Unforeseen Consequences

I’m sorry, but since I’m on yet another playthrough of Half-Life 2 due to its Mac release, I have to gush on it a little bit. A while ago I started writing a post on how great the HL2 games are, and it got really quite long, but I never published it because it was just pointless blatant fanboyism. But I have so much fanboyism in me that I have to let a little bit out.

Let’s just talk about how amazing Valve is at game design, shall we? Let’s talk about that. Specifically: how amazing Valve is at storytelling. “What!” I hear you cry. HL2 has a silent protagonist and no cutscenes or anything! How on earth can you say it has amazing storytelling!

Well, let me tell you how HL2 has amazing storytelling. It is amazing precisely because it tells stories so effectively without the crutches of cutscenes, text walls or speaking protagonists.

So there’s this area in the chapter Water Hazard, the one where you’re buzzing around in an airboat avoiding a hunter-chopper that buzzes around strafing you and pooping mines in your path. There’s an area off to the side during the part where you’re going through some kind of refinery. A lone metrocop shoots at you from behind a pile of tires. If you kill him and go into the area where he was, you will find a story, told by nothing but scenery.

As you go in, a zombie will get up from the ground and, inexplicably, a whole bunch of headcrabs will come flying out of a big inaccessible opening above. Once you dispatch them all (with great dispatch!), take a look around, and listen to the story that the scene tells.

There’s a little lofted area with a lambda painted on the wall. There’s some supply boxes there, but also two bare mattresses and a few empty cans of food. It’s very plain that two rebels camped out here. If you look around, you’ll see a dead body — one of the rebels. As for the other one, well, uh, that zombie. Look up at the opening where the headcrabs came from and wonder what’s going on back there. These rebels chose an unfortunate place to camp.

This is hardly unique in the game — there’s plenty of evidence of rebels living in harsh conditions and meeting sticky ends — but this scene stands out in its use of sound. First of all, there’s the howling wind. This, combined with the spinning windmill above, makes the place feel very desolate — as if you’re out in the middle of a desert, even in the midst of this concrete wasteland full of headcrabs and radioactive sludge. The wind sound is quiet, and a welcome break from the constant noise of the airboat, gunfire, and exploding mines. This is a very peaceful, lonely place to stop and rest.

And then there’s the windchimes.

This one sound effect is why this scene makes me gush and spew and profess my undying love for Valve. If you wait a little bit, eventually you will hear a small jingle, and then a clear, lingering tone from a windchime. It is haunting and spooky and beautiful all at once. It continues the story of the two luckless rebels and makes it rather more poignant: the rebels tried to put a little touch on this place to make it feel more like a home. That, in turn, makes you feel like you’re intruding, and makes you slightly uncomfortable about being there, while at the same time slightly mesmerizing you. But here’s the real key: there are no windchimes to be found. This sound, this goosebump-inducing sound, has no apparent source. It meshes perfectly with the scene, yet it makes no sense.

And this is why this constitutes great storytelling: the windchimes are telling you that there is a story here that you will never know.

The whole scene, including the windchimes, tells you a story, but deliberately leaves out part of it. The windchimes are what gives the scene emotional impact — no small feat given that the story is about two already-dead NPCs — but you cannot find them. You will never know where the rebels put them in order to make this little corner feel like a home. You will never see them. That part of the story has been lost forever.

The windchimes aren’t the only mystery of this scene — if you look up, you’ll see a platform with a dead guy, high up and inaccessible. How did he get up there? You’ll never know.

And this is why Valve is great. Not only are they able to tell such a poignant story completely without words, but they bother to craft these stories at all. They could easily have left this whole corner out, and they could easily have left the windchimes out. But they put these things in. They acknowledged that there is even more story there, but it’s gone.