Why Are Old Halo Games So Creepy? - Halo Retrospective

Hello, my name is Nikos and happy Spooktober, this past summer I played Halflife 2 for the first time. It took me quite a while and during the game's runtime, Gro tesque monsters and body horror fusions. Attacks the player despite the abundance of alien monsters. in Halflife the setting itself is what I remember most from the game, the tone of the game is absolutely bleak, an overwhelming alien empire has conquered the Earth, built and ruined, beset by alien wildlife and parasites forced onto our planet from the entire universe, civilization and even the atmosphere. itself has been completely shaped by the will of the combine with the entire sea level dropping several feet along with human populations being forced into impoverished cities that are governed by numbers instead of names, these cold and desolate environments of Halflife 2 It unearthed a nostalgic feeling within me.

I was suddenly reminded of when I played Halo Combat Evolved as a kid, and then it reminded me how much I appreciated the first Halo game and how it feels and maintains a very different tone from the other

games

in the HALO series that it's hard to explain. While Halo 2 onwards has more light-hearted and action-packed tones, the first Halo is sinister, mysterious, and at times downright terrifying. It's also the bloodiest of the Halo

games

. Gunshot wounds and melee attacks cause a lot of blood in the game. Shabby, this Elite combat evolution is among the best pre-2005

creepy

video games and honestly, it's a little hard to describe why this game is so

creepy

and quite unnerving at times, so what makes it Is Halo Combat Evolved so scary?

Activate your rifles. lantern we go Marines Halo Combat Evolved begins with a war for a lost cause, humanity is decidedly on the defensive as the overzealous Covenant alien races melt human planets into carbon and crush their military with superior technology and numbers in a apparently blind jump. Despair leads the UNC ship known as the Pillar of Autumn to a mysterious ring-shaped planet, one of which has never been seen before. The human crew aboard the Autumn has only one advantage over the Covenant, the biomechanically engineered super soldier known as the Master Chief. The player character, the Covenant, reaches Ottoman space, and after a brief naval fight, Covenant infantry begin boarding the human ship.

As for gameplay, Pillar of Autumn serves as an excellent tutorial for the player; throws only two basic enemy forms at the player. Skilled Elites are protected, as well as weak and cowardly Grunts, and the player is offered very few weapon options. Here you learn about crouch melee grenades and more so far. This is a classic setup for a sci-fi universe and a first-person shooter story mode. It's pretty run-of-the-mill at this point, upon evacuating Autumn, the Master Chief, as well as Autumn's captain pillar and all the surviving human crews, have no choice but to dive to the surface of this mysterious World Alert Covenant in ring shape.

Drop the ship back, they must be looking for survivors. I recommend immediate evasion. Stepping foot into the ring for the first time was an iconic moment for players as they looked up at the Sky Box to see the planet they are currently on wrapping and around their heads. a fascinating image that can best be described as psychedelic or even sublime alien, the ring itself is all-encompassing and will always be remembered by the player just by looking at the Sky Box; the player only has a few moments to assimilate their new surroundings. Almost immediately, Covenant search parties descend from space to hunt down the surviving human forces of the Castaways in this Mission titled Halo, the player regroups with the survivors and protects themselves from the Covenant and the decidedly alien architecture is definitely not architecture. of the Covenant because it's not purple enough and definitely not. a natural formation thanks to Cortana's helpful and informative suggestion this cave is not a natural formation someone built it so it must lead somewhere the Halo ring is an artificial world full of alien structures and facilities these facilities seem inactive but the The player will quickly discover that many of these structures are very much awake and currently functioning, as the surface of the Ring is filled with plants, trees, and geological formations like rocks and mountains, but these environments feel out of place, even too barren. and clean to be natural there.

