Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

Over the course of the first 3 missions you meet the following characters:

• Icarus
• Noah
• Nomad
• Birdman
• Dogen*

(who are all men)

and 3 nameless side characters with a single line of dialogue each, 2 of them are women.

*Dogen is not actually met, but he's introduced through dialogue.... by the 2 nameless women characters who each have a line like "Dogen expects you to pay your debt, and he's getting impatient"

You get introduced to 1 important woman about halfway through the game, and 1 other important woman about ¾ of the way through. And then that's it.

There's this weird discrepancy between the world/level designers filling spaces with an even distribution of men and women, and then the writers basically saying "the only important people in this story are men".

I recently played through the original Mirror's Edge and now I'm playing through Catalyst.

Two things have struck me: firstly, Catalyst feels so much better moment to moment.

But secondly: this game has a really weird relationship to gender.

With the side characters that you find in the runner safe houses and such, there are plenty of women.

But the characters who play an important role in the story? They're basically all men.

(One of the expansions to the original game, Blue Shift, also included some great xen sections which showed off this kind of stuff, and it's something that the original game was very sorely missing.)

Black Mesa (the game) adds scanning equipment, and tents, and various pieces of quick-set-up infrastructure and machinery, to make it clear just how much they were messing around in the border world.

I've been playing Black Mesa, and I've gotten up to Xen, and I have to say that they've done an outstanding job.

They've managed to make it feel alien, while also expanding on the mechanics of the core game.

It's beautiful, and (most importantly to me) it actually makes the story behind xen more clear.

The scientists at black mesa were already sending survey teams to explore xen, and while that's said in some side dialogue in half life 1, you never really saw it.

(cont)

gears, cogs,
sprockets and sprogs,
That's all you need,
to make some frogs

hello sweetlings, softlings, and otherlings!

It's this weird mix between

a really strong aesthetic, and interesting stealth gameplay mixed with mechanics about light

and

an interface that makes it feel like they didn't think the game was worth the effort to just polish it a little bit more.

Things that feel Early-access-y:

It has dialogue, but it doesn't have subtitles.

The main menu and loading screens have text at the bottom of the screen telling you what version number it is.

There's a mechanic for scanning your environment for reasources. Pressing the key doesn't do anything that visually looks like a scan - floating icons that represent where resources are just appear.

The health and food bar look like placeholders.