Reviews - Escape from the Darkness - Remod for Half-Life

Thanks a lot for making this remod, it fixes a lot of issues of the original mod!!

A decent campaign with weird map design.

The broken geometry is one problem but the other one is the "optional areas" that are nothing more than dead ends.

The maps have unusually high detail in them so that's a plus.

You made this mod from insufferable to a nice experience. Thanks.

This is another one of Zik Shadow's great efforts at giving some obscure Hl mods some much needed polish. I did not feel like playing Escape from the Darkness for much longer than I did, but the little I saw felt consistent with what you'd normally see in Zik's other remods

-HD Models: 8
-Detail texturing: 8
Both great, as always.

-HUD Changes: 7
I actually don't like the hud here, it was basically kept from the original, which made use of two bars, one representing health, the other armor/suit energy, I'd prefer to have a numerical counter in addition to the bars, or replacing them entirely

-Music Changes: 9
I wasn't too bothered by the soundtrack of the original, but I appreciate the switch to the Half-life 2 soundtrack, it feels more fitting, I also like how Zik got creative and introduced some new tracks in certain moments, outstanding job.

-Sound FX Changes: 7
-Text Changes: 7
Nothing bad, nothing special.

OVERALL: 7 (7.6)

Even though I'm giving the Remod itself a 7, I cannot recommend Escape from the Darkness, as I've given the original a 5. I'm gonna do this weird thing I did for The Real | Remod, where I sum up the score for both, which once again gives us a total of 12, and then divide it by 2, which gives us the final rating of 6.

The following is my review of the original, it is unrelated to ZikShadow's work:
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Escape from the Darkness, by Dieblein and Thief (are they the same person? I'm uninformed and dum, sorry) is a bit of a frustrating mod, on first impressions it has some pretty nice looking environments, they kind of don't make me feel like I'm in Black Mesa (I don't recall seeing so many palm trees grow in the new mexico desert, but I don't know things), maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not, it's a refreshing take, at least.

Sadly I couldn't help but notice inconsistencies, for example, early on we see the palm trees I mentioned, they are very detailed for a Half-life mod, then later on we see some pine trees up close in another location, and they are quite literally the two-dimensional cardboard cutouts you'd expect to see in a game from the mid 90's, then we have the bathrooms, they do look very detailed and realistic, the problem is that they are in the wrong place, with graffitti all over the walls and assorted acts of minor vandalism, Black Mesa must have a pretty rowdy population of senior and middle aged scientists, who like to tag bathrooms in their time away from work (can we get one about being forced to wear ****** ties?), either that or the soldiers are just completely ******* nuts.

Sadly the inconsistencies also extend to the visual language of the mod, you have two sets of wooden boxes right next to each other, one is unbreakable, the other is breakable, and you are *supposed* to break that set to get into a vent and progress.

Then there's this bit... Youtu.be

Let's go over it together: so we're going through this office, doing the usual Half-life stuff, oh, door doesn't open (15:15), let's go through the bathrooms, there's a window overlooking the bathrooms from this office (15:30), that's pretty weird, but whatever, let's jump through, by the way, once the next map loads, don't check the door on the left, or it will literally swap between loading each map like 7 times, anyway, we keep moving forward and we get to this valve (16:06), we have no reason to turn it, but let's do so anyway, OH, uhh that did a lot! It also caused a displacement field to appear in mid air for some reason? But nothing seems to have changed... I climbed up into the space above the ceiling and found nothing there, that passage that had collapsed was still blocked, nothing opened up anywhere, I was here for at least 5 minutes trying to figure out this "puzzle", turns out that we have backtrack to the previous map (luckly our friend in the video already knows this), because the door that was locked earlier spontaneously exploded (16:29). You might think the door on the left (16:45) is the way to go, but it just takes you to a dead end, with an invisible wall that prevents you from moving forwards. Wild stuff. Special thanks to Youtuber ParkJinSung for this and their other playthroughs.

By the time I got to the part where soldiers were shooting me from behind the aforementioned 2d trees, in a valley with holes in the ground through which I could see the whole world, I decided I'd like to play something else, and so I did.

I imagine making this was a good learning experience for the author(s?) of the mod back in the day, it seems they worked on it when they were in high-school, I can relate, I wanted to make some Doom levels where you played as some souped-up Imp when I was in high-school. At any rate, despite my issues with this mod, I can tell that the developers are very creative! I hope they have held on to that creativity throughout the years, and that they will continue to do so for the rest of their lives.

Interesting aesthetic design and new weapons but the gameplay is very lacking. Alot of ******** parts like that valley where the soldiers shoot you through the pinetrees but you cant see them.

I stopped playing at that teleport in the cave, I had around ten HP and every time i entered it, i took fall damage and died, litteraly unplayable, there is no health down there, how was i supposed to know the portal would be deadly? Bad game design!Weapons do alot of damage but they are all innacurate as ****.

Lots of invisible walls and places you could get stuck, awkward level geometry where you would constantly bump into edges.