Polaris and Radiator

I’ve had a few more Half Life 2 mods to play recently: The Stanley Parable, which had me in stitches, and Nightmare House 2, which had me running scared for a while.

Next on the list was the Radiator mod, which is a work-in-progress..
The series begins with Polaris, a strange short story of a couple’s strange first date in the woods, with star-gazing tasks..

This required clicking on specific stars as prompted, with a bit of a story including a little mention of Polaris being the god of dreams “who knew every mortal heart’s desire”.. rather a cheesy chat-up line 😉

The final note was of the relationship being fairly forgettable.. so when the second part of the story involves a couple in marriage therapy.. I wonder if it’s meant to be the same couple.

This part of the game was weird.. being stuck in a room full of crates and warning signs, and vague instructions to place the crate somewhere within the rows.  Picking up and destroying a random crate triggered some kind of repressed memory of the couple’s life together, but it all seemed rather depressing, regarding illness, death, break-ups.

I found the first few crates easy to place, but any wrong move resulted in explosions and warnings that I wasn’t taking the therapy seriously.  I started to find it rather frustrating, and having the therapist repeatedly asking the same few questions, with the player’s husband giving the same responses only added to my annoyance.. and I gave up on the mod.

I love trying out mods, and I love that there are so many, but I don’t want to be frustrated by them.

The Stanley Parable

The Stanley Parable is another in a long line of experimental mods for Half Life 2, with a narrator guiding the player through the story.. the author of the game recommends that people play before reading about it, so.. go play first, as this post may contain spoilers 😉

Stanley is employee #427, whose job consists of pushing buttons as instructed, when instructed, every day.. until one day, there are no instructions, and no other people.  The narrator provides the direction, and he says that Stanley goes to the employee’s lounge..

After leaving the office, I was presented with two open doors.. the narrator said that Stanley goes through the left one. I disobeyed..

The narrator commented on Stanley having gone the wrong way, and said that he therefore turned left at the next available opportunity.. of course I carried on going the wrong way, which resulted in the narrator talking about how bad Stanley was at following orders.. and that he then decided to punish himself!

The oh-so-calmly delivered commentary about my ruining the story, insults about my ability to follow instructions and the direction to go and punish myself had me crying with laughter 🙂

When the lift arrived, I missed the fact that there was a choice to disobey again, and went up as instructed, to face my punishment.. and mocking from the narrator about being stupid enough to actually get into the trap too 😀

I decided to behave on the second run, but when I came to a set of stairs to go up, I went down.. and then round and round until Stanley went mad, collapsed and died, only to be discovered by a woman who served as a pointed comment about not finding out what the story was about as you didn’t follow instructions!

The third run had my obedience right up until the very end.. I came across the generator room where the player is told about the machine controlling all the employee’s feelings, and causing them to do what they’re doing.. much like how a game controls the players’ feelings and actions 😉

Right up at the top of the room had the option to engage or disable the failing generator.. the blue pill or the red pill.. I made my choice and was rewarded with freedom, or at least entry to an outdoors area 🙂

As it’s still ScampLAN, the guys also tried out the game afterwards, and both disobeyed the initial instruction to go through the left door, though maybe influenced by my comments..

They were more disobedient than me, and went down a floor in the lift, to be faced with the choice of doors again, and with more disobedience being shown an room made of skybox and dev_textures, before being put into an empty Half Life 2 map, with the narrator throwing a few insults about Stanley being fat, ugly and really stupid, bad at his job, and addicted to drugs and hookers:D

When I downloaded the mod, it came with a text file of author commentary, which was preceded by a note saying not to read anything before playing the game itself.  Apparently most people take the left door on their first playthrough.. so I guess we’re a little more delinquent than most!

The author also lists Dear Esther, which I played and loved a while ago, and Robert Yang’s Radiator HL2 mod, which I’d not heard of before but is now in my download queue 🙂