Chapter 6 — "We Don't Go To Ravenholm..." · Half-Life 2 · PC · 2004
Half-Life 2 spends five chapters teaching you to shoot, then takes your ammunition away and drops you into a zombie-infested mining town with a physics toy and a great many circular saw blades.
Ravenholm is the sixth chapter of Half-Life 2: an Eastern European mining town whose inhabitants were overrun after Combine headcrab shelling and turned into zombies, leaving a single survivor — Father Grigori, a shotgun-carrying priest of highly ambiguous sanity who cackles at Gordon Freeman from the rooftops. Level designer Dario Casali has explained that Ravenholm survived from an early build of the game and was retained specifically to give the newly introduced Gravity Gun a stage where it could dominate. The chapter is starved of conventional ammunition, and the town has been elaborately rigged by Grigori with sawblade traps, swinging car hulks, gas canisters and crushing weights, so the player is obliged to fight with the environment rather than with a weapon — and the environment is full of saws. Lighting is kept minimal and high-contrast, used to guide the eye and to withhold information. PC Gamer's Andy Kelly later called it "probably the best level Valve has ever designed".
Valve's standard technique is to introduce a mechanic and then build an environment in which that mechanic is the path of least resistance. Ravenholm is the most aggressive application of the method in the studio's history: rather than encouraging Gravity Gun use, it removes the alternative. Ammunition is scarce to the point of anxiety, and every room contains something heavy, sharp, explosive or swinging that is far more effective than the bullets the player is hoarding.
The result is that players do not so much learn the Gravity Gun in Ravenholm as get converted to it. By the chapter's end a saw blade has stopped being scenery and become a verb. Valve never states any of this — the town simply presents its inventory of lethal objects and lets scarcity do the teaching, which is the same pedagogy Half-Life had used since the original game's tram ride.
Half-Life 2 is a science-fiction shooter about occupation and resistance. Ravenholm is, for about forty minutes, a horror game — and the seam is invisible because the chapter is motivated entirely from within the fiction. The Combine shelled the town with headcrab canisters; this is what a town looks like afterwards. Nothing is contrived for atmosphere that is not also a plausible consequence of the plot.
Grigori is what makes it work rather than merely work well. A silent, empty Ravenholm would be atmospheric; a Ravenholm containing one hysterical priest who has been alone with his congregation-turned-zombies for an unknown length of time, and who has spent that time building saw traps and singing to himself, is disturbing in a way the zombies alone could not manage. The chapter's title — spoken by Alyx, flatly, as a refusal to discuss the place — does more world-building in five words than most games manage in an hour.