There isn't a single animal or living creature native to the Ring notable when Bungie designed the game, Halo's empty atmosphere was only partially intentional. It has long been known that Halo Combat Evolved was originally planned to showcase dinosaurs and other alien beasts that have populated the ring and the final release environment. Wildlife was wiped out, aside from sea worms and moths, leaving us with a fairly lifeless ring. As the Master Chief leads the Marines across Halo to fight the Covenant and the Guerrilla's desperate attacks, several mysteries remain. no response for the player. partly due to how our minds are completely perplexed by the strange world around us, at the forefront of these questions are these two, since the Covenant did not build Halo, who did, and furthermore, for what purpose is a planet created? in the shape of a ring filled with active alien Installations that seem to have no meaning or purpose.

This brings me to what is perhaps my favorite part of Halo. Combat evolves level design. Lial's spaces are the subject of an internet aesthetic that portrays empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Lial itself is a term that describes something that is intermediate between two states trans IAL or indeterminate, it is a fairly abstract term and Lial spaces themselves are really huge on the internet today, partly due to the disconcerting and terrifying images of the back rooms. These Lial spaces really attract a cult following because they provoke a very strange feeling in the people who see them, it's a kind of nostalgic fear, as I like to explain it, and when I found the Lial spaces for the first time I fell in love with the whole style. artistic, it's really strange to me, I just love the idea of ​​how empty they are and how creepy they are when I was a kid in high-rise buildings.

I used to go down to the basement floors and just relax there with no one down there, just empty dimly lit hallways and all I could hear were the ceiling lights above me and the occasional moans from the elevator. While most modern video games increase graphics budgets by oversaturating their level scenes with objects, rocks, foliage, and other assets, Halo Combat Evolution's environments are fairly barren due to the limited hardware in the original. Xbox, this lack of detail is complemented by the dull and cold colors. The tones chosen for much of the game, 4Runner's cold, bland hallways, elevator shafts, and endless copy-pasted mazes somewhat reflect the empty outer parts of the Ring, the dull blues and grays of these hallways leaving the player out of his element, a far cry from the bright, warm human architecture aboard the Autumn, sometimes wandering through these spaces as a child made me feel a little nervous, like something was around the corner or lurking in the shadows. shadows, similar to when I was exploring those Underground Basements that were completely empty and always kept me curious as to what these completely empty Bland and Combat Evolved forum structures must be.

These forun spaces are rudimentary, rough and angular through this design, they show their age and appear to be as old as the rocks that surround them complement this factor - how austere and gloomy these environments are with little to no lighting as you climb up to the top of the 4un structures, as I mentioned earlier, the surface reflects these installations almost equally as lifeless mascots of muted colors, blue, gray and dark stones. Lush emerald greens, the color choices of the top of the ring create a rather depressing environment, almost as if the art design team wanted you to feel like you were in an alien world that was created and poorly disguised as a living ecosystem of a cutting way. the wildlife of Halo ended up complementing Halo's setting brilliantly, the whole ring makes the player wonder why couple with Halo's art design, the sound design and Halo tie it all together, the vast sublime canyons that dwarf the player harassed by the howls of hostile winds and snowfall.

Rain and ambient insects can be heard chirping through the ring, making the ring feel even more meaningful and vast. The canyon walls themselves. Echoing sounds the player makes in a quiet landscape to make the player feel even smaller and the ring feel even more meaningful and sublime. The effect is amplified in sections without music. Totally empty enemies and friends. The game's main characters don't speak very often, reserving it to further draw players' attention to the world. Atmospheric noises can also be heard in these solemn halls. They yawn and breathe almost as if they serve as the ring's circulatory system, as if they were alive.

Halo, as all great game narratives do, absorbs the player into its world, the art design, narrative, sound design and gameplay mechanics all molding together to effectively put the player in the Halo ring alongside the boss Because of this, standing in a random corner of one of these empty rooms will induce feelings of liminality for some, this helps build a compelling and sinister narrative as the player continues their guerrilla war against the Covenant, the mystery of Halo It remains in the back of their minds, prompting them to discover the secrets of this ring-shaped planet. The Master Chief arrives at the control room after slaughtering any children of an Inhuman who stood in his way.

