 Good evening. Half-Life is not a horror game. At least, not for the most part. The original game was filled to the brim with dark, slapstick humor, featuring scientists dying in all kinds of funny ways and exploding into huge chicken bone giblets, all because humanity couldn't keep their noses out of this nasty green space world filled with giant testicle spiders. When the sequel released in 2004, it actually took some people aback because of its more somber and lonely tone. Though it too wound up having its fair share of comic relief characters and sitcom-tier gags involving clumsy pet headcrabs and garden gnomes and time-traveling boats. For all the series does to try and tell a serious story about a struggle for the future of humanity, it still always had a consistent sense of humor throughout, for better and for worse. There is one very notable exception to this silliness though. One moment in the series that drops every hint of irony and abruptly releases the player into a world of complete darkness without any cheesy slapstick or watermelon props to console them. That moment is a little under halfway through the Half-Life 2 campaign, when a surprise combine assault splits the cast apart and players suddenly find themselves alone. Plunged headfirst into the grim and unsettling ghost town of... To the last damn near 20 years, the sixth chapter of Half-Life 2, We Don't Go To Ravenholm, has stuck with players in a way that most other video game levels could only dream of doing. It's given people nightmares and made them lose sleep, yet left them enthralled and desperate for more all the same. Its inspired countless fan mods, remains one of the most talked about topics in the game's community, and was even the center piece of at least two official cancelled spin-offs that people still mourn the loss of to this very day. And despite the growing amount of dirt that people have started spattering all over Half-Life 2's name in the recent years, Ravenholm on its own still has a great reputation as a tasteful stand out of not only the game, but of the series as a whole. So, what the hell was so special about this chapter and setting in the first place? What was so captivating about this zombie town that's left people still enamored with it all these years later? Well, it's spooky. Duh. There's a little bit more to it than that though, so let's just start from the beginning. A lot of people don't know that the first time you see Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 is actually early on in the canal segment. There's two spots where if you stop and get out on foot, you can spot this ominous, blurry, shitty-looking silhouette of the city in the far distance. Then, once you enter the Black Macy East Lab, it's possible to trigger Alex to acknowledge the abandoned tunnel that leads to the town, which is where we first learn of its name. In a game full of one-liners, this oddly somber and reserved line from the otherwise snarky Alex Vance does a good job of catching us off guard and foreshadowing the grim horrors soon to come. After an annoying, unskippable gravity gun tutorial segment, the combine to send upon the lab in Eli gives us yet another stark warning. Of course, our stubborn ass doesn't listen, and once some rubble separates us from the rest of our friends, Alex immediately orders Dog to clear a way for us to climb up through an abandoned elevator shaft, at which point we, despite what the chapter title might lead you to believe, most definitely do go to Ravenholm. At first, things are quiet, though as we emerge from a shed and take in the nighttime air, we quickly start spotting corpses strung up on walls and trees and hearing demented laughter in the distance. This place has a lot of mutilated bodies, and a lot of zombies screaming in agony. It's completely unlike anything we've yet come across on our journey, and on a first playthrough, it's incredibly jarring. Almost immediately, we come face to face with the Minister of the Town, the Mad Monk, the one and only Father Grigori. Now, this guy is an absolute nutjob, but he's also one of the best examples of what's easily one of my favorite character archetypes, the Badass Priest. Equipped with his trusty Winchester rifle that might just be the ugliest looking model in the entire game, Grigori speaks almost exclusively in religious passages, builds cool ass motor traps to crush and maim zombies that get too close for comfort, and on a first playthrough is a bit of an uneasy ally. He's literally introduced to you as an insane person laughing maniacally in front of a mound of burning and paled corpses, so the first time I played this level I honestly got the read that this was all going to lead up to him being a boss fight. In fact, pretty much all of Ravenholm can be a bit hard to follow on a first playthrough, which I don't think is entirely unintentional. A cursory look at the game's manual helps clear things up a bit though. Basically, Ravenholm was once a small but prosperous mining town that fell into disrepair and abandonment following the Combine's invasion, but was later rediscovered by the Resistance and repurposed as a safe haven for humans looking for an escape from the oppressive alien rule. The Combine quickly learned of the defective town, but due to its far distance from the Citadel and the dangerous amounts of alien wildlife in the area surrounding it, they decided not to waste resources sending soldiers in, and instead used a shelling device to ravage the town with headcrabs and