You should go to Ravenholme
Half-Life 2 is 20 next week, and mining town Ravenholm is still a masterclass in first-person horror
It's autumn now, something I'm aware of because my house is freezing and I got a faceful of falling leaves while cycling up the hill to my house this morning. Autumn being an end to things means that thematically it's a good time to look backwards, and so I've tumbled back in love with car-based kickabout Rocket League despite being terrible at it and having no concept of how to play the ball.
I fulfil a valuable, but low-scoring, role in my friendship group when we play Rocket League. I'm the enforcer, a vehicular Vinnie Jones, moving at high speed and annihilating my opponents. This is a faux pas to more established Rocket League players, and as a result, it annoys people like you wouldn't believe. This throws them off their game as they try to get payback on me. Then my friends who know how to play can start bashing the goals in. It has the added benefit of lowering expectations on me, so that now anytime I hit the ball in the right direction, I get cheers of encouragement from my friends.
But that's not the only way I've been looking back. Half-Life 2 turns 20 next week, and I'm here to tell you that the best way to celebrate that birthday is to get involved and play Ravenholm, one of the best FPS levels ever made, and still the most interesting part of Half-Life 2 all these years later.
“We don’t go to Ravenholm anymore," says your occasional companion Alyx Vance during the opening hours of Half-Life 2. The oppressive world of Half-Life 2 is pretty miserable at the best of times, but Ravenholm is one of its most jarring tragedies: a stronghold of the resistance that the alien Combine shelled with Headcrab bombs, which are… bombs filled with Headcrabs, little turkey-looking things that turn people into zombies.
Obviously, soon after you go to Ravenholm. And look, if you hate the idea of a town of people turned into faceless undead monsters then yes, Ravenholm is probably pretty horrifying. But as a gamer, Ravenholm is a masterclass, a Halloween fairground ride designed to showcase Half-Life 2's best weapon: the Gravity Gun. It teaches you to use the Gravity Gun effortlessly – with barely a "cut off their limbs" – and trains you to fight with physics, something no game has managed to feel as good since.
The gravity of the situation
If you've never played Half-Life 2, you're going to love the Gravity Gun. When Alyx Vance hands the player the weapon minutes before you rock up in Ravenholm she tells you it's mostly used for heavy lifting, which explains why it carries the entire game from that point on. It allows you to pick up and throw basically any object in the game, which is instantly thrilling. You don't really learn what that means until you get to Ravenholm though, where you learn its true power is in hurling sharp objects at rotting flesh.
I won't break down every part of Ravenholm – you should get to explore Half Life 2 for yourself if you haven't gotten to it yet. But the first moment in Ravenholm teaches you about the brilliance not just of the doomed town, but also Valve's game design excellence: when you first enter Ravenholm you see a zombie chopped in half by a saw blade. Your path forwards is blocked by several saw blades stuck in the door frame, and when you grab one with your gravity gun to clear the path, a zombie staggers into view, practically wearing a bullseye.
You'll barely reach for a gun for the rest of your time in Ravenholm. Half-Life 2 isn't a horror game, but for the next hour or so you'll fight for your life against swarms of zombies, meet the enigmatic Father Grigori — a priest driven insane by what happened to his flock in an archetype straight out of a Romero flick and isn't mentioned by anyone else anywhere in the entire franchise, tragically — and face off against the infuriating poisonous zombies, and the fast ones too.
Later the steady supply of saw blades starts to dry up and I found myself as a teenager, and again now when I replay, putting myself into cramped corners on purpose so that I could bounce the blades off the wall and back in my direction, ready to scoop it off the ground and fire it off again.
Tragically, Half-Life now seems like a dormant series. But there is some evidence that Valve wanted to tell more stories in Ravenholm's world. And it's going to make you bitter. Immersive sim legend Warren Spector and the team at Junction Point Studios were planning to set an entire DLC episode there. There's no real information on the game, but Warren Spector developing a Ravenholm episode is probably my sleeper agent activation phrase.
But, after Valve cancelled this Ravenholm episode, Valve passed the idea to Arkane Studios. The studio behind Dishonored, Prey and Deathloop. The protagonist was going to be Adrian Shepherd from Half-Life: Opposing Force. Sadly, this didn't come to fruition either. You can see an hour of gameplay here.
Still, Ravenholm exists and you can play it. You should play it. It's probably the closest we will get to a proper horror game from Valve, but with the bad taste of a terrible Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Zombies level fresh in my mind, I'm nostalgic for zombies done right.
And, you know, the gravity gun.
Out this week
A busier week if you're PS5 Pro inclined. I'm skipping Sony's updated PlayStation because my PS5 is mostly sat under my TV so i can watch things on it, but for a lot of people this mid-generation refresh is going to be a big deal.
Otherwise, there's a VR Metro game and a top-down shooter coming to Early Access. Why not give Straftat a go?
- PS5 Pro: Nov 7
- Metro Awakening VR: Nov 7
- Ammo and Oxygen (Early Access): Nov 7
Gibs
- Tarkov PMC achievement status: 223 / 300 - I haven't played much because Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 still has me in a chokehold. I went on this week to discover that most of the maps are overrun with zombies that will infect you with a single melee swing, leading to a slow and agonising death. I went to Interchange, the only map not full of zombies after wiping out a couple of times and was killed at spawn by a player with a 30 k/d and a grenade launcher. So I'm taking a few days off until the event ends.
- This piece on VG247, by Dom Peppiatt on the use of Faith No More's Epic in one of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's multiplayer maps, is a good read.
- Someone hacked that new Nintendo alarm clock so it can run Doom. Obviously.
- My Australian partner took me to see DZ Deathrays in London last week. DZ Deathrays are an Aussie dance-punk trio, so I guess we went as a cultural exchange date night. They're great live, so here's a couple songs.