The boss connects Cortana and her AI to the main system. The terminal fully embraces a much-needed Victory against the Covenant. Cortana has access to all of the Ring's data stores and is finally able to piece together Halo's purpose despite this recent Victory. Cortana tells the Chief some very disturbing news, she mentions that there is no time to explain and urges. The boss must leave the control room and head into the swamps without her when quest 343 Guilty Spark opens. We witness ranks of fleeing Covenant soldiers. The mysterious swamp is beset by thick black fog, and after falling into the swamp, we slowly begin to unravel.

The disaster that unfolded here helps make Captain Covenant something of a ship-launcher. There are no signs of human life anywhere. The shots come from rooms that appear empty when we approach them. Meanwhile, this spooky environment makes the player control the tree line. see if anyone is watching them from the thick fog after descending into the structure and deeper into the swamp, the player finds the same Lial spaces as before. Something is very wrong. The Covenant's minimal presence is weak. Their elite squad leaders are missing and gruesome massacres. Some of the hallway lights flicker. Unknown viscous drops from ceilings in isolated places.

Many gates and foreign facilities and structures down here are damaged or completely destroyed, which is definitely not from the Covenant, as they worship these structures believing they were made by their gods. Otherwise, without any concern for architectural integrity, it's down here with the player, the first sign of friendly human life seems to be mad, stay back, stay back, you're not going to turn me into one of those things that I'll blow your asses off. Brains, stay away. For my part, Mendoza, oh God, the things took them, they left. This setup is brilliant, subverting players' expectations and taking them out of their comfort zone.

They were perfectly content to take down the Covenant waves one by one and were constantly getting on edge. Now gearing up for something that completely disrupts everything you've grown accustomed to in Halo, why do we always have to listen to this old stuff? Watch your mouth, son, these things are your story, I should remind you, grunts, why we're fighting to protect. If the governor wants to erase this particular part of my history, that's fine with me, where does that come from? of Mena. Don't know. After watching a live leak video, the player learns about the alien flood parasites that absorb living creatures into a hive. mind of shared memories that lash out at the living on an endless mission to consume them all, a parasite so devastating that entire ecosystems and atmospheres of the planet are reshaped to their will if they manage to gain enough power, theseCreepy parasites mutate anything they can catch their antennae on. and grotesque tortured monsters and were responsible for the destruction of the original creators of the Halo ring over 100,000 years ago.

The player now wanders the corridors created by this fallen alien empire, the race that fell to the insatiable parasites that now lurk in the containment facility. that was meant to lock them in stasis for eternity, it's as if these two titans, the precursors and the flood, collided once again, 100,000 years later, the humans and elites possessed by the flood began to rush the player through The facility damaged with the introduction of this new and quite terrifying threat, the player finally gets a respite, finally an elevator out of this hellhole. Let's ascend to the swamp again and get out of here now.

Flood Ed's weapons and the flood beings retain the memories of their previous lives enough to chaotically fire any weapon they want. they can get their hands on and let's get back to the blood of this game, the flood is bloody, unloading rounds in flood combat forms will slim them down and send chunks of their organs and body parts all over the room, this also ties into the game mechanics where you can target the limbs of a flood form to take their weapon or even cut off the claw they use to attack you in melee with environmental narration that knocks it out of the park in this level and you can also see the effort put in by the Covenant to block themselves.

To keep infection away with these stacks of purple boxes. The bodies of the Marines can be found piled up next to those of the Covenant, they became so desperate that they put aside their differences and fought to the last man. The flood reveal was a classic horror setup complete with found footage video. and now each subsequent level becomes much darker and much more intense as the stakes are raised, chaos has now erupted throughout the ring and from here on in the game, isolation really begins to set in in many sections of the campaign. Throughout Halo, the Boss fights completely alone.

Marines only join periodically. the Master Chief in his fight against the Covenant after the Master Chief leaves the swamps, from this point on no more Marines will join the Master Chief in his fight as there are very few left in the ring. After the flood has become virulent and after Cortana is left behind. In the control room, no one familiar would keep the player company, this creates a sense of intense isolation in these already eerie spaces and it is often up to the Chief and Cortana alone to continue Humanity's fight, the first sign of life. from the creators of Then, the facility appears to the player as they are teleported to what is perhaps Halo's most notable facility and also the game's most infamously hated mission.