render it uninhabitable. Pretty much everyone is assumed to have died or been zombified in the ensuing carnage, hence the hordes upon hordes of zombies. Everyone except the man we've just met up with. Prior to this tragedy, Grigori was the priest of the town and always had a deep connection to it and its residents. So despite his colleagues dying all around him and the unsafe living conditions to put it lightly, this guy still refuses to leave his home and has gone mad from all the violence and solitude. He now stands as the town's only keeper, setting up shop in what was once its church, building traps and pathways over rooftop so we can always stay one step ahead of the zombies, all while helping the occasional passers-by and looking after his flock of fallen friends who have succumbed to the parasites. Grigori's story is some real Edgar Allen potion. There's really nothing else like it in the entire series in terms of its poetic angst. In fact, the shitty looking Winchester rifle Grigori carries is called the Annabelle, which I think might be a direct reference to one of Poe's palms. He's apparently into self-harm too since he's got crucifixes literally burnt into his hands. Sick converses though. Knowing the full story of his character, I've always found Grigori's moment-to-moment dialogue really interesting and kind of messed up, especially when the player dies and he mourns yet another victim of Ravenholm, or as he's nicknamed it, the House of Chaos. One of the main things that makes Grigori special as a character is that he literally only appears in this chapter and is not once ever mentioned by a single other person throughout the rest of the series, making him easily one of the most enigmatic figures in all of Half-Life, right up there with the G-Man. In fact, even the G-Man is technically mentioned by more characters than Grigori is. There's actually even a fan theory that Grigori isn't real, but instead a hallucination that Gordon dreamt up to help him cope with the overwhelming lonely horror of the town. That's always been a bit too abstract for my taste, but it's still interesting to see how much people have managed to read into this guy who basically only exists to throw the player a shotgun and explain away these weird nonsensical traps that some Valve dev came up with. Anyway, we spend the rest of the chapter pushing across town and fighting alongside our new religious friend. He gives us a trusty shotgun and covers us from the rooftops while we storm through the town's claustrophobic winding streets. We work around and with his traps and team up to take on hordes of undead together until we finally reach the church grounds. It's here we get to see Grigori up close and personal, as well as the exterior of his fortified church, which I always really wanted to look inside of as a kid. Standing together side by side, we trail off through a graveyard path behind the church, and the mad monk sees us out of the town through its mines. The last we ever see of him is him laughing maniacally once again as the graveyard goes up in flames. The developer is intentionally left it completely ambiguous as to whether he lives or dies for players to fill in with their own imagination. Things wrap up with the player escaping through these mines, coming out to a rail yard in the early morning, taking out some soldiers and snipers, finally reuniting with the resistance at shore point base just in time to help them fend off a combine onslaught, and then passing through to the coast while they tend to their injured. I used to think it was kind of weird that a song is iconic to the series as triage at dawn, place here to commemorate the death of a single random NPC named Winston, but I recently realized that I'm fucking stupid, and what it's really meant to commemorate is Gordon's escape from the nightmare that is Ravenholm, and him finally reuniting with the rebels. Somehow that greater context escaped me for the better part of a decade, and I have no idea how. This is where the chapter ends though, I'm afraid. After this, Gordon sets out to find Eli at Nova Prospect via the coast, and eventually this big tower thing explodes or whatever. We don't go to Ravenholm really isn't even that long to be honest, which makes it all the more impressive that it's stuck with people so much. So now that I've given everyone a refresher on the events of the chapter, it's time to finally answer the question of just what makes it so special. Why exactly is this little waltz through zombie town remained virtually everybody's most fondly remembered moment in Half-Life 2 for so long? I think it's actually really simple, in fact you can sum it up in one word. It's unique, not only from the rest of the game, but from the rest of the series as well. Visually not only is We Don't Go to Ravenholm pretty much the only chapter in the entire Half-Life 2 trilogy that takes place at night time, but the town itself is in a uniquely terrible state of disrepair, and the oppressive combine technology that juts out of the buildings we see all throughout the rest of the game is nowhere to be seen. The Citadel isn't visible from here either. Hell, even the G-Man doesn't pop up in this chapter until you've already left the town. I think the chapter's theme song also does a good job of reflecting this stark contrast that has to the rest of the game. It's a weird dark horn with chimes or something. I don't really know what it is, but it sounds nothing like the rest of the techno songs on the soundtrack. On