Ravenholm

Ravenholm is a fictional ghost town in the first-person shooter game Half-Life 2, developed by Valve Corporation and released in 2004. It serves as the primary setting for the game's sixth chapter, "We Don't Go to Ravenholm", which follows the game's protagonist Gordon Freeman as he journeys through the area as part of an escape from Black Mesa East after it is attacked by Combine forces in order to reach a nearby Resistance outpost. Ravenholm is a mining town in Eastern Europe destroyed by a Combine bombardment using headcrabs that turned its residents into hostile zombies. Its sole survivor, Father Grigori, offers his assistance to Freeman throughout the level, culminating in a last stand at the town's cemetery.

The level received critical praise due to its level design and unexpected usage of horror aspects involving the headcrabs and zombies, with some critics calling it one of the most well-designed levels in a Valve game or one of the best first-person shooter levels ever made. Due to its popularity, Valve initially contracted Junction Point Studios to make a prequel featuring the town, a project that later became a spin-off game developed by Arkane Studios that further followed the story of Grigori and his fight against the Combine. However, both projects were ultimately cancelled partway through development.

Level content
Before the player, who controls protagonist Gordon Freeman, enters the level itself, companion Alyx Vance states that "we don't go [to Ravenholm] anymore", foreshadowing its overrun nature. The player visits Ravenholm when Black Mesa East, a Resistance base, is attacked by Combine forces shortly after the player obtains a gravity gun and uses it to play catch with Alyx's pet robot Dog. Dog opens a door to a tunnel leading to Ravenholm, allowing the player access to the town's outskirts and beginning the game's sixth chapter, titled "We Don't Go to Ravenholm".

When the player first enters Ravenholm, which is revealed to be a ghost town, the soundtrack shifts to a traditional horror score, and they see a pair of decapitated legs hanging from a tree before discovering the town is infested with headcrabs and zombies. The sudden shift in the game's tone forces the player to raise their guard as the level "is easily the most dangerous part of Half-Life 2 that players will experience up until that point". New enemies are introduced in the level, which include poisonous and fast headcrabs and their respective zombie counterparts. Poisonous headcrabs will temporarily drain the player's health to one point if they score a hit while fast headcrabs are quicker than their conventional counterparts. Fast zombies are quicker than regular zombies and can climb drainage pipes, while poisonous zombies are slow but have large amounts of health and carry around poisonous headcrabs on their back that they can throw at the player.

After traversing the town, which is littered with traps designed to kill zombies, the player meets the town's lone inhabitant, Father Grigori, who built the traps as part of his efforts to remove the zombie presence from Ravenholm. The player follows him through to the town's warehouse district, where they encounter fast zombies for the first time; Grigori gives the player a shotgun to aid them in fighting the zombies. Proceeding to the town centre, the player encounters poison zombies before heading out of town through a cemetery. There, they come face-to-face with Grigori, who helps the player enter a nearby crypt, holding off incoming zombies in a last stand. The player continues on through a series of mines, escaping via a railway network to reach Shorepoint, a wrecking yard held by the Resistance.

Plot
Prior to the Combine invasion, Ravenholm was a small mining town somewhere in Eastern Europe. Following the invasion, the town served as an outpost for the Resistance, which resisted the Combine occupation. The Combine eventually attacked the town by bombarding it with artillery shells containing headcrabs, alien parasites which attack organisms and turn them into zombies. Ravenholm's entire population was zombified, which led the Resistance to completely abandon any presence they maintained in the town.

Development


The level was initially called "Traptown" or "phystown" in the game's files during an early E3 demo of Half-Life 2, referencing the numerous booby traps scattered through it. Datamined information by fans showed that an early build featured Combine forces in the level in addition to headcrabs and zombies, and the "mining town" aspect of Ravenholm was much more prominent, including allowing the player to control a large excavator. The original version of Ravenholm may have also been set chronologically before the player arrived at Black Mesa East and acquired the gravity gun. The weapon ultimately ended up defining the level, encouraging the player to kill zombies using saw blades and other tools as an alternative to using the player's weapons. Players who possessed shared knowledge of zombie-based fiction such as The Zombie Survival Guide could also instinctively guess that the objects able to be picked up by the gravity gun could be used in an offensive manner.

