Christmas always puts me in a big horror mood for some reason. This paired with a huge Half Life kick made me check out one of the most early well known mods for the series: They Hunger.
Developed by Black Widow Games, who previously developed various Quake mods and an even earlier mod for HL1 called USS Darkstar, They Hunger was sponsored at some level by PC Gamer. Originally releasing via bundled demo discs thru 1999 to 2001. As a result The PC Gamer brand has numerous cameos throughout the trilogy as "PC Gamer Foundry and Machine Works".
I'm not sure how a company named "PC Gamer" functions here as the game is set in the 1950s... perhaps there are steam powered gaming rigs we never get to see or its founder was named Percy Clive Gamer.
The game begins by demonstrating its penchant for 90s machinima styled cutscenes with a broadcast by BMRF radio regarding "strange atmospheric phenomena" followed by another cutscene of your character driving a hearse. Fittingly for a game set in the 1950s, it reaches 50s film levels of "we WILL show you the entire drive the character makes and you WILL LIKE IT, DAMN IT" but remains pretty charming regardless. Sadly, your very gothic choice of vehicle is blasted into the river by a stray lightning bolt.
After pulling yourself out of the river, you'll find yourself exploring many diverse locations throughout the mods three episodes. These include a graveyard, church, an active volcano, a mansion that hosts a hidden lab beneath its surface and great value stonehenge. HL1's love of setpieces are very much present here.
Additionally, the mod has plenty of original dialog. Most of it exactly of the quality you'd expect it to be for a 90s mod. A notable moment involves someone I can only assume is an actual child playing the role of a cop on a radio angry that his fellow officers didn't "get burgers 5 hours ago"
Regardless of the now higher standards we view mod voice acting under, it still hosts some neat aspects. One of these is that you can find radio recordings from characters that previously existed in the spaces you're navigating. It never adds anything significant but remains pretty fun and feels ahead of the curve given how much games love audio logs now.
Throughout the mod's areas, you'll encounter a host of cleverly tweaked and reskinned enemies from HL1's cast. You'll mostly be dealing with headcrab zombie reskins but also included are things like obvious evil dead inspired disembodied hands and lightning shooting skeletons.
While this enemy lineup is fun and interesting in how it adjusts HL1's lineup throughout, it's here where the game also encounters one of its first issues: the game reuses aggro'ed Barnies from vanilla HL1 as a generic enemy type. Leaving you forced to deal with an AI that originally existed as a punishment for a player being a bit of a prick. They do not broadcast their presence when engaging in combat with you and their fast firing animations often leave you suddenly with only 10% health left. The stage design often has a fondness for placing them in ways where you'll often never see them coming without previous knowledge.
The first time you encounter them in the early areas of the game, you're also likely to think they're still on friendly terms given the fact their reskin only goes as deep as making the color scheme on their outfit white. This put me in a situation early on where I walked up to one assuming they were still friendly. I was even able to press E to invoke the barks that occur when you ally with a barney in vanilla HL1. After this they slowly turned around to face me and instantly blasted me to death.
I can't even be mad about this because it's extremely funny.
Additionally, the zombies make up a majority of the games encounters. But particularly early on feel just kinda placed in big random chunks. I'm not sure if this is to aid to a sense of scale or is just a late 90s mod stage designer deciding to place enemies everywhere.
These issues, I feel, exacerbate an issue present in vanilla Half Life where most encounters will become an ordeal to deal with if your health is anywhere below 60%.
Weapons are a mix of entirely new and HL1 reskins. Most of these are cool but it shares an issue I feel Opposing Force has where you get given multiple melee weapons. However none of them have interesting variations from each other and I mostly just defaulted to the spanner given it output the most damage in a short time. The highlight is the reskin of the crowbar into an umbrella.
Map design improves as the trilogy goes on but starts particularly rough and only gets vaguely less rough by the time you're sitting in front of the credits roll. For example: there are NUMEROUS parts in Episode 1 where you need to swim through a body of water that are too long and force you to take damage. This often led me left in a situation where I just did not have enough health to make it past and had to reload a save from far earlier in the run
I feel it particularly improves upon map design related issues during the second episode. In which you start encountering military bases and research facilities hidden under the mansion of one of the games antagonists, Dr. Franklin. While these areas never escape aforementioned issues while often being quite labyrinthine, I think they are otherwise the most emblematic of the good qualities the game has to offer.
However, the level design once again hits a snag once again during its third episode. Starting strong with an escape from a hospital into the countryside. The problems begin when you eventually return to a burnt out version of the asylum from the previous episode. its neat to see the environment re-contextualized at first. But shortly after this you find yourself captured by the other half of the games antagonists: Sheriff Rockwood. Forcing you to backtrack thru a chunk of the aforementioned countryside.
Your reward for this backtracking is yet more reused geometry in burnt out form. The game climaxes with a re-run of previous areas like this.
I could make all sorts of speculation on why I think this might of happened...but the end result feels like the mod is betraying the great b-movie horror vibe it has by just going through the motions. It does at least pick up a tiny bit via a visit to an underground theater, complete with movie posters from the 1950s.
The game climaxes as you board a helicopter and are followed by Sheriff Rockwood giving chase in his own chopper. You fight back by unloading all your ammo into him via your choppers open door.
This fight was apparently SO difficult in the original release of Episode 3 that you could manage your ammo perfectly throughout the last stretch of the game and it would STILL require nearly all of your ammo. Despite being nerfed it is still unfortunately quite insufferable to deal with.
The game ends on a credits roll backed by an original song, "You Are What I Eat", by "Loungemeat". Something that feels like a dev garage band given I could find absolutely nothing on them aside from their work on this game.
They Hunger is messy, lacking in polish, and kind of frustrating. Yet at the same time it carries such a love and sense of fun towards schlocky b-movie horror that I couldn't help but have a pretty decent time with it.
This mod was, unfortunately, Black Widow's penultimate released project. They produced an official tie-in mod multiplayer mod for the film Underworld and were were working on a commercial follow-up to They Hunger on the Source Engine called They Hunger: Lost Souls. This was seemingly quietly canned sometime during the mid to late 2000s. Which feels like a genuine shame given how many similar modding teams managed to break into commercial gamedev during that era.
If you want to check out They Hunger for yourself: It has its own MOD-DB page:
