Half-Life 2

How the wordless Gordon Freeman became one of gaming’s best raconteurs

Before Dunwall, there was City 17. Before The Last Of Us’s overrun sewer colony, there were Route Kanal’s resistance outposts. Before Elizabeth DeWitt came Alyx Vance, and before Andrew Ryan there was Wallace Breen. Thousands of words have been devoted already to explaining how great Half-Life 2 is to play, but that’s only a fraction of its legacy. It might read like hyperbole, but a great deal of what we know about effective videogame storytelling today was incubated in Valve’s 2004 opus.

Galak-Z: The Dimensional

Scintillating but imperfect 2.5D space shooter Galak-Z proves that FTL’s creators were onto something when they coined the ‘Roguelike-like’ label. We do need a less generic umbrella for tough games that aren’t afraid to reset a chunk of progress when they kill you, and procedurally generate their levels. 17-Bit’s latest comes in hot on the tail of The Swindle, another game to be loosely classed as Roguelike, both titles experimenting with structural twists designed to retain the tension of permadeath while allowing each lifespan to contribute to a detached progression path. Call these Samsara games, perhaps: your actions in past lives can influence this one, but you’re still lashed to the merciless wheel of rebirth.

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture starts in a familiarly restrictive manner, funnelling you down a set path marked out by immovable barriers and impenetrable shrubs to keep you from wandering off into the tempting landscape beyond. It’s a sop to convention that feels almost like a letdown in the context of the promises made for the game, but any sense of disappointment is short-lived. Only a short while later you’ll be overwhelmed with indecision as Rapture’s world and story reveal their surprising – and entirely refreshing – indifference to your presence.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Hideo Kojima isn’t normally one to practise what he preaches. The Metal Gear saga warns against puppet masters who would govern our lives from the shadows, but does so in adventures traditionally trussed up by directorial intent and a rigid script. Kojima’s self-contradictory nature is perfectly captured in The Phantom Pain when series mainstay Revolver Ocelot berates new recruits for “fighting as Hollywood taught them” only to spend a few seconds swivelling a six-shooter on his finger in slow motion. This is the same man who, two hours earlier, helped us unload a shotgun into a flaming unicorn. The series has made knowing nods to the conflict between authorial vision and agency in the past – think of Raiden at the end of MGS2 – but until The Phantom Pain (and its playable prologue, Ground Zeroes), it had not sought to remedy it.

The making of Her Story

Sam Barlow and Viva Seifert talk us – in spoiler-filled detail – through this shake-up of game narrative conventions

Big publishers and their aversion to risk makes for a solid, if familiar, backbone to a story, but it’s usually slaved to a simplistic narrative. As a topic, creative stagnation looms large over the videogame industry, spurring talk of an increasingly desolate landscape of numbered sequels and incremental feature bloat. It’s a genuine concern, even if such warnings often appear, without apparent irony, next to lists of ten things to be excited for in Fallout 4.