Post Script, an HL2 Mod That Focuses on Storytelling

Games based solely on atmosphere are a rather rare thing theses days, where everything needs to rely on big explosions, flashy graphics and if they do have a story, they're something very thin and transparent, a see-through garment on a soulless lingerie model. The reason is a simple one, and that is that such titles are not profitable. Atmosphere games like Penumbra or Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth might be a glorious example of immersion, but none were a money pot like any current run-and-gun first-person shooter, for example.

But that doesn't mean the genre is dead, so leave it to the small developers to try to spark a little bit of magic every now and then. Game journalist and GSW contributor Lewis Denby has been working on Post Script, a rather simple Half Life 2 mod that focuses on environment and storytelling. As surprising as it may sound for an HL2 mod, it seems like there will be no shooting involved at all, and the game, while mostly a story, will be solved through riddles and puzzles. What the title does borrow is Valve's Source Engine and its library.

“Post Script examines the nature of society, how it shapes us and how it’s shaped by us,” Denby said. “It asks how we respond to astonishing hostility and unexpected love. It raises big questions, but there’s a decent chance it won’t get round to answering them. [...] It’s about trying to toy with people’s minds a little bit.”

The game will be released as episodic content, and the developer, or better said, the writer, expects that it will be made up of five episodes. While the first one is already done, and he has some vague idea of what will happen in Episode 2 and 3, the rest of the script is pretty much in the air, and will be written as he goes along.

As Denby sees it, the mod tells a story as “a series of characters look back, from some sort of undefined afterlife, on the period between a terrible disaster that almost wipes out mankind, and the proper end of the world a while later. The central story arc is about how that actually came to happen. Within that structure, each episode explores a single character, and we learn about their day-to-day lives and personalities over that time period. So there’s kind of stuff running parallel.”