Recent reviews by Gamer Gaming

This is kind of like an extended Kotaku article about Valve's "wilderness" period in the 2010s, detailing what they were getting up to (not limited to Alyx development) when most fans had decided they were just resting on their laurels. Apps like these are really valuable for providing insight into an often secretive company, and The Final Hours does exactly that. It adds some much-needed context to those years by thoroughly detailing the activity behind the scenes, following and interviewing a range of Valve employees to get into their heads a bit, and describing the tension of remaining competitive as a company against the creative freedom they try to promote, like a more grounded answer to Valve's slightly utopian employee handbook. The tone is slightly fanboyish but ultimately professional and neutral (which seems like a reasonable description of Keighley himself) and makes for very easy reading. Towards the end it starts dropping a few sly hints at what Valve might be working on next, which is great fandom fuel. It ends with the message that we're looking at a new era for Valve - though Keighley acknowledges that might be a bit too early to call.

The text is interspersed with high quality animations which progress as you keep scrolling, and some fun and insightful interactive pieces like concept art slideshows, a sound mixer to create your own headcrab sounds, and interactive model and animation viewers (unfortunately, character models are not 360 degree views and you don't get multiple animations for a model). In addition to the article there is a Google Maps-style tour of Valve's main floor using high-quality 360-degree panoramas. You can also sacrifice some quality and switch to a laser-scanned 3D model of most of the floor, that you can walk around in first person. This might be exciting for anyone aspiring to work there but it's also a nice surprise to spot things that appeared in the "article" part of the app.

The article could use some fleshing-out. It has chapter selection, but you have to do some annoying scrolling to access it and there's no bookmarking feature. Sometimes the writing deploys some industry slang or "geek speak" and doesn't always explain what it means, breaking the flow as you search outside the app for the definition. More clickable text in general to provide extra information would have been great. The text could use some more proofreading, and as far as I know it's only available in English, yet there is no translation for certain pictures containing Russian text.

All in all it's a nice companion piece with information and insight. Most of the information will have been repackaged into YouTube videos and so on, but this is still worth getting for the interactive aspect, great look, and the personal touch.

I played through the whole series this year just to play HLA, and even without all the suspense it was incredible. It might not be the fabled HL3, but series fans should do whatever they can to play this for themselves - it's fun, but also a legitimate game and worthy series instalment.

HLA adapts exceptionally to VR. The previous games had complex, strategic threats you took down with fast speed, fast thinking and firepower. This is trickier in VR, with the latency and lack of precision of full body movement - plus added panic (VR gets scary!). HLA slows down the pace, zooms in on the simpler concepts, and lets challenge emerge from "performing" actions. Alyx is less physically capable than Gordon, but the world is adjusted for that resulting in excitement and challenge equivalent to any other game in the series, just for different reasons.

Trivial FPS actions are expanded into physical processes. To reload, you eject the mag, reach for your ammo, load it in, and ready the weapon if empty - a process that varies between weapons. Easy to screw up when panicking, but fluid and professional-feeling with experience (in fact, all actions become really satisfying, even save scumming). You can play better by treating weapons as if actually holding them, like by steadying them with the off-hand. You can grab and climb ladders rung by rung, and cover-based shooting segments let you appreciate the magnitude of physically crouching and leaning. VR can be an ordeal for players who suffer from motion sickness or have difficulty with physical movement, but every player should use their refund window to look through the well-stocked accessibility menu, get in some fights and see if they can make it work for them. HLA even has a "Story" difficulty with minimal combat.


To balance out the physical work, enemies are downgraded. You face fewer enemies at a time, but they can still give you a bit of a workout. Combine AI tends not to push forward, and the other lifeforms move slowly and predictably, though HLA's new monsters are very well-designed, scary and fun to fight. VALVe miss opportunities to innovate general combat past HL2 standards, like by improving tactics in the higher difficulty settings. Certain enemy types hint at some thought about different effects depending on where you hit them, but generally things just absorb bullets until death.

Your arsenal is down to just three weapons, which is less exciting, but ultimately cleaner, and you can craft upgrades for them with hidden collectibles. The system is fine but the flaw is the high cost of the laser upgrade. In my VR development experience, pointing without a genuine laser pointer is almost always frustrating - where you think you're aiming rarely matches reality. You might like the realism, but I would often expend an entire pistol clip on a single headcrab in the early chapters and find myself stuck. Make sure to grab the lasers early to save yourself some awkwardness.

The strongest aspect of HLA is its deepening of your relationship with the props of the atmospherically cluttered City 17. The opening segment invites you to just explore your hands and the props around you, so you remember those interactions when you see similar objects later. I'd often just grab random junk while looking around because it was so enjoyable. Generally, if you can imagine a prop interaction, you can do it. It's a mini-revelation to discover that you can shake a matchbox and hear the matches inside, or attach an item to your face and walk around with it. It's fun just rooting around in bins and drawers for shiny blue loot. Some cheeky moments use prop physics against you, punishing greed or impatience. Source 2 hasn't "solved" collision physics though - I once threw a bicycle at a wall only for it to meld into it like Han Solo in the Carbonite.

Every level is a brand new City 17 location, and their designs usually match the series' gold standard, though sometimes there's not enough indication of what you can do, breaking the flow. More than ever, you're rewarded for creativity, strategy and environmental awareness, though it's very easy to get tunnel vision. Obviously graphics and audio have come a long way since HL2; you can get up close with naturally animated NPCs (I love the filthy look I got when I lobbed a spoon at my sidekick), pulsating Xen fungi and unashamedly... organic monsters. Certain Combine tech hammers home how ruthlessly they exploit the creatures they subjugate. The positional audio is great and takes the spotlight in a fan-favourite chapter. You can even use the blessed Steam Workshop integration to negate any flaws I mentioned above.

HLA's daring ending has exciting implications for HL3, but will VALVe ever justify that excitement? I'll gladly play as much VR Half-Life as I'm given, but it's just different to the older games. The series began on the screen and I think it should end up back there one day.

[Edited on full completion of the base game]

At the time of writing I've fully completed Disc Room, racking up 10685 deaths that should have been closer to 7000. I think any let's play of the first twenty minutes or so will tell you whether this game is for you better than any review can.

First off: yes, this is a toughie! Disc Room has you evading unstoppable bouncing buzzsaws until they inevitably dismember you. It's just like being trapped in the screensaver of Meat Boy's DVD player. With no way to fight back, survival is the objective. Each chamber has its own leaderboard so you can see how long you fared compared to your peers and the dev team; levels fill with discs so quickly and completely that I suspect there is no room to improve on the top times by now. (If you prefer a lower skill floor, or have motor difficulties, don't stop reading yet!)

"Endless" games that always kill you might turn you off - after all, you can have a much longer, more satisfying run in many free mobile games - and a leaderboard isn't much of an incentive to keep playing, but Disc Room has more going for it than that. There's a (at first) comically short minimum survival time for each level for 300% completion: the game seems calibrated to kill you a second before that. Death is woven into progression too: there's a collection aspect to discovering and dying to all 64 disc types, and certain rooms are only unlocked by dying in specific ways. There are also puzzles in certain rooms, where you'll rack up a few deaths experimenting with solutions. These all help take the stigma out of dying - in the Disc Room, you're there for the long run so you might as well get comfortable. Even with all that, I can't help getting hung up on certain levels, where lasting 20 seconds seems to rely on really nice starting RNG, prompting me to sit there dying and restarting in the lowest points of the game. Difficulty is very well pitched for basic completion but these grind the fun out of 300%. However this applies to around 6 of the 101 levels. If you felt 300% wasn't an adequate challenge, you can die to the several additional challenges, which I doubt many players will (or can) complete all of.

Level design is really clever, with lots of variety and gameplay twists, giving each chamber its own identity. As well as changing the disc types in each chamber, other gameplay aspects are played with: what you see; how you move; how time works. This and the flavour text give the impression of an unstoppable sentient construct figuring out different ways to torture you. As you progress, even sometimes by dying, you uncover little bits of the general mystery of the story and world. It doesn't seem very complex, but even by 300% completion it doesn't seem to answer that many of the questions it first posed. If story is the main thing you go for in games, you'll probably be intrigued but not fully satisfied. Hopefully the upcoming "Turbo" DLC will address that.

If the arcade action's getting too much, Disc Room has plenty of options for blunting the game's teeth. The speed of discs and other hazards can be slowed incrementally, down to just 10% of normal speed. Challenge difficulty can be reduced, and even blocks of levels can be unlocked instantly. It seems there are separate leaderboards for different difficulty settings, and 300% is possible on any setting. Where so many indie developers would insist on challenging the player or worry about compromising the product's value, Disc Room - one of the most imposing die-and-retry games I've played - turns out to be incredibly accessible.

