Half-Life News

Video game documentarians Noclip have released more than an hour of footage from Arkane Studios’ cancelled Half-Life 2 horror spin-off, Ravenholm. The video was originally captured for Noclip’s 2020 documentary about the history of Arkane, the studio behind the much beloved Deathloop and Dishonored series. Ravenholm did feature, albeit briefly, in Noclip's original documentary, but now Noclip producer Danny O’Dwyer has decided it's time to show off a bit more of it, interspersing his gameplay footage with some critical context for what’s going on and the ideas behind it. Have a watch of it below:

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Footage of Arkane's Half-Life spin-off, Ravenholm, has been posted online by Noclip, the YouTube channel known for producing some really great documentaries on games.

In the hour-long footage, you are shown the build Arkane created to show the current progress of the game to Valve. This means what you see is not a finished title, but it still offers a glimpse at what might have been.

In the game, you would have played as Lieutenant Shephard from Opposing Force, and met up with a fellow by the name of Father Gregory who took refuge in an asylum that acted as an experimentation center. The building at one time in its life featured a children's hospital, so you would have found toys on the floor of the place, making it "a bit creepy."

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Part of the modern soundscape is a sing-song synthetic voice telling us about everything from slime recipes and teenage drama to unionisation procedures and scissor-wielding 'fashion hacks' that surely are covert fetish videos. It is TikTok's text-to-speech voice, and it is everywhere. Now it's even in Half-Life, thanks to a mod which replaces the opening tram ride voiceover with a TikTok TTS version. It's a distressing artifact, and I hate that it kinda works. See/hear for yourself in the video below.

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s far as intro sequences go, Half-Life's is an all-timer. A tram ride through Black Mesa's mad science labyrinth, as a somewhat stilted automated voice sets a clinical, unnerving tone for the extradimensional disaster story to come...
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Gordon Freeman and Nick Farell have a lot in common. Both work in the field of secret government science: Freeman is a theoretical physicist at Black Mesa, and Farell is a generator technician at Delta Base. Both of their companies are working on teleportation technology in huge, sprawling underground labs in New Mexico. Both are men of few words (no words, to be precise) and despite their nerdy leanings are just as capable with rocket launchers and shotguns as they are with scientific equipment. And both are about to have an extremely bad day...
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