Video Game / Half-Quake

Everybody is here to die.

You may ask yourself, why you're here. What went wrong, why you. Well, I'll tell you one thing: You have made a mistake and you have to pay for it. Even if you're innocent at the moment, the long fact that you are human is reasonable for us to make you and your eternal soul suffer. You can take the guns, not that it will help you, but... we just ask for some entertainment.

— Muddasheep's voice, intro to Half-Quake: Amen

Some of you would expect some sort of crossover of Half-Life and Quake from the name alone.^note And we're not talking about Deathmatch Classic here. The last time someone thought the same has been reduced into Ludicrous Gibs, far from the last person that would suffer such fate. Sounds harsh? Only for those uninitiated to how the bunch of Austrian mad men that run this Half-Quake facility roll.

Anyway, Half-Quake is a series of Half-Life Game Mods conceived by Philipp "MuddaSheep" Lehner and his friends that are designed to be as sadistic as the developers could think of. Each of them have the setup of your Featureless Protagonist showing up in a mysterious facility, going through series of sadistic trials while being relentlessly mocked by said facility's owners.

The series consists of three mods:

• Half-Quake, first released in 2001.
• Half-Quake: Amen, first released in 2002.
• Half-Quake: Sunrise, first released in 2010.

If you're up for some serious punishment (or just hate yourself that much) and either way own the original Half-Life, you can get the mods there. The mod trilogy has also received an Updated Compilation Re-release on Steam, combining all three installments into one package, which can be found here.

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Take these tropes if you want to delay your death:

• Actionized Sequel: Inverted. Amen puts more emphasis on its devious puzzles, but it isn't without its fair share of combat encounters. Sunrise, meanwhile, has no direct combat at all.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: Each of the mods feature a section like that, with the first installment straight up cribbing the one from one of Quake's levels.
• Arc Words: Sadism. Keep that in mind by the time you'd get onto Amen's very first platforming puzzle in "Pestilence".
• Armor Is Useless: Invoked when you pick up the HEV suit in the first installment.
  This suit is made of plastic, it won't protect you from anything. It only makes you feel.... confident.
• Art Shift: Half-Quake: Amen moves from Half-Life's aesthetic for a more abstract direction with its environments. Sunrise also has a style of its own, that eventually gets subverted when you'd stumble upon locations from the previous mods.
• Apocalyptic Log: Amen has a few diary books you can stumble upon, written by another unwilling participant that came before you. You would end up meeting up with the guy who wrote those entries in a minor boss fight, see Unique Enemy below.
• Author Avatar: The leading developers have also cast themselves as the owners of the Half-Quake facility, the self-proclaimed "Masters of Sadism". They can be heard though the entire series, although only seen in person in Amen, using edited scientist models.
• Battle Theme Music: Somos in Amen comes with his own theme song, parts of which are played depending on whenever you'd get to deactivate his shields or not.
• Bizarrchitecture: Half-Quake at first starts out in a sort of grounded setting until it suddenly puts you in a void with plenty of spiked platforms, and things only get weirder as the series progresses.
• Bizarre Puzzle Game: The series verges into this at times, especially Sunrise.
• Black Comedy: Features most prominently in Amen.
• Blackground: Amen has a lot of walls that are just pure black, to the point it's not uncommon to start a level that at first seems like there's nothing there until you look around.
• Chess Motifs: Sunrise features one Chess-themed puzzle.
• The Chew Toy: Pretty much every single unwilling participant in the Half-Quake project, yourself very much included.
• Compilation Re-release: The Half-Quake Trilogy released on Steam collects each of the installments into one big mega-mod, complete with Quake-inspired Hub Level at the start that lets you start up any of the three installments. It also brings a few updates within the installments themselves, including achievements and replacing instances of copyrighted music with more of Muddasheep's own soundtrack.
• Creative Closing Credits: Sunrise has names rise up from a pile of rubble like smoke.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: There are a few cases in Amen when you'd get to have more than a single weapon at once, but because of the lack of HEV suit, the normal weapon selection keys is inactive and you would have to rely on the "switch to last used weapon" key to switch between the crossbow, mp5, and/or Sword of Sadism in the rare instances you own at least two of these at once.
• Darker and Edgier: Sunrise manages to be quite bleaker than the rest of the series, with very little Black Comedy elements sprinkled in comparison due to how often you're simply alone in that installment.
• Deadly Game: Half-Quake is stated to be this, particularly in a cut-scene from the "Essence" chapter of Amen where it is presented as a sadistic TV show.
• Death Course: In the first installment, Half-Quake is stated to be an institution and reasonably looks a bit like the deathtrap dungeon would. It gets harder to tell by later installments with the more surreal environments. And then Sunrise has you slip into locations from the previous installments that confirm that the entire array of weird locations all resided in a single facility.
• Death Trap: Examples abound in the entire series, tending to get more creative as the series progresses.
• Dem Bones: The Audience section in Amen features one talking skeleton. That is in fact the same rat-eating cogwheel-obsessed security guard from the previous installment. He can't do much aside from just talk and even gets a cube dropped onto his bones.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Amen is entirely in black and white aside of splashes of green (discounting splashes of blood) and Sunrise is all grayscale aside of splashes of light blue, locations from past installments showing up in the later stretches of the mod aside.
• Drowning Pit: The very first Death Trap in the first installment involves a corridor being suddenly flooded by water, draining down just before you'd almost drown to death.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first installment is the only one with the art-style closely resembling the base game it's a mod for^note before the Trilogy re-release makes the installments share a few assets with each other, and also the only one to ever give the player the HEV suit (the other installments are almost completely HUD-less, discounting the occasional chapter texts and the damage indicators).
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Whenever the player character is ever referred to by any name, it's usually "Victim".
• Everything Trying to Kill You: If Muddasheep would be able to program a main menu that would kill you, he absolutely would.
• Fake Longevity: Pretty much the whole point of the Patience chapter in Amen.
• Fan Sequel: The series being Game Mods aside, Half-Quake: Amen has received a fan sequel of its own, in the form of The Present.