a story level Ravenholm also flips everything we've seen throughout the game so far on its head. Up until this point Half-Life is sought to show us just how horrible it is to live under the combine's rule, but this chapter shows us just how much worse it is for those who try to live outside of it. It also doesn't have any unskippable dialogue that drags out on repeat playthroughs, which is one of the things this game is most heavily criticized for in retrospect. And of course who could forget that Ravenholm is the first place where the player gets to use the iconic gravity gun in combat, and where the player gets their hands on the first shotgun. It's where we first encounter fast and poison variants of the zombies and headcrabs too. Hell, even this train yard at the end that everyone forgets about technically introduces not only the combine soldier, shotgunner, and sniper units, but the AR2 weapon as well. Hound for pound we don't go to Ravenholm might just introduce the most new gameplay elements out of any chapter in the entire game. All of what I've just described on top of what's left unspoken about the mysterious past and future of the town, and the endless speculation about what might have happened to Father Grigori, helps to make Ravenholm the perfect centerpiece for the game. And that's not even getting into the cut content. Ravenholm was one of the first levels Valve planned for Half-Life 2, and I want to dedicate at least a little bit of time to talking about the chapter's bizarre development cycle, because it's kind of fascinating. Earlier versions were called Zombie Town, Fizz Town, Trap Town, Quarry Town, or just Quarry, or just Town, and for a surprising amount of its development, it was actually set during the daytime. The level was also originally going to take place before Black Mesa East, with Gordon arriving at the town's docks and his mudskipper right after the canal segment. If you look around online, you can find a ton of early, very different leaked prototypes of Ravenholm with varying levels of polish, showing that the area was at one point an American desert town called Springfield, and was once going to be more centered around an enormous quarry, kind of like the one in Fallout New Vegas. Might have been interesting. Most of you probably already know, but it's still worth mentioning that Ravenholm features quite a lot of the model Corpse 01, which uses an actual forensics photograph of a dead-burnt body as part of its texture. The Half-Life 2 update project on Steam adds in even more of this model funnily enough, hanging in the far distance. There's also the classic fun fact that when you play the zombie sounds backwards, they scream for God. If that's not more but enough, there were once plans for the player to be able to find a child's dead body under a bed somewhere in the town too. Curiously, one of Half-Life 2's E3 presentations shows a version of Ravenholm with combine soldiers who get smacked around with this big swinging trap, as well as a Pepsi machine that blows up and spits a bunch of cans of soda out. Obviously, the Pepsi and swinging trap are nowhere to be seen in the final game, yet another example of how weirdly deceptive this game's pre-release material sometimes was. And finally, I want to take a second to talk about the digger. This thing is a piece of shit. If you don't know what this is, basically, for a period of time and development, the Ravenholm mines were originally supposed to take place in the middle of the chapter instead of at the end, and they were originally supposed to be like twice as long because you were going to have to use this rinky dink car called the digger to drive around and knock over wooden beams and then finally ram it into a giant headcrab testicle thing on the wall to progress. Now, I know that might sound kind of interesting on paper, but if you play this section of the chapter in the leak, you will immediately see why it was cut. It's a buggy disaster of a vehicle that constantly freaks out and gets stuck on stuff, and I do not mourn its loss whatsoever. What I do kind of mourn, though, is return to Ravenholm. Sometime around 2006, Valve gave another developer called Junction Point Studios the go-ahead to develop a Half-Life 2 expansion game set in Ravenholm. If you've never heard of these guys, they were a studio led by Warren Specter, the creator of Deus Ex, and were actually the same people who went on to make the Epic Mickey series. I've never played that, but it's apparently a pretty big deal. Now, sometimes I get comments of people telling me that I come off as a know-it-all or that I'm pretentious, so I'll confide with you guys just this once that I actually have no fucking idea what this game is going to be like. Every time I try to look into Junction Point Studios' Ravenholm game, I keep finding contradicting just flat-out nonsensical information. All that's ever actually leaked of it is one single level, but it's actually not a level, it's just a style guide, which means it was basically just a proof of concept. But some people online say it actually was meant to be the first level anyway, evidenced by hidden entities in the map file or something. I don't know. I'm not a game developer, and the more I talk about that side of stuff, the more likely I am to get something wrong. What does seem to be set in stone, though, is that Warren Specter was really excited at the idea of the game having a magnet gun that would kind of serve as a foil to the gravity gun, and that there