Well, I admit that this level is really bad, it's incredibly repetitive, boring, difficult and quite angry. some of the darkest and emptiest areas can be found in Lial space. Labyrinth of installation 04 the library, a structure with no access to the upper floor and which is now infested with The Walking Dead. undoubtedly monotonous and boring, this mission is a drag in a dark, monotonous, almost monotonous and confusing facility. The player spins the entire SLO pushing through horde after horde of flood creatures with nothing interesting in sight and an absolute maze to fight in this mission. Much like Halo's back rooms, despite the presence of flood jump threats and scary dimly lit areas in this Mission, the scariest part of the library is the introduction of the rocket flood after claiming the index.

Activate Halo and finally beat this nightmare of a mission. The Master Chief is teleported back to Cortana in the control room, where he finally learns the full truth of Halo's purpose. Halo is effectively a giant stagnation button that eliminates all life in the galaxy. The ultra-powerful precursors were so out of options that they chose to sacrifice themselves. themselves to prevent the flood from winning the fact that an Empire is powerful since the foreigners were so unable to defeat the flood that they needed to make a weapon that eradicates all sentient life just to prevent the flood from continuing to spread is very discouraging and scary.

Perspective that only shows how overwhelmingly dangerous and all-powerful the flood is without telling the player that this was even more worrying, especially since minute by minute the flood grew exponentially in strength as they spread through the ring that was built to destroy them, the Clock. . The ticking and only one man had the opportunity to stop them. Cortana and the boss damaged the ring systems along the way to prevent them from firing and then find Captain Keys, who is infected by the flood and the initial outbreak and is taken aboard the Truth and Reconciliation. against his will, the flood was attempting to organize what was left of the captain into a fleshy supercomputer known as the grave mind so that he could effectively coordinate his hive mind with the appropriate strategy, a grotesque detail that most of the ladies are if you look at the flood massive in front of you, the limbs and pieces of numerous lost human souls can be seen conglomerated next to the captain's keys and this is most evident if you turn on the anniversary graphics.

Covenant bodies pile up all over the ship to feed the floods and at this point the Truth. and Reconciliation has almost completely fallen into the flood, the Covenant having very little control over it after the boss breaks through Captain Keys' brain to obtain his neural implants that are necessary to detonate the Pillar of Autumn for the end of Halo. An absolute fight is going on. For me, in the shadowy halls of the starry autumn pillar it's perfect that, although there was all this backtracking in the campaign where the player revisits previous missions, I think it's pretty perfect that the player enters Autumn through one of the escape capsules.

The hatches mirror the escape pod sequence from the first level and bring the narrative poetically full circle towards the end of the mission. There's a really disturbing detail that I don't see enough people talking about online right before the player can stock up on rockets and ammo. in the Armory, but in the dark corners of the room, the only use of active camouflage Flood Elites is that these invisible Elites hang out silently waiting to jump on the player while they are distracted. Gathering rockets and ammo is really creepy and then absolute. The horde comes at you as soon as you kill the first invisible Elite so you know there is no rest in this game with the flood, the master boss destabilizing the reactor and a spectacular wild boar race against the clock.

The ring is then destroyed and the game closes. with everything from the beginning of the story destroyed apart from the boss and Cortana, plus the Marines in Covenant who appeared in the books, that and Mr. Dustin Echoes, did anyone else make it just DUS and Echoes? Dustin Echoes we will go. We came back for them, all of them, that's right, I think Dustin Eko was the guy who opened that door in the library, that's true, and between, you know, I always wanted Sergeant Johnson to come out of some little cubby here, well, we had lots of legendary endings. jokes in which Sergeant Johnson came out like brushing his teeth and he came out doing a lot of funny things that we couldn't do now.

The funniest thing was that I remember when fans were finally able to get into Halo PC. probably think and remove the camera and see what was going on and try to see what was under the boss's helmet. MH unfortunately the boss takes off his helmet. He wears another helmet, a beautifully dark and sinister story that began as solid science. fi shooter and ended up as a survival horror FPS, the midpoint turns and Halo is amazing and the entire campaign has a stellar narrative that is generously conveyed by the game's art direction and sound design, but that's just the mode for a player I've seen. people share online before wandering around empty multiplayer maps from pre-2010 games scares them.

