Half-life: Echoes

Relive the Black Mesa incident all over again in this expansion-quality story mod.

- Rick Lane

Has any videogame story been told from more perspectives than Half-Life’s Black Mesa incident?

Including expansions, the vanilla game offers three points of view alone, while countless mods have added to the Black Mesa lore, introducing new playable stories centring on lawyers, black ops assassins, and even alien slaves.

Half-Life: Echoes is the latest in this tradition of framing the Black Mesa disaster from a new angle, and it’s easily the best singleplayer mod for Half-Life in years, offering incredible level design, thrilling survival horror and blistering action. It also weaves itself into the broader Half-Life fiction in some clever ways.

Created by first-time modder James Cockburn, Half-Life: Echoes puts players in the shoes of Candidate Twelve, another Black Mesa employee who arrives for a normal day at work when the resonance cascade transforms the facility into the world’s most technologically advanced abattoir. Like Freeman, Shepard, and the rest, you must navigate and survive Black Mesa’s labyrinth, battering zombies and blasting marines while the G-Man observes it all.

FAMILIAR GROUND

What make Half-Life: Echoes stand out from other Black Mesa retellings is the sheer level of craft and ambition that has gone into it. To begin with, the mod’s 20-odd maps are enormous and stunningly detailed. Even the very first area you spawn in—an underground car park, impresses with its cavernous scale and moody lighting.