On March 9, modder SellFace released Lost and Damned, a single-player mod for Half-Life 2’s venerable Source engine. It’s a cheeky, fun homage to Resident Evil that jumbles the two games up in a way that gave me whiplash (in a good way), and maybe the most surprising thing here is SellFace’s pitch-perfect fixed camera gameplay.
Are you even supposed to be able to do that in the Source engine? SellFace nails the flash cut perspective shifts of an old Resident Evil, with your view of a scene drastically changing as you move through a room. It’s carried by a pretty solid implementation of tank controls as well, all mapped to keyboard and mouse.
SellFace achieves this really jarring effect by combining the stockest of stock Half-Life 2 assets with some crazy-effective swings at Resident Evil details. The inventory screen is immaculate, just a full send classic Resident Evil six-slot deal with those PS1-core bwum, breedledoo sound effects, but then you use a health vial and it’s straight up the sound effect of picking one up in base Half-Life 2. There are also, of course, classic Resi door opening zoom-ins, but with these mundane, photograph-textured HL2 doors that I’ve become so familiar with for the past nineteen years. Lost and Damned kind of prods two different nostalgic lizard sections of my brain at the same time in way that I definitely enjoy.
I haven’t gotten particularly far in the mod, but it cuts to the chase pretty quick. I’ve already run into a cheeky one of those surreal, Resident Evil item “riddles” to find a hidden key, and while the first few fights are pretty easy, I had my day ruined immediately the second there was more than one zombie onscreen. I scurried off to a side room and picked up a health vial only to trigger a jump scare, with a nasty zombie popping out and making short work of me in the close quarters.
You can get Lost and Damned over on ModDB, and its installation is pretty simple. You’ll need to install the Source SDK (I tried grabbing it ahead of time, but Steam will just do it for you if you try to run the mod without) and have it set to “upcoming” in the beta tab of its properties menu. Drop your files into steamapps/sourcemods, restart the client, and Lost and Damned will be waiting for you in your library.
