Source Mods You Should Care About: Radiator 1-1 & 1-2

The (Unfinished) Radiator series isn’t your typical Half-Life 2 mod –Hell, it isn’t even your typical game– There are a handful of games that I’ve played that I would describe as “poetic”, and this is definitely one of them. I’d like to recommend that if you care about experiencing this without any discussion of the finer points of the plot and overall experience of this game, to stop reading, get the game, play it, and come back. I promise it’ll only take about half an hour.

The first episode, subtitled Radiator 1-1: Polaris tells a simple story of two guys going stargazing on a first date. The character the player controls seems really jaded about the whole thing, making some pretty harsh observations about his date, such as his “hella ratty jacket” and “dumbfuck smile”. The thoughts from the protagonist makes it seem like the player character is really bored and uninterested in the whole thing.

The whole 15 minute experience consists of you moving the character to a picnic table, and looking at various constellations in the sky, with an increasing number of different constellations and stars you have to look at to advance the little story that your date is telling you about Orion and the Big Dipper. It’s a very dull, tedious experience. But isn’t that exactly what most first dates feel like? If there was a game that’s ever depicted a first date more realistically and truthfully (depending on if you leave early or not, it ends with a sour tone, mentioning forgettable sex and not calling him back), I don’t think I’d continue living life normally and talking to people.

Handle With Care (1-2) is quite different than the first episode of Radiator. It starts out with James (the player) and Dylan, his husband sitting on a couch in a marriage counselor’s office (it says on the subtitle that pops up that they’re located in Fresno, California). The counselor tells your character to let Dylan have a turn and asks him why he thinks the two of you don’t communicate. At this point, your perspective moves to a strange room called the Internal Repression Service with a video screen playing the last few moments that you witnessed in James’ normal perspective with shelves of boxes lining the walls.

As you try to place the boxes in gradually more difficult positions (it’s nearly impossible to get some of the last few in it seems), you “repress” memories, and the counselor scolds James for lashing out, if you accidentally (or intentionally, depending on how you feel about repressing memories) break a box, she commends James on a good session. It’s kind of confusing, but I’ll get to that.

When you do eventually break a box, you’re presented with a very surreal scene involving various events from James and Dylan’s relationships. They’re very strange, and I don’t understand what was going on in half of them. But they all left me feeling less inclined to continue, attempting to try to get the boxes in their places on the shelf.

That’s the point of the game though, memories are powerful things we carry with us. We can either choose to let them get away from us and effect our relationships in a negative way(or positive, depending on how you look at it), having us get mad at all of the bad things so much that they outweigh the good things, or we can cope with them and lead a relatively stable, happy, American life [an in joke from the game, the counselor mentions Americans living with confrontation like it's