were also supposed to be two characters named Scooter and Duncan. If the leaked map is anything to go by, it was Snowy, it took place a day time, and you were supposed to fight combine units throughout the city streets despite the lore inaccuracy. Maybe it was supposed to be a prequel showing the fall of Ravenholm? I don't know, there's really not a terrible amount to go off of. Hopefully someone in the comments will have a better understanding of this project than me because even after going on a deep dive for this video, I genuinely still couldn't make pretty much any sense of it. And I got fucking desperate, okay? Luckily, however, there's a second incarnation of the Ravenholm game that is much more well documented and a lot easier to talk about. Because once Junction Point's version of the game was cancelled, the idea was passed off to Arcane Studios, the same people behind Dishonored. And while this second iteration was also basically a complete mystery in the Valve community for ages, save for a few scant screenshots published by ValveTime in 2013, in May 2020, a no-clip documentary about Arcane Studios history came out on YouTube and randomly dumped a huge wealth of knowledge under the public about this game that had, up until this point, been a complete enigma for over 13 years. Two years after that, a video of pretty much a full playthrough of the game was posted as well, giving us a pretty dang comprehensive idea of what it was going to be like. Starting with the story, the protagonist of this game was going to be the fan favorite Adrian Shepard from the Half-Life Opposing Force expansion, waking up in a hospital on the outskirts of Ravenholm after being presumably dumped by the G-Man and nursed back to consciousness by Father Grigori. The plot this game was running with was that yet another zombie parasite had begun ravaging the outskirts of Ravenholm, one that uniquely didn't require a headcrab to spread, and one that Grigori himself had become infected with, a fact that he would initially hide from the player. This led Grigori to begin trying to develop a cure, in part by injecting himself with headcrab blood in an attempt to build a resistance to the parasite's effects, and in part by experimenting on zombies and animals, leading to the creation of a zombie monkey enemy type. As Shepard, you were going to fight through hospitals, sewers, and city streets crawling with the infected, and run errands for Grigori to help restore power to his lab. In the background of this, Grigori's mutations from being infected and shooting up headcrab blood would worsen to the point that he would have to change his clothes to try and hide it from the player. Up until the point at the end of the game where he'd become so malformed and monstrous that you'd have to kill him as the final boss. I actually still remember the day all this information came out. Hearing more somewhat official dialogue from the mad monk all these years later and finally getting to see more unreleased Half-Life content was unreal, especially with Half-Life Alex having released just a few months prior. It kind of felt like we were entering a second win for this series in terms of public interest. It was also fascinating to see this newer design of Grigori, featuring a higher quality face mesh, a new model of his rifle this time actually made of more than five polygons, and a new outfit that looks a little bit more efficient and mobile than his old priest garb. Anyways, as for the gameplay, Return to Ravenholm was actually quite a bit different from Half-Life 2, especially with its eccentric weapon arsenal. It seems like a decent portion of the game was centered around this nail gun thing, which you were going to have to use to solve water and electricity puzzles. There were also nail bombs, leaf blowers you were apparently supposed to rocket jump with, a giant plasma cannon, and unlike any other Half-Life game that came before or after it, every weapon was supposed to have a halo-style melee attack. It's kind of weird to imagine. The enemies were, as you could imagine, pretty much all zombies of a non-headcrafted variety. They were a lot more mobile, and you could actually knock them over and pin them into the walls if you pushed them with your melee attack. Which looks like a hell of a lot of fun, I'm not going to lie. The zombie monkeys I mentioned earlier seemed really interesting. They were apparently going to throw props at you and run and climb away if you shone your flashlight on them due to some kind of hypersensitivity to light. I think the implication might be that these guys are while the electric wiring in the hospital is fucked up and why Grigory's lab is out of power. That's just my own speculation though. There was also this interesting zombie that could spit acid and charge the player with this mean power walk. He seemed pretty imposing, and it's also interesting to note that he was spitting acid about four years before the spitter zombie in Love for Dead 2 did. I guess Arcane was ahead of the curve. Anyway, this might be a hot take, but with time I've started to realize that while this Return to Ravenholm game might have been a fun and exciting experience, it probably would have been remembered as a pretty bad Half-Life game. Or at least a very weird one. The focus on these electricity puzzles is strange. The introduction of non-headcrab zombies takes away one of the most distinctive parts of Ravenholm's mythos, and the whole story kind of just feels like weird fan service to