7 Confusing Video Game Plots That Make More Sense Than You Think

It's easy to forget amidst all of the Half-Life 3 jokes (one day, folks... one day) just how influential the series was when it first released. While many know of its impact on the first-person shooter genre, they don't realise the significance it had in shaping video game story lines, specifically how they're told.

The Half-Life series is a brilliant example of environmental storytelling, and this is why many people find its narrative difficult and confusing. The vast majority of gamers are used to being force fed story during long, drawn out cutscenes and lengthy exposition, but Half-Life did away with all that, choosing to tell its story through subtle environmental clues instead (a newspaper clipping in Kleiner's lab is enough to alert players to a past war, and characters don't stand around explaining the back story – we deduce it from their dialogue about the present).

Piecing the whole thing together then reveals a relatively simple plot. You play as Gordon Freeman, a Physicist who works at Black Mesa, an experimental facility. Incidentally, one of these experiments goes wrong, opening up a rift in space time and allowing aliens to flood the earth. Freeman battles against these aliens, later crossing into the alien dimension and killing the Nihilanth, the entity maintaining the rift. After this, it's revealed Freeman was being observed the whole time by someone known as the G-Man, who offers him a job.

This takes us to Half-Life 2. Gordon Freeman wakes up from stasis to find the world overrun by an alien race referred to as Combine. Once again Freeman leads an alien resistance.

Adapting to a different kind of storytelling is the most challenging thing about following Half-Life's plot, but when you do, it all clicks into place.