So you're not instantly obliterated, the developers hand you some lifelines. Believe it or not, you can spend three frames inside a disc before it tears you apart. When you're near a disc, time actually slows down to give you a brief opportunity to escape. Certain discs confer abilities on you; these are often too situational, but the ol' reliable dodge move usually gets the job done. In the thick of things you'll probably take these for granted, and celebrate each impossible disc dodge, each second over your personal best, as your own hard work. It might be the way that an exciting experience is provided as well as a challenge that has me coming back to it.

That experience is made extra vibrant by Disc Room's look, sound and game feel, which all show superb attention to detail. The art is clear even at the game's busiest, easy on the eye and deliciously visceral. The soundtrack has wide range, from metallic existential terror to twitchy, creeping horror to explosive, frenetic chaos, and distorts nervously when you use an ability or get a bit close to danger. A subtle pause of a few frames gives each death a kinetic energy that made me jump sometimes.

The story didn't quite do it for me, but in terms of classic 2D arcade magic, Disc Room has the full package, and with its accessibility options, I think a wide range of players will get a big kick out of it.

I started following this game's development in 2015, not long after playing Antichamber, and am really pleased to see that those seven years of development have been well spent. It's good to have another entry in the Escher-inspired-puzzle-platformer genre (is there a better name for that? Esch-'em-up maybe?). As it happens, if you enjoyed Antichamber, you will enjoy this game. You don't even need to keep reading! They have several things in common, but Manifold Garden, while shorter and less challenging, has its own set of mechanics, smarter integration of puzzles and geometry, and goes beyond Antichamber in its architectural vision.

The game almost immediately sells itself short by putting you through a series of small, almost featureless chambers. You go through a comprehensive, but sort of austere introduction to the fundamental mechanics. Where are the gorgeous views you saw in the promo. material, or even the title screen? They're coming; you just have to push through this first section. In the meantime, you learn about your gravity-shifting ability - walk up to any wall, right-click and that wall becomes the new floor. Players may find it disorienting to begin with but the healthy array of graphics options can mediate that. You also find out about the cubes you'll be dealing with for the rest of the game, which simply refuse to obey gravity unless it's in one particular direction. There's not that much mileage in this mechanic alone, but it integrates organically into other mechanics introduced later.

Having passed the weakest point in the whole game, everything opens up and the level design lets loose. You're treated to visually impressive vistas in which the world repeats itself forever. If you go too far in one direction, including by falling, you end up back where you started. It doesn't add much to the gameplay but has stunning aesthetic value. The indoor designs also become vibrant, decorative, and awe-inspiring in their own ways. Almost entirely using flat-coloured cubes, the designer evokes Greek, Roman, Eastern and futuristic architectural styles, and occasionally flies off the handle to create extravagant kaleidoscopic designs too. The game alternates between expansive, explorational puzzles in these spaces, and minimal, focused puzzle chambers, but everywhere feels much more hand-crafted and personal after that tutorial.

So the player is acquainted with gravity, blocks and the mechanics surrounding them, and navigating self-similar landscapes. That's plenty for a complete game, but the developers decide to go beyond that and introduce non-Euclidean geometry; most commonly doorways into passages that can only be seen from one side, or that link seamlessly into parts of the room they are not connected to. Apart from being impressive to experience they are often part of puzzles too, and the developers somehow make them feel like a natural part of the world, rather than a gimmick. I think they could have got more out of this concept: in the largest part of the game, you need to solve six puzzle areas to open what the game calls "the final door". The last two areas seem to be over really quickly, maybe because I was so comfortable with the mechanics at that point. Those two areas would have been good places to utilise that feature some more.

Apart from that the game is a very well-paced five hours, and the rewards at the end feel well-earned. Every puzzle you solve has some visible effect on the world and your progress through it, which increases in magnitude the larger the area you complete, so you have a constant incentive to grow your topological orchard. The puzzles can be tricky, but I never needed a walkthrough. Some solutions are very similar to previous ones, but at least it reinforces the technique in your mind. Sometimes it lets go of your hand and trusts you to correctly guess a mechanic that it hadn't clued you into before, and these are some of the most gratifying moments. On completion, the Steam achievements tell you about an alternate way to play that sounds impossible.

All of this puzzling goodness is accompanied by a high-quality adaptive soundtrack, and sound effects that reinforce the feeling of exploring some kind of Atlantean puzzle box. Apart from some awkward cutting between tracks when moving between rooms, there's a smooth ambience that's enjoyable without distracting. As you might guess, I never dropped frames, but I would have liked to see if my GPU could take a longer render distance, to crank that feeling of infinity as far as possible. A detailed photo editing tool lets you immortalise your experience as a beautiful wallpaper, but it would have been so cool to be able to play the game with some of those filters permanently on.