me. Now I don't know about you, but if I heard that a new game about Ravenholm had just come out, and I booted it up just to be met with a weird electricity puzzle game set in the daylight that ends with me having to kill one of the most beloved characters in the entire series, I think I'd probably actually be a bit disappointed. There were still a lot of cool ideas in there though, and some of the level environments looked absolutely beautiful, especially for their time. So it's a real shame we'll probably never get our hands on this game, even in an unfinished state. Who knows though, maybe someday it'll leak online and some modders will touch it up. It wouldn't be the first time. Speaking of modders though, as is true of Half-Life as a whole, a lot of the most interesting content related to Ravenholm is actually the fan-made stuff. In the middle of the 2000s, Ravenholm was the centerpiece of not only countless fan videos and machinimas, but even a few game projects as well, some of which are actually really cool. The first one I know of is simply called Ravenholm, which seems to have started development all the way back in 2005 and released in 2007. In it, you take control of a rebel named John who winds up stranded in Ravenholm after getting chased out of City 17 by the Combine during the uprising. By this point, Gregori is nowhere to be seen, and the Combine have even begun sweeping what's left of the place to clear it out once and for all. Abandoning your friends, you fight your way through the city for a little bit, wind up in some sewers for a while, make your way through a spooky abandoned laboratory, complete with video logs from a dead scientist, before finally making your way out to the coast and driving off in an extremely convenient abandoned car that someone left the keys in. I'm not gonna lie to you, this mod is littered with annoying hallucination sequences and is a bit shoddy at times. But for a game clearly whipped up by a few Eastern European kids, it's not too bad, and it even has a few moments where it genuinely carries the vibe and atmosphere of the source material pretty well. In other words, it's made with heart. It also actually reveals to us that the most insane person in Ravenholm isn't Father Gregori. It's clearly whoever the hell did the town's interior design. One of the things I find most neat about this mod is that when you beat the game, you unlock a bonus mode where you can replay it with the gravity gun and find new secrets. Which is a cool idea. It's not perfect, but the people who made this were clearly very creative souls, and I think that had it received another layer of two of polish, it actually could have been remembered as one of the best early Half-Life 2 mods. The other project I want to shine a light on to is called Ravenholm Reconnaissance Squad, which is really short since it was just a small part of a bigger mapping competition, but it's still easily one of the most interesting Half-Life 2 mods I've ever played. In this map, you again take control of a citizen stranded in Ravenholm, but this time with the gameplay of Half-Life 2 shaken up quite a bit. For example, pressing E doesn't pick up boxes, it just breaks them outright, because there's no melee weapon. Dying to a zombie also isn't game over, as there's now a live system and you can actually even use these beacon things to choose where you respawn. On top of that, the enemy variety has been ramped up with all kinds of new juicy variants of the classic zombies, and it's actually really fun. The objective is to explore every corner of the map and find three batteries to power this electrified rail so that in the end you can climb into this van hoisted up in the air and glide out of the town in style. It's a really cool experience and replicates the Ravenholm atmosphere perfectly, so leave a link to check it out in the description if you want to play it for yourself sometime, I definitely recommend it. There's a lot more fan mods set in Ravenholm too, but some of them look like poop, some of them I couldn't get running at all, some of them aren't finished yet, and there's also only so much fan-made Ravenholm stuff I could take in at once. Regardless though, there's definitely something to be said about how many people were inspired by this chapter to the point of creating their own standalone campaign based entirely around it. So in conclusion, Ravenholm is peak. It's fun, it's super memorable, it's got an impeccable atmosphere that catches the player off guard really well, and one-tapping zombies with a Winchester while reciting Bible verses will never not be cool as hell. And all of that is why it will always remain probably the most beloved location in all of Half-Life, even rivaling the Black Mesa Laboratory that started it all in terms of popularity. For people with a romanticized idea of the Half-Life 2 Beta, Ravenholm represents the strongest connection the final game has to a darker and more disturbing story. For everyone else, it represents a delightful scare from our childhoods and an unsolved mystery. And to me, it embodies all of the Eastern European loneliness and desperation that makes Half-Life 2 so beautiful. I'm sorry if this video was a bit cheesy, but I've always found Ravenholm and Grigori fascinating and wanted to do a video about them. So if you've gotten this far, hopefully you've learned something or were at least entertained. Thanks for watching, subscribe for more, and have a good day. I'm Ravenholm's Madmuck. Who the fuck are you?