• Featureless Protagonist: The Third Person camera sections of the original mod depicts the player as a green robot-like figure (taken from one of Half-Life's multiplayer skins), and beyond that there's nothing describing how the victim looks underneath that plastic suit. The victim(s) in Amen and Sunrise, meanwhile… all we know of them is that they are male, out of them being referred to as "Mr. Victim" by other characters, as well as their fall damage voices (voiced by different people in either of the installments).
• Fetch Quest: The "Sapience" section in Amen is comprised of these, in an environment that resembles a village in a Role-Playing Game.
• Final Boss: Somos — whose name stands for Son of Masters of Sadism — is the recurring one in the series, showing up in the final sections of each of the installments.
• Guide Dang It!: Amen has a hint guide text file included in the files. You might end up reaching to it a few times.
  • Outright enforced in one of the sections of the above installment — the one in the white room with Blackjack's inverted face with glasses — that outright tells you to turn the game off and look up a certain file.
• Hilarious Outtakes: The Ambience section in Amen has two buttons which play these.
• Hope Spot: One of the doors in the final section of Amen is this.
  THIS! is the only room, where you will survive! .....for ten seconds. *player gets gibbed not even 10 seconds in*
• Hub Level: The Steam release of The Trilogy features a Quake-like starting level with entrances to each of the trilogy's installments, alongside their tutorials.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The easy -> medium -> hard difficulties have been renamed into fast -> slow -> sadistic. It matters more towards some of the combat encounters and much less when dealing with the variety of One Hit Killing Death Traps.
• Idiosyncratic Menu Labels: The series go really far with the sadistic theming of their menus. The notable examples are:
  New Game: Die
  Load Game: Die On
  Save Game: Life Insurance
  Join Multiplayer Game: Multisadism
  Options: See Your Blood
  Quit Game: Amen
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: Sunrise plays with this with "Morality Intersection", with a "hard" way and an "easy" way, both of which lead to the same place at the end. The "hard" route involves some platforming, while the "easy" route just involves a boat ride, a song, and constant choking and screaming sounds throrough the ride.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Amen has the Sword of Sadism — first obtained in the Ambience section — which replaces the Crowbar in that installment and deals around a whopping 999 damage, which is capable of one-shotting most enemies.
• I Shall Taunt You: Somos does this to you repeatedly during each encounter with him.
• Kaizo Trap: The mods in general feature plenty of this trope, Sunrise being quite more prevalent in that compared to the rest of the series. (What part of "Masters of Sadism" did you not understand by now?)
• Killed Mid-Sentence: In the original Half-Quake, you meet up with a wounded security guard who survived by eating rats and tells you to find the missing cogwheel and a way to escape. He ends up getting crushed by a rock.
• Large Ham: Somos gained a new voice in Sunrise, and he definitely must have had taken chops from Dracula.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Parodied with one room of Sunrise with a door that takes quite a while to "load" before opening, complete with a song.
• Malevolent Architecture: Well, yeah, most of the Half-Quake facility is designed to be one big Death Trap.
• Man on Fire: Downplayed example. One of the quests in the "Sapience" chapter of Amen has you help a guy try to blow up a chest with a stick of dynamite. To do this, you'd have to reach a fireplace within the level and light your own right arm with fire (which curiously doesn't seem to affect your health) in order to light up the dynamite.
• The Maze: The Audience section in Amen features one. Sunrise also has a handful of smaller but no less lethal ones.
• Minimalist Cast: Most prominent in Sunrise, where it would take quite a while for the player to even meet anybody in person (discounting characters that could be heard in voice only).
• Multiple Endings: Parodied by Amen's final section, which presents the player with twenty doors, each coming with their own way to kill you before cutting to credits.
• Nintendo Hard: Let's say that for the most part, the mods live up to the hostile tone they have to the players.
• No-Gear Level: Don't expect to be able to hold onto your weaponry at any moment within the first two installments. To say nothing of Sunrise never giving you any weapons, ever.
• Non-Indicative Name: The "Half" part of the name may be apt for at least the first two installments, but the series has nothing much to do with Quake at all, aside perhaps from the first Mod featuring teleporters similar to the ones in Quake — just with stars being replaced with the >) smileys — and cribbing the Advancing Wall of Doom from The Door to Chthon level.
• Noodle Incident: It's never elaborated on what the "mistake" is that the protagonist(s) is being severely punished for. At most, the readme for the first mod mentions that the "mistake" in question is up there with robbery and rape.
• Nostalgia Level: Sunrise has you slip into locations from the previous installments/locations at few parts.
• Once More, With Extra Sadism!: The first Half-Quake has a section that gets repeated a few times through its runtime, with adjustments to it being made to it each iteration. That "repeat" section even pops up — with the current art style — once in Amen.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Amen features "Dragons"… that are simply Headcrabs that vocally pretend to be dragons.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: May as well be Half-Quake's modus operandi. They take people they believe to be beyond redemption and force them through sadistic Death Courses, with not much of a way to survive escaping them all.