All in all, barring a few gripes, Manifold Garden is worth every penny for its extravagant art, impressive but unpretentious atmosphere, and fun, well-pitched puzzles. An excellent debut and a memorable, almost numinous experience.

An unnamed Johnny Bravo-type wakes in a cold sweat, overwhelmed by a sudden desire for something anyone who's spent time in MMORPG or anime subcultures will find familiar - a demonic harem. Your role is to guide him through just nine tricky block-pushing puzzles, accruing a gaggle of sharply-dressed Slavic succubi. This is a great way to spend a free hour (my total play time is definitely an outlier!).

The level art is a minimally-shaded, angular Gothic look, but the demon girls are drawn in a punchy Skullgirls-y style. They both obviously fit the theme, but complement each other really well. The jaunty backing music is almost like hardbass - what with the demons' names and the vodka references it's no secret what part of the world the game came from. I don't think it was good enough to justify being the only track in the main game's roughly-one-hour runtime, though.

The bulk of the game is the nine puzzles, with only four mechanics introduced. You're given a set number of moves in order to reach the girl(s) at the end of the level, and you'll need them all. Levels are cleverly designed so that you will frequently find yourself just one or two moves off, and realise the dangerous sacrifice you didn't make earlier was actually what you needed all along. The compact levels don't have a huge number of possible states either, so if you're stuck, you can't go wrong just pushing random blocks and seeing what happens (the developer probably knows this, which would explain why if you ask for a hint, you're generally told to just skip the level). While I was a bit disappointed it didn't bring all four mechanics together, I found the final puzzle particularly tricky and developed tunnel vision to the point of needing a walkthrough to show me the light.

The runtime is unfortunately padded by some inconvenient design decisions that had me restarting more often than I would have liked. Except when walking into a level boundary, every move you make lowers your move counter, even if the move doesn't change your position or the state of the level. There's no undo button so you have to start from the beginning. A longer cooldown between moves would also have been useful; when moving quickly it's easy to make a move by accident and need to restart. When you do get to the end of a level there is generally a question, and it's usually 50-50 whether you get the answer right and move on, or wrong and get sent back to the start. Levels generally let you skip straight to the question, at least. Helltaker is rounded off by a surprising gameplay shift, tossing away the thoughtful puzzling and battering you with a challenging series of arcade levels. Going out of the frying pan into the fire like this actually mixes it up in quite a refreshing way, if you like arcade gameplay at least, and helps push the restart count ever higher. By the time you reach the ending you have felt a little bit of the punishment the protagonist went through, but like him, you'll feel it was worth it.

Gameplay is interspersed with a little textual interaction: putting a foot wrong at certain points treats you to one of the many bad endings, and you can chat with your growing harem via the "life advice" button. It doesn't go any deeper than you choosing from two dialogue options occasionally, but it's quick and easy to try all the interactions if you want to. The English is a little rough but the dialogue is naturalistic and fairly humorous, and on the light side of saucy, so it's never uncomfortable to read. The characters you've gathered feel under-explored considering your protagonist has made seducing them his ultimate goal, but if you like them the developer continues their adventures via comics on Twitter. If you want more of the game itself, there's a neatly-hidden secret ending: pay attention to Steam achievements and level details for that.

The vanripper team have gained huge public approval for delivering a flipping good indie game and exhibiting a flair for smart, tight puzzle (and suit) design. The fandom around the characters and world (including from the developer himself) mean we can expect a return to Helltaker's world; with a bit more fleshing out it could be pretty sweet.

[Updated to describe the state of the game in the third month after release]
If you want a TL;DR, I'll just say that I've been writing all this between rounds.

Fall Guys presents an alternative to the battle royale establishment by throwing sixty players at a time into an "Episode", a series of crazy slapstick minigames including obstacle courses, team matches and memory games. A certain number of players can "qualify" in each round, and the final round is one last pulse-pounding free-for-all. The chance of winning a crown is pretty low, but it's all done with an exuberant, positive atmosphere that usually has you only feeling mildly bad when you lose (which you will). Getting your first crown is exhilarating though, and still feels incredible three months on.

