I gotta sperg a bit because I love this game and it is criminally underrated.
Underhell is one of the finest mods ever made for half life 2. Hell I personally consider it the finest mod ever. It was a project started by one man with some help from the guys who did nightmare house 2 and was planned to be a multiple episode series. There's only one episode with a prologue, but holy crap, is it a fleshed out and meaty game.
Essentially you could call it three games in one.
1 Horror hub house where you get chased by the ghost of your dead wife.
2 The Prologue, which is an action extravaganza of you and a swat team going after what appears to be terrorists.
3 The base game of Episode 1. Which is a very unique prison escape experience.
The core gameplay outside of the house is an action shooter in the vein of F.E.A.R, but with more resource management and no slow mo.
but the main thing you need to know is that the guns sound fucking fantastic.
I cant remember a time after bad company guns felt this raw.
The soundtrack is fire.
The story is really great.
Your playing a literally mute Swat member named Jake hawkfield. You experience some shit your not supposed to and get sent to an underground prison in the middle of nowhere.
An outbreak of "something" happens and you have to join forces with the local prison guards to somehow find away out of there.
A lot of the magic of the game in my opinion is the character interaction and level design. The prison feels like a real place and has a character of its own. With a unique security system, layout and hurtles to overcome between all the levels. Then there's the security guards you team up with.
Underhell is one of the very few horror games ive played that actually seems to really care about fleshing out an ensemble cast. It's long enough that it can indulge in that without breaking up gameplay flow, with periodic sessions to regroup and plan out your next moves. Actual fucking planning mind you. Your not trapped in room with a bunch of morons or redshirts for once. There are 10 to 20 min segments where the team actually THINKS of a solution to their problem and banters their way through some tight places.
You get invested in them, they actually praise you for being a one man army and you dont mind not risking their lives when you go out alone to accomplish a goal.
That is insanely rare in this day and age. The voice acting is amateur , but it works well surprisingly. the guards feel like actual people and the writing lines up nicely.
Something really neat about this game, is that outside scripted events, the item, enemy and collectable placement is completely randomized. So there's a lot of replay value, even more so given the game has a shit ton of effort and coding put into it. There's moments of player choice, characters responding to little shit, easter eggs, just a ton of detail that shocked me the second time I played it. Solider AI is pretty smart and has a lot of dialogue. the infected were fun and I liked how they have a sort of Left 4 dead spawn system where you can fight them or just hide. The gore is great and you can shoot off limbs to your hearts content. Also there's stamina, battery life, bleeding effects, Just a lot of little things that add up to a very varied and thoughtful playthrough as opposed to a simple run and gun shooter.
Horror wise, most of the obvious scares are in the house, I never tried to stay very long in there, you've got a trade off of learning more lore at the expense of getting hunted by your wife. The base game is more atmosphere and tone then direct jump scares, but it did a great job with the music and sound to give it a subtle unnerving feeling of wrongness. There were moments worth their weight in gold I wont spoil though. The game pulls off some shit I never saw coming and really plays with your emotions.
I brought this up now, because after 10 years it was recently confirmed in a stream that the creator Mxthe has the script for episode 2 done. Id pay him money out the ass, but apparently he's unsure of the legality of doing a gofundme while working for another company. He works with the guys who made insurgency sandstorm.
In any case this masterpiece deserves more attention and love. It has such an ambition and scale to it that many modern games on better engines fail to achieve.
(Dont worry about the cliffhanger ending, its surprisingly satisfying.)