Level designer Dario Casali stated that Ravenholm was conceived as a "sanctuary gone bad", where the player went expecting help from potential allies, but realized they had all turned into enemies. Casali further stated that the town was designed to both appear isolated to the point where it could have believably escaped Combine notice for a time while simultaneously match the game's other levels, describing this as a challenge. The level's designers initially created the traps in Ravenholm using "simple geometric shapes", before turning to concept artists to transform the ideas into more detailed and realistic concepts.

It is generally believed by fans and critics that Ravenholm was partially inspired by a level of the 1998 video game Thief: The Dark Project known as the “Sealed Section", as Marc Laidlaw, who wrote the plot of Half-Life 2, was personally a fan of the game. In the level, the player traverses through a quarter of a large city which has become infested by the undead, which stands in contrast to the technologically advanced neighbourhoods surrounding it. However, unlike the Thief level, the player has not yet encountered overt horror tropes in Half-Life 2 prior to arriving at Ravenholm.

Cancelled projects


Between 2005 and 2007, a Half-Life prequel was in development by Junction Point Studios, with a team led by Warren Spector. The game's plot was intended to explain the backstory behind both Ravenholm and Grigori, showing how it was attacked by the Combine and Grigori's actions prior to the player meeting him in Half-Life 2. It would have included a "magnet gun" which could attract metal objects from remote locations using metallic ball-shaped projectiles. In mid-2007, the project was cancelled and the studio went on to develop platform video game Epic Mickey instead, releasing it in 2010.

The concept was later given to Arkane Studios, who changed it into a spin-off Half-Life game titled Ravenholm set entirely in the town, but was cancelled by Valve after "9 or 10" levels had already been completed. Intended as a linear game, it would feature Adrian Shepard, the protagonist of Half-Life: Opposing Force, as he made his way through the town with the help of Grigori. Grigori, who was revealed to have survived his last stand in Half-Life 2, would have gradually mutated into an inhuman being as the result of a serum created from headcrab blood that he believed would protect him from harm.

The game would also have introduced several new weapons, such as a nail gun, which could power up doors by acting as an electrical conductor, a plasma weapon and a weaponized leaf blower that could be used to double jump. Laidlaw stated that reasons behind the cancellation included the fact that headcrabs and zombies "were pretty much played out at the time", and that the fact that it had to take place chronologically prior to Half-Life 2: Episode Two was too creatively constraining. Footage of the project was shown in a 2020 documentary by media company Noclip titled The Untold History of Arkane.

Reception
The level's originality caused it to stand out to critics. GamesRadar+ journalist Alex Avard praised Ravenholm as an example of a horror sequence in a non-horror game, describing it as "harrowing" and a "blood-soaked frightfest". Fellow GamesRadar+ journalist Ashley Reed praised the game's inclusion of "Zombie Chopper", an achievement which forced the player to beat the entire level employing only the gravity gun, arguing that not using weapons forced her to think creatively about how to proceed through the level, turning to items such as saw blades as improvised weaponry and employing strategies such as fleeing the zombies before they could notice her presence.

The level was also praised for its effective use of horror elements. Den of Geek journalist Matthew Byrd described Ravenholm as "the perfect horror level", stating that it both served as a send up of horror tropes and effectively utilized them to scare the player. Suggesting that it "just happened to be the perfect idea released at the perfect time", Byrd further stated that some elements of the level "certainly don't feel quite as groundbreaking" 15 years later as they did upon the game's release. PC Gamer journalist Andy Kelly included the game on the list of his best first-person shooter levels ever, calling it "a tense, terrifying gauntlet" and "probably the best level Valve has ever designed". Screen Rant journalist Padraig Cotter argued that the level was "arguably the game's most famous" and had a "perfect balance" of horror and action. Describing the town's atmosphere as "oppressive", he noted that the level's incidental details, such as bodies and gore, told a "powerful story", saying that it was "hard not to feel sorry" for the unwillingly transformed zombies. Polygon writer Jenna Stoeber called Ravenholm an example of Valve's best level design techniques, praising its strong core narrative idea and the fact that the player comes across the level in medias res. USgamer journalist Jeremy Parish stated that Ravenholm "makes great use of audio cues to build tension", noting how the player can hear poison headcrabs before they see them.