Half-Life 1 Has Been Remade As A Top-Down Roguelike

Half-Life 1 is one of the best first-person shooters ever made, and its fan community is still going strong nearly 25 years after its release. A developer who goes by PinkyDev has recreated the original Half-Life as an isometric twin-stick shooter, and the developer says that Valve has given its permission to put the fan-game on Steam.

Originally titled Half-Life Loop (now called Codename Loop to prevent confusion), the premise of the game is that G-Man has trapped series hero Gordon Freeman in an infinite loop of challenges to test his mettle. Though the original idea was to make a Half-Life roguelike, PinkyDev says that they’re now focusing on creating linear campaigns for the mod.

A demo for the mod is now available on Moddb, and it features a significant portion of the original game’s Questionable Ethics level. It also includes every weapon and enemy in the original Half-Life, excluding certain bosses. The mod also supports custom maps and campaigns, with PinkyDev encouraging mappers to create their own levels to test out the mod.

Half-Life’s modding scene is truly a marvel, with players adding ray tracing to the original game, recreating aspects of the game in Doom source ports, and even retro-porting its remake Black Mesa into its original engine. That’s what we call recursion.