This is the original Half-Life and its expansions, the games that rewrote what a first-person shooter could be. Half-Life (1998) was Valve's debut, casting you as physicist Gordon Freeman after an experiment at the Black Mesa research facility tears open a portal to a hostile dimension. Instead of disconnected levels, it told one continuous story through the environment, never wresting the camera away for a cutscene.
The Gearbox-made expansions retell that disaster from other angles: Opposing Force from the perspective of a Marine sent to clean up, Blue Shift from a security guard, and Decay as a two-player co-op story. Half-Life: Source ported the original to the newer engine. The throughline is point of view: a single catastrophic day at Black Mesa, examined again and again from the boots of the people caught inside it. A genre-defining, games-only foundation.
The Half-Life 1 and expansions franchise spans 5 games in the CrossBinge catalog.
Part of Half-Life.