• Platform Hell: The mod series is a prime example of a ''First Person Shooter Hell', all while predating a number of well known examples of this by few years.
• Prank Call: One of the few activities you can do in the "Patience" section of Amen is answering the phone, and the calls all happen to be this.
• Prepare to Die: In fact, the "New Game" function in main menu is simply titled "Die".
• Puzzle Boss: Somos, each time he's encountered at the final chapters of each installment. Typically, you'd have to find a way to disable his shields before you can strike his weak point (Half-Quake), flip some more switches (Amen), or play a Cat and Mouse game with him involving destructible walls you'd have to lure him into shooting to escape through (Sunrise).
• Rewarding Inactivity: "Patience is called Patience because you'd need around 20 minutes of patience." By the time you get to the section in question — which happens to be a train station — you'll realize they were not kidding.
• Sadist: Half-Quake's owners, The Masters of Sadism, duh.
• Save Scumming: You would more than likely need it. In fact, Sunrise's tutorial at one point tasks you with making a quick-save.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: You'll know things would not end well for you when even the tutorials of these mods kill you off at their conclusion. The campaign of Sunrise just slightly bucks this trend.
• Sigil Spam: The >) emote is plastered in a lot of places in the series, especially in the first installments when it could be even seen in medkits, weapon models, and even headcrabs.
• Shmuck Bait: Examples abound thorough the series. Particularly in Amen which among other things, has you regularly encounter a pair of booths, one of which is named "Life", which heals you, and the other is "death", for which you should get the idea by now. Except in the "Audience" section, where it just falls apart.
  • Sunrise has plenty of Bottomless Pits thorough the mod that are nowhere near as honestly marked as The Drain from The Neverhood.
• Smurfette Principle: Amen and Sunrise have a single female voice each, with the former being the train station announcer. Each being just as hostile to you as almost everybody in the series.
• Songs in the Key of Lock: Sunrise has one musical puzzle that has you re-arrange the notes on the wall to play the Leitmotif of the series since Amen. After the entrance opens up upon solving the puzzle, you'd still have to platform on top of these notes. And avoid the lethal music player.
• Spooky Painting: The house you somehow end up in in the middle of Half-Quake's fourth chapter happens to have plenty of these.
• Subbing for Santa: One of the quests in the "Sapience" section of Amen tasks you with putting yourself in the Santa suit, then going outside to arrange the blocks so you would be able to enter the house through the chimney in order to exorcise a possessed talking Christmas Tree.
• Surreal Horror: The series veers into this from Amen on, as it moved away from the Half-Life-esque setting to the more surreal hand-drawn worlds.
• The Stinger: Amen and Sunrise feature multiple audio ones after their credits, including a song in Amen's case.
• Take That!: One of the many multiple doors you can go to at the very end of Amen involves death by Britney Spears.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: By the end of it all, your quick-save and quick-load keys might end up having even bigger use than your attack key.
• The Many Deaths of You: The series is pretty diverse in all of the ways it tries to kill you, most notably exemplified with Amen's Multiple Endings, above.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The original has a few "jump and run" sections that suddenly switches from the first person perspective to a Survival Horror-esque cinematic perspective with you doing some platforming challenges in that sort of camera.
  • Sunrise has a Tower Defense-like section and an Interactive Fiction-like section; quite a feat to pull that off in the GoldSrc engine.
• Unique Enemy: Amen features a single re-skinned Marine — whose Diaries you've been reading up to this point — that is beefed up with insane amounts of health and kicking strength, to the point you'd have to defeat him with the Sword of Sadism.
• You Suck: Pretty much nobody in the series ever gives you any sort of respect. In fact, even the main menus has this air of hostility, with the usual "New Game" instead being written as "Die".
  • One literal example is from one of the first voice mails from Sunrise:
  Heeey, Victim! I just wanted to let you know:You Suck! Cheers.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Part of you may have been tempted to try your newly acquired Sword of Sadism in Ambience on the Masters of Sadism. Doing so gets you killed. It's not a good idea to slash the friendly NPCs in the Sapience chapter either.
• World of Jerkass: The amount of characters in the series that don't want you dead can be counted with fingers.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Half-Quake has you almost escape from a house somehow on top of the facility you've escaped from, and then screen blacks out and types in "You cannot escape, idiot" before throwing you into the remixed early section.

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Don't you think that you're wasting time? Won't it be better to leave this life?

....Well, I see. You're one of those.... "tough" guys, aren't you?

So now, take a minute and think about it.... why the hell should we be having a train system, hmmmm? Well of course, because we want to torture you, but.... we don't need any transport system, we are everywhere, anyway. So this was an example of how life really is: sadistic and absolutely senseless.

— Muddasheep's voice, end of "Patience", Half-Quake: Amen