Black Mesa
Moderate overall intensityWhat's in it
Sustained first-person combat with guns, explosives, and melee against human soldiers and alien creatures, with blood spray and on-screen deaths.
Tense stretches through dark facility corridors with lurching headcrab-infested humans and sudden alien ambushes.
Explosions and powerful weapons can burst enemies into flying body chunks (gibbing).
A research disaster kills most of the staff, and the arriving military hunts down surviving personnel along with the aliens.
Occasional mild profanity in soldier and scientist dialogue.
Who can reach your kid
What it is
Black Mesa is a fan-built remake of the 1998 first-person shooter Half-Life, in which you play a scientist who must fight his way out of a research facility after an experiment tears open a rift to an alien world. Most of the game is combat and puzzle-solving: you gather weapons and battle armed soldiers and a range of alien creatures through the ruined complex and, later, an otherworldly landscape. Fighting is bloody, enemies die on screen from gunshots and explosions, and blasts can blow bodies apart into chunks. There is no sexual content, and language is limited to occasional mild words; the tone is tense and at times frightening, with creepy monsters and a facility full of the dead. It is chiefly a single-player game, though it includes optional old-style online deathmatch where voice and text chat with strangers may occur.
How it's framed
The game frames its violence as survival: the player is an ordinary person defending himself against monsters and soldiers to escape and stop an invasion. Killing is presented as necessary action-movie combat rather than something celebrated or cruel, and the story leans on tension, discovery, and a mysterious larger conspiracy rather than on shock value, even as the on-screen gore can be graphic.
Details
- Developer
- Crowbar Collective
- Publisher
- Crowbar Collective
- Released
- Mar 6, 2020
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