Fall Guys' design perfectly suits casual gaming, with little time investment per Episode and no emphasis on "gitting gud". Episodes last around ten minutes from start to finish. The most skilled players will often see their dreams crushed by rivals interfering on purpose or otherwise. In each qualifying round, you don't have to be the best - just good enough. A couple of hours is all it takes for you to not worry about the first round any more, and after around a week you'll be reaching the final pretty consistently. I win a crown every 3-4 hours on average. Improving your platforming skill is the only thing (within the terms of service) that will give you "an edge" in Fall Guys (if cheaters put you off the game, since the anti-cheat update I haven't noticed a single cheater). The only items you earn are cosmetic. Looks are a big part of Fall Guys and its myriad cosmetics fit perfectly into its deceptively cute bubblegum-bouncy-castle aesthetic.

Importantly for me, Fall Guys feels like it wants me to keep playing. When you lose, you can quit at lightning speed, grab a reward for your performance and jump straight into a new Episode. Fame points go towards levelling up, and every level gives you either currency or cosmetics. The currencies are Kudos, which you can earn through normal gameplay or paying extra, and crowns, which you win by hitting certain levels or winning the final. Getting to the final will net you a few hundred Kudos, and cosmetics cost upwards of 1000, so it's about half an hour's play for a colour pattern and two hours for one piece of the two-piece costumes. "Legendary" items cost crowns instead, but I won my first crown 11 hours in. MEDIATONIC addressed the difficulty of winning crowns by liberally adding extra crowns to the free Season Pass - if you complete the Season Pass losing every Episode, you can still buy two costumes. It gets more generous - if you miss out on a costume when it's first released, it goes into the shop rotation and you can pick it up another time. If you miss out on a truly limited edition cosmetic, there's usually a similar (not necessarily worse) variant available for crowns, and if you can't afford that there's usually a similar variant available for kudos. No one has to worry about looking like a "Default".

I wouldn't have spent so long with this game if the gameplay wasn't its own reward, though. Some players might have been underwhelmed by the four new levels added by the season two update, but MEDIATONIC assured players it would be their smallest one and they're almost all new favourites anyway. MEDIATONIC took two years to create their original 25 levels, so don't expect hours' worth of new levels each season, but halfway through each season something easier to do and more exciting happens - certain levels get new random variants. These range from unusual to downright frightening - an often uneventful level like Perfect Match can become as tense as a final round. These breathe new life into old levels and mean you can't rely on muscle memory. Their trademark "Big Yeetus" (just a big spinning hammer) can pop up and turn your current situation around (for better or worse). The new alternate game modes, with certain conditions or a certain selection of levels, are full of potential. MEDIATONIC will probably need to churn out new maps and variants at least every season to renew players' interest, but it's probably impossible to launch a seasonal battle royale without some ridiculously detailed content schedule so I'm sure there will be plenty more content to come. I wish they had focused more on certain frustrating bugs than content early on, but nowadays the game is more stable and fun than ever.

Really, how could there not be - half an hour with this game and you may well start brainstorming game modes you'd like to see. There's so much potential with platforming minigames - I'm personally hoping for a game where each team controls a giant fighting mech, variants where you play certain maps in reverse, and maybe a challenging single player campaign that provides some extra currency. I think the future of this game is as bright as its colourful world, and I can't wait to see what comes next.

Prism Studios have created a fantastic adventure in the world of Portal 2. It's creative and visually impressive, but what stood out to me most is how much it feels like Portal 2 - you could be forgiven for thinking that this third-party mod was some kind of official DLC adventure.

Following the VALVe playbook, we naturally kick off with a train ride, in which we are treated to some voice acting work - a monologue from someone doing a passable Cave Johnson impression. It shows a good "Portal-y" sense of humour that lasts through most of the game. You play as a visitor to Aperture Science Innovators, way back in 1952, so you get to spend some time wandering around the Aperture offices before things inevitably go belly-up. This early section is where the scenery designers get to show off the most. The things you'll see here are... surprising... but totally conceivable. The other chapters of the game will look much more familiar but the original assets fit in to them so well, I found it hard to tell which assets were original and which weren't. The same is true for the music; it's been a few years since I played Portal 2 but I really could not listen to a random track and tell you who made it.

Prism really took their time with the intro sequence. They put a lot of work into areas you're supposed to be in, but here and in the rest of the game, added optional areas that don't reward your curiosity. You can go off the beaten track but will often be met with an uninteresting dead end, where a mod like Aperture Tag might put a little joke or Easter egg (there are Easter eggs to be found; most obviously a different funny warning message from Cave Johnson on each locked door). If they weren't going to do anything interesting with the extra space I'd have preferred a more linear environment. That train ride also doesn't give you much to look at, where VALVe used Half-Life's train rides for comedy moments and technological or artistic flourishes. The intro sequence takes your time, too - there are interesting things to see but nevertheless it took 20 minutes for me to actually acquire the portal gun.

