Bizarre Half-Life 2 Mod Lets You Control A ‘300-year-old, Self-destructive, Misanthropic Vampire’

There aren’t many games that mix heavy-handed literature with first-person shooting. BioShock is one example that springs to mind. Not so much Half-Life 2, but someone is in the midst of creating a mod for Valve’s iconic FPS that seems to take cues from the classics.

ModDB user GRÆMAMËTH is currently working on “Goethe’s Last Laugh,” a full-conversion modification for Half-Life 2 that, from the images alone, looks wonderfully bizarre. Oh, hell. I don’t think I could do it justice, so here’s what the creator has to say about the project (after you’ve checked out the footage below, of course):

In the abstract, it’s a working class power fantasy about addiction and revolution…

Take control of Jackson Ian Faust, a 300 year old, self destructive, misanthropic vampire, and investigate the many unusual phenomenon of Gondolas city, a fictional civilization set on the sinking monster island of Duciano.

No mention of a Mephistopheles-inspired gravity gun

It’s still in development at the moment, with no release date yet. However, you can keep an eye on progress from the ModDB page linked above, or follow it on Itch.io. This one definitely seems too good to miss out on, especially with its proposed themes.

Now, I’ve never read Faust, so I can’t say how certain this Half-Life 2 mod will match up with the original text. But I do know that it must have inspired the project, given that it’s titled after the play’s author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and has you play as someone literally called Faust.

It’s also where we get the term “Faustian” from, to refer to any kind of deal or barter that leads to dire consequences. I’m hoping there’ll be some of that in GRÆMAMËTH’s mod. If not, at least we get to play as a cynical vampire that’s three centuries old. That’s always dope. Do people say “dope” these days?