Half-Life's multiplayer maps running on Valve's own source engine are infamous examples of unintentional creepy scenes in games, many other games using the same engine host the same thing. Garry's Mod Counterstrike effect, all of these scenarios feel sterile and quite desolate, although they are not built on the same engine. Halo Combat Evolved is no exception to this rule. Often, after playing the campaign, I decided to just wander around the multiplayer maps on my own after visiting them. all of them, some of these maps are quite strange, let's quickly shoot through some of them. Sidewinder mage prisoner rats run high hangam is canonically who knows where honestly he is apparently lost in some secluded location in facility 04 high hangam is a very large vast open space complete with a view of the sky but not the ground eliminating any indication of where we're on the map dur lives up to its name a space station trapped in the void the crown of space multiplayer maps Lial goes to Chiron TL 34 the teleporter labyrinth on Mars with no conceivable exit while the buzzes and howls of the environment make All of these maps seem barely alive as I wandered through them as a kid with too much time on my hands.

I always wondered if I had encountered some type of player or entity. Even alone, I felt like someone was watching me. It's no surprise that with the early arrival of the Internet and the lack of fact-checking sources, many began to believe and share urban legends about ghosts lurking in these ancient games. Halo 2 also has a bit of Lial in it. quality, especially their multiplayer maps that scared me as a kid when I walked on them alone and talking about games, urban legends and Halo 2, a hoax was born, the ghost of the crash that swept the internet, a glitchy entity with no name tag . that glided through non-animated maps that was enshrined in one of Halo 2's most desolate cold maps, while these ghost sightings were probably just glitches or, in the case of online matches, network errors, there was no evidence legitimate efforts to debunk these hoaxes and legends in the past.

Therefore, the day when the ghost of the blockade and other campfire stories that accompanied these classic Lial games spread like wildfire, this scared numerous children around the world and also made many decide to go ghost hunting. on many Halo maps to see if they could witness these mysterious anomalies for themselves, it wouldn't be a Halo Combat Evolved

retrospective

without mentioning the modified Maps Halo Custom Edition released as a PC port for Halo complete with modding tools that allowed anyone to dive in and create maps and experiences for everyone. For enjoyment and the process of using the same engine, these maps often convey the same sense of isolation and liminality as bungee levels.

They also use the same textures and ambient sounds, as well as making these expanses look stark and old in some cases. These maps seem creepier because of how big and unpolished many of these levels can be, and I'm not even talking about Halo's horror maps. These horror maps are the peak of the disconcerting old PC game Factor that approaches Darkness over the already sinister and Many lial spaces, including myself, remember experiences on some of these modified Landmark maps and today, wandering alone through these abandoned sands is a surreal experience. Halo Combat Evolved was a monumentally definitive piece of entertainment from the early 2000s, but many overlook how this game handles its tone.

I personally love this tone, it reminds me of old PC games from the 1990s, it always felt like a walk in the woods at night, that's what Halo doesn't show or tell you, that says a lot, you don't need to see to the precursors nor their battle. with the Flood or the human Covenant War to understand how drastic and important these events are, instead they are left as an Environmental Wonder surrounded by a mystery so significant to the Galaxy that the player only needs to look to the Horizon to remember its importance in everyone. In the first ring of Halo, we find spaces from our youth that we remember fondly and, in some cases, not so much.

These memories left a permanent mark on Halo fans everywhere when we see these spaces. Now there is an avalanche of memories returning of mixed and highly charged emotions, but this time receiving a new sensation a sense of transition the passage of time Limón these same halls and canyons are now more than 20 years old once new and full of wonders and friends now we go through them alone in a new light I can't deny that playing through the The old Halo games areEerie not just because of the flood hordes or the dark, silent corridors or the dead surface formations of the ring, but now because I completely understand the weight of how quickly time has disappeared and, furthermore, how powerless I am to stop myself.