With the upcoming release of Half-Life: Alyx the virtual reality game from Valve they’ve given fans an amazing opportunity. All Half-Life games are temporarily free-to-play until the game’s release in March. This means Half-Life and Half-Life 2 with all of their expansions.

To briefly summarize in Half-Life you are an MIT graduate tasked with doing experiments in a top-secret laboratory. One of the experiments goes wrong and horrific creatures starting pouring through a portal you’ve created killing everyone and its your job to figure out what happened, stop it if you can, and escape.

I already own Half-Life 2 and the expansions and have played them to death, but I never got around to playing the original game. By the time I found out about the franchise it was nearly a decade old and as a teenager with limited finances to play games I’d rather spend the money on a new game then buy the old one.

Now I have the chance to go back and revisit the classic and it’s been a lot of fun, but it’s also been horrifying.

Not horrifying in the sense that there’s a creepy atmosphere, visually terrifying foes, or any of the silly jump scares modern day horror games have. Sure it was probably horrifying when it came out, but you can’t go from playing Half-Life 2’s Ravenholm level to the original Half-Life and expect it to be just as scary.

What I’m talking about is a more subtle horror, an inception of insidious design that this game pulled off spectacularly and has been a surprising temptation to resist for me.

Killing the scientists.

Not just running up and blasting them in face with a shotgun GTA style but using cleverness to lure them to their doom under the guise of providing protection and helping them find freedom.

For those who haven’t ever played this game or who haven’t played in a while, every friendly NPC in the game has the mechanic to be told to stay put or follow you. This is useful for when you need a scientist with clearance to open a specific door or to get a security guard to provide backup in a firefight, but there are many instances where you have this power, but no reason to use it. Such as a scientist trapped in a broken hallway that can’t climb the rubble or crawl through vents.

At first you’d be forgiven for thinking that all NPCs have this mechanic and the developers didn’t want to bother taking the time to remove it from those who couldn’t follow you, and this is probably true, for the most part.

Because there are some NPCs who have no useful or practical purpose for following you in the areas they’re found, except for a bit of morbid fun.

Within this wonderful game of action and puzzles, there are secret puzzles for many of the NPCs you come across. Opportunities to use the follow mechanic and some diabolical ambitions to lure these poor souls to their deaths.

Barnacle creatures with open mouths and drooping tongues to snare unwary prey, electrically charged puddles, headcrabs searching for a viable host to infect, military soldiers looking for tie wearing targets, and so on. This game is littered with dangerous situations that you can bring NPCs to and watch their deaths play out in various ways.

I don’t know what’s more horrifying, that the game developers went out of their way to make some of these deaths possible or that as a gamer you have a sincere desire to see if you can make them work.

The game is well made in the sense that the only reason you consider carrying out these gruesome murders is because it never explicitly tells you to. It’s like walking into someone’s home and seeing a pile of wooden puzzle pieces of abstract shapes and sizes sitting on the coffee table, even for those who hate wooden puzzles there’s a pique of interest or a sense of curiosity to see if you can solve it and what it’ll look like when you’ve completed it.

You don’t go into the game thinking how can I kill these poor scientists in brutal and horrific ways. You merely stumble across a scientist standing idly by a vending machine and a lone barnacle sitting in the hallway, easy to dodge and seemingly there for aesthetics.

Most wouldn’t think twice of this scenario and would move on dodging the creature or slaying it with their crowbar, unless your mind works a little differently and you start to put two and two together. And this happens over and over again in this game.

It’s like having a toddler in a white carpeted room with a can of red paint. As long as the lid stays firmly shut the toddler can’t open it, but what would happen if the lid was off the can? Of course there’d be a mess and that would be awful to clean up, but what would the mess look like? How would the toddler interact with it? Would you be surprised in some way by what happens?

It’s that same mindset that worms its way in your brain and you begin seeing opportunities littered throughout the game to do awful, clever, and vile things to the NPCs.

The best thing the game developers ever did was give players the pieces to the puzzle and zero instruction on how to make something happen or a nudge as to what was intended. Just let sickos like me come across these secret sinister puzzles and let the wheels in our twisted minds start turning.

Because this is my first experience with the game and I’m on the clock to finish it while it’s still free I’m focusing on playing it as I would if it were a real-life scenario, which means saving whoever I can, ensuring the NPCs I leave behind are as a safe as can be, and looking away when I have no choice but to kill someone, such as turning on the generator the stubborn scientist is hiding on top of.

But if I have the time, or if I get around to downloading the free fan-made remake Black Mesa (legacy version). I think things will go a little differently for the various NPCs in the game.

Let’s just say there’s a lot of unfinished puzzles that still have my curiosity piqued.