That said, it took 20 more minutes before I completed the first test chamber. The puzzles aren't messing around! The harder puzzles took me around ten minutes to work out, and I might have been stuck on one forever if some miraculous glitch hadn't caused me to skip to the next chamber when I next loaded the game. I haven't even tried Advanced Mode yet! Prism have managed to tease out some interesting new ways for Portal 2's various mechanics to interact, not all of which are possible in the Portal 2 level editor, so if you think you've seen it all this mod might still surprise you. Some of the most exciting moments come from novel interactions with partially destroyed test chambers that are just about still helpful to you. If all that walking around at the start is making you restless, hang in there - soon enough, you'll be standing around in a test chamber, thinking furiously.

What would a Portal 2 mod be without a friendly guide to help you on your way, possibly into some flames? Your guide, Virgil (what would a guide character be called in any game, if not Virgil?), is a rather chipper personality core - it's good that according to modders, Aperture has so many cores that are just happy, friendly, fourth-wall-breaking buddies. With company like this you wonder why GLaDOS is so despondent. Ignoring his snazzy, old-fashioned design, Virgil feels like a spritual successor to Nigel from Aperture Tag, down to the accent. He's a decent, agreeable companion, but I've yet to see a Portal 2 mod with a companion I can really believe is Aperture property. Virgil has beef with AEGIS, an old security system with one last task to perform. Its speech doesn't betray much personality of its own, but the puzzles it creates might suggest a mood like a cat playing with its food.

Throughout the latter chapters you are aiming to thwart AEGIS at every turn, and your efforts culminate in a gratifying boss battle and build-up to said battle. AEGIS looks imposing when you confront it at last, though you make short work of it. The battle is very simple without much spectacle though, and the novelty wears off quickly. I beat it first try with plenty of time to spare, which is at least good if the puzzles have mentally drained you. After that fight, you're given one last pre-rendered cutscene. There are a few of these in the game, and they look good, but the last one is remarkable. It also fits quite neatly into the canon - as you probably expected.

Hopefully I've made it clear that Portal Stories: Mel is worth your time even if you think you've seen everything. The art and music are worthy of VALVe themselves, there's plenty of original thought in the writing and design, the puzzles have plenty of meat on their bones and are some of my favourites I've ever seen, and it's funny to boot. I hope Prism's VR puzzles meet the same high standard!

Aperture Tag puts the power of Portal 2's repulsion and propulsion gels in your hands, creating a kind of spiritual successor to TAG: The Power of Paint. You won't see any of Portal 2 or TAG's other gels here, but the two gels are enough to make a decent game. It turns out that there aren't really that many ways you can combine the two gels, but the game doesn't outstay its welcome, and if you're still not satisfied there are community levels available via the Steam Workshop.

Giving you this paint gun helps address what I thought was a negative of Portal 2: towards the end puzzles became a game of "can you spot the white tile". When you can paint almost any surface you have to consider the whole environment. This makes the puzzles generally engaging and reasonably challenging, though there is a drop in difficulty in the middle of the game. Occasionally Aperture Tag will revisit a level from Portal 2 and cheerfully let you utterly break it with the new gun. The developers clearly put care into their original levels, throwing in plenty of Easter eggs and an alternate ending. Easter eggs are generally easy to find but the most entertaining ones will take some creative thinking (probably some noclipping too). Unfortunately, Portal games encourage you to try and break out of their levels, and gels give you a lot of options for that. Sometimes I would go out of the usual bounds of the level, easily enough to make me think it was deliberate, and end up in a glitchy space with no option but to reload. At one point I even glitched beneath an Aerial Faith Plate inside the level.

Levels sometimes have a very small margin of error too, letting you fall when they ought to be catching you for convenience. For a mod of a game that relies so much on its physics engine, it should be making more allowances for deviations from normal movement. The worst offender is a Faith Plate towards the end of the non-stop minute-long "escape" section, which you'll miss unless you run right up the middle of the preceding ramp, and you can't see until it's too late. That section in general was a little too "tricky" for me to believe people beat it first try, and the long fall and restart from the beginning punctures all the excitement. The developers even add a large in-world button you can press to "skip" the section, which rather than skipping actually plays a video of the sequence being completed. After "skipping" I tried to load my last manual save but couldn't find the option; I only seemed to be able to load from my last autosave (the start of the fourth chapter) or the start of the third chapter.

