which can turn
encounters with several of them into a race of ‘You v/s Getting swarmed’. The
Shotgun is, essentially, given to you to deal with them, which turns shotgun
fights with them into small ‘bull charge’ encounters, since the best way to get
the best shot is to get one to charge at you and to give it a lethal double
dose at point-blank range. They do a similar role as their slower brethren,
that of testing your ability to control space and make a way, albeit they do
this on crack.
They
continue the trend of ‘zombies being really freaky’ since they take things up a
notch by being completely nude – of both clothes and skin. So, yes, they are
essentially skinless corpses charging at you while bellowing and shrieking in a
way that will leave you relatively terrified. I did say that the horror
elements resurface when you begin to encounter them…
Poison Headcrab
The flipside to the fast headcrabs, they
are much slower, easily dodged and give a loud screech before pouncing at you
and are all round far more noisy. The screech is important because getting hit
by one immediately poisons you, taking your health down 1 following which it
will slowly rise to the amount it was before you got hit. Obviously, poison
headcrabs are not dangerous on their own since they are incapable of doing
fatal damage to you (as far as I have seen), but it should be rather easy to
guess how dangerous it is to suddenly go down to 1 hit-point in the middle of a
fight with other enemies more than capable of killing you.
These
enemies are another showcase of great sound design, as their strange
combination of hissing, yelping and rattling all combine to be rather
unsettling… which is fitting since their very presence is incredibly
unsettling, considering the mortal (quite literally) danger they pose. To make
things worse, they are rather durable and on Hard can actually take a fair bit
of ammo to take down safely; which where the crowbar and its ability to one-hit
all headcrabs comes into play, making it the most efficient, riskiest and most
fun way to take them down.
Appearance-wise,
they are the most different and most… animated of the lot. They crawl about in
a slow, almost organic fashion and don’t have the jolly gait of the standard
ones, or wiry gait of the fast ones. Their black, bristly appearance differentiates
them from the others, makes it stand-out more and makes it considerably more
unsettling. Even if they were the cause of only one death in this playthrough,
that hasn’t lessened the tension brought about by their mere presence.
Poison Zombie
And of course there’s another zombie
variant for the poison headcrab, and it’s simultaneously and most horrifying,
powerful and the most easily avoided. Essentially a single human host with
several headcrabs attached to it, that initially attacks you by tossing them at
you – which makes them a potent threat to remain aware of during fights, but
turn into a meatier shambling zombie once it has expended its tossed headcrabs
(man than sentence sounds weird). These things are bullet sponges, capable of
taking an entire volley of magnum rounds and several shotgun blasts before
falling… not that you’d always want to kill them, because they do become
relatively harmless once it is done tossing crabs at you (man, that sounds so
weird too).
To
suit their horrifying hosts, these zombies are adequately horrifying… being
bloated and dotted by massive scars where the headcrabs had attached
themselves. And the sounds… good golly, the sounds they make, let me just say
that they sound like cows and in all seriousness sound terrifying.
Combine Overwatch will be
covered in the next part, since you don’t really encounter them much here.
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| Engines roaring. |
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