Once a Resistance outpost, Ravenholm was shelled by the Combine, unleashing a horde of Headcrabs on its unsuspecting denizens. Often held up as one of the best examples of horror in a non-horror game, Ravenholm is Half-Life 2 at its darkest. But, there’s one place The Resistance does not, under any circumstances, go: Ravenholm. It’s a lesson, early on, that the Resistance can be anywhere, as long as they’re out of sight. In Half-Life 2 ’s opening moments, Barney Calhoun, clad in Combine body armor, ushers Gordon out of the train station, unseen by the real Combine guards. The Resistance grows where there are people, buoyed - like one of the game’s barrels in simulated water - by the most powerful technology humanity’s best and brightest can muster under the boot. Eli Vance, Arne Magnusson, Isaac Kleiner - these men were present at the New Mexico facility when Gordon Freeman was an accidental party to the creation of the Resonance Cascade - the catastrophe that attracted the Combine to Earth in the first place. The Resistance is a guerilla movement, led by a who’s who of ex-Black Mesa scientists. And, when Half-Life 2 begins, The Resistance has coalesced around three primary locations: their hidden base in City 17, up the coast at Black Mesa East, and deep in the woods of White Forest. This period - the nascent stages of the growing resistance movement - will be the focus of the upcoming prequel, Half-Life: Alyx. Thanks to the efforts of Eli and Alyx Vance, Half-Life 2 ’s human opposition is surviving and fighting back. Because how can you resist something you aren’t even aware of? After all, the Combine conquered Earth in just seven hours.īut, 20 years after humanity’s initial defeat at the hands of their technologically advanced oppressors, The Resistance is eking out a life in the shadows. There wasn’t much resistance at the beginning, of course. Haf-Life 2, like many of the best sci-fi stories that came before and since its 2004 release, is a resistance narrative.
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