Your helpful guide for this game is a personality core called Nigel. I'm not sure what personality he's meant to represent; he's somewhere between Wheatley, GLaDOS and the developers themselves. The humour is definitely Portal-y but the jokes are often too similar to what we've heard before. When it's not, a couple of running gags are quite funny (look out for Nigel on the TV screens, getting up to his own adventures while you're busy testing) though it leans on toilet humour a bit. I was a little bit distracted from the delivery by some inconsistencies and grammar errors in the voice lines and subtitles. The alternate ending is very satisfying and the unexpectedly weepy tones in Nigel's voice gave me a laugh. The original art is nice, and the original music supports the mod nicely, keeping the "technological majesty" of Portal 2's music while having its own eccentric (orangey?) flavour, which is something the game does well in general.

Aperture Tag is really satisfying to play because it lets you experience the gel mechanics to the full and fly around its levels unconstrained by which tiles you can shoot, though it's not always the best at anticipating what the player might do. It's also interesting to think with portals that are out of your control for a change. It's reasonably easy to progress through, though a few challenges should make you stop and think, and the Steam Workshop is there for you if you need more. If you're a fan of Portal 2 it's worth keeping in your library even just as an alternative game mode.

HL2: Episode 2 keeps pushing the games' quality upward, while giving the story some welcome acceleration. Episode 1 was a good ending point for the City 17 story; this feels more like the start of a new game. After Alyx helps you from the wreckage of the evacuation train (of course it couldn't go smoothly), your extended date continues way outside City 17, with an excursion through an antlion-riddled mine and then the verdant White Forest - completely different territory but very welcome, and showing sides of VALVe's environmental art that you don't see very often. Your journey takes you up to a converted Soviet missile silo which the Science Team is operating from. You gather some more plot threads for your inventory, launch a rocket, save the day, and see an emotional cliffhanger - at which point, the story ends. Forever. Despite their VR prequel, and lots of behind-the-scenes trying, VALVe haven't given any clear indication that they'll ever continue the story.

I now have about 52 hours' worth of investment in this series so I can fully understand the community's desire for a fitting end to Half-Life. Up until now, while individual adventures are paced really well, the overarching plot has been drip-fed very slowly. Episode Two provides two bizarre revelations (and interestingly, one plot point that works as a revelation now) that invite you to think about the forces at work beyond the world you're experiencing, and question their motivations - not that there's much point if we're not getting a sequel. VALVe clearly knew what their grand finale would involve, but for whatever internal reasons we instead just got a surreal blog post (graphics and level design suffered and pacing felt rushed - review coming soon). Being this invested, I can also see VALVe's point of view - they need to do justice to a series now 22 years in the making, with expectations rising ever higher. It's not something you'd want to rush into, and I hear they've discarded multiple drafts. Some of their key writers have since left too, making the possibility of HL(2E)3 very faint indeed.

Episode Two brings some welcome quality of life improvements: the torch is now separate from your auxiliary power and there is a slightly hacky mount/dismount button for ladders. The fact that you don't need to dismount ladders halfway up also helps a lot! Graphics, sound and level design are all to the same high standard, so I'll talk about what's new, such as your temporary alien companion. It's not much different from having Alyx with you but at least it helps you forget all her animations that VALVe is reusing. It insists on complimenting you for your every action: I don't know if this annoys or flatters other players, but I found the irony of such praise, despite dying and reloading a lot, pretty funny.

This is one of the few new ideas in Episode Two, most interesting of which are the new enemies. The antlions' world is fleshed out further with some new species. Antlion workers and grubs are introduced, as well as the angry, deadly guardian of the antlion hatcheries. The new species change your combat and exploration style a little and give the impression of an established ecosystem, less strikingly but more organically than what we saw in Opposing Force. Hunters combine power, speed and tanking, functioning as mini-striders you can't hide from so easily. Some great power scaling has you unable to fight them at the start, and you face down more and more as the game goes on, until the final battle throws them at you with reckless abandon. You have enough equipment to defeat them, but it doesn't become easy. In stark contrast are the Advisors - you have absolutely no answer to their abilities and are truly helpless before them, even though they're only larvae, so these stand out as the instigators of some of the tensest moments.

Your dwindling weapon inventory has one small addition late in the game; a projectile device you launch from the Gravity Gun that is critical to the final fight. Bringing in new weapons as extensions of the Gravity Gun is a really smart move that, with enough of them, might one day have made up for the void left by all those alien weapons from the first games. That final fight is like nothing seen before in Half-Life, with waves of enemies invading a huge environment. It's on a big scale and it feels uniquely war-like - the kind of set piece you'd expect of a series finale, which at least for now, it has to be. The Episode ends on a character death, which is brutal, tragic and a little symbolic, but not so surprising - maybe surprising character deaths are more difficult post-Game of Thrones. The blog post hints at the kind of ideas they had for Episode 3, such that nothing is off the table - even that death might not be final. Such huge ideas - such a shame we might not see any more. We can at least be grateful for the series ending on a definitive high note.

Some people consider it an epilogue, but really, Episode One is a direct continuation of the original Half-Life 2's story. After a typically brief G-Man sequence, teasing so gently at the larger story, Episode One has you play out the evacuation from the recently-jeopardised City 17, from your efforts to mitigate the destruction, to assisting the evacuation effort on the ground. This game does a lot to fix the problems I had with the original HL2 story, though it doesn't push gameplay much further.

HL2 threw a bunch of characters at you early on and sort of pretended you remembered them all from HL1. It's mostly the same story here, with the exception of Alyx. The star of this Episode, Alyx fights alongside you almost entirely throughout, and you get to look on dumbly as her vivid personality pours out. Alyx is relentlessly positive against terrible odds, has a sense of humour (as cheesy as it can be), and seems to be set up as a love interest, but rather than acting as a "damsel in distress" is highly proactive, a tough and competent fighter (so much more so than those squad members), and seems about as smart as Gordon. This Episode often lets you feel like the big hero, but it's Alyx that knows what to do, and the only reason she needs you around is because you're wearing that great big H.E.V. suit. It's really enjoyable to adventure with Alyx, but she seems more than fond of Gordon and her dialogue even gets a bit flirty. This is very weird - as far as I understand, there's a huge age gap and Gordon only met her for the first time at the start of HL2. What's more, it feels like the entire universe is conspiring to hook you both up. This started in HL2 but some characters practically nudge and wink at you when she's around - it's beginning to feel like I've stumbled into an arranged marriage. That's also weird for user experience reasons: as I understand it, VALVe made Gordon mute so that the player can easily project their personality onto him. Unfortunately it looks like VALVe are going to force Alyx onto the player regardless of their preferences, so... you're out of luck if you'd prefer, say, Mossman, or Kleiner.

Episode One doesn't provide you with a single new weapon, and even takes some away. You go most of the game without your crowbar, forcing you to rely on the "new girl", the Gravity Gun. By the time you get your crowbar back you'll realise the Gravity Gun does just about everything the crowbar does and more. It's very, very clear where VALVe's preferences lie! Despite you spending so much time with the Gravity Gun VALVe have failed to explore its potential any further - even such small changes as a temporary supercharging mechanic, or new throwables with different properties (even Lost Coast had some throwables with potential, like a hook and a harpoon, though it treated them as normal objects), would have gone a long way. What can and can't be affected by a blast from the Gun seems arbitrary too. Physics puzzles also haven't innovated; by this point the player is ready for something beyond weighing things down and propping things up. It could be that they're too nervous about engine quirks breaking things; I had one unfair death in which I fell into a room of explosives, but some movement I couldn't control caused one of the explosives to trip and kill me, so I can understand that.

As you might expect, level design is as inventive as ever, continuing to find new combinations of the existing hazards, objects and enemies, while doing a lot with the sparse additions. VALVe have slightly varied standard combat by bringing a new enemy to the table, which often requires the use of two weapons to dispose of safely. Having Alyx by your side gives VALVe an excuse to throw trickier sets of enemies at you, and she even becomes a combat mechanic at one point. Nothing so far in the series has felt like a retread of anything that came before. Maybe the most memorable section is a rowdy Left 4 Dead-like crusade through an abandoned hospital, which kicked off with the first boss fight to focus on a destructible environment. It reminded me of HL2's brilliant prison section - I'm looking forward to what I assume will be an epic fire station battle in Episode Two. Maybe it's the fact that this is split into three games, and a single 30 hour game would feel different, but I think Episode 2 will have to push the boat out further with new content or mechanics to meet my increasing expectations.

As I mentioned, by the end of Episode One you have left City 17, which makes Episode One feel like the real ending. HL2 doesn't feel complete without it. I suspect there'll be a different setting going forward, with hopefully a bit more focus on the overarching story. Like in most games, though, that story isn't very impactful if it's not fun to play through too. I think that's going to take some ambitious new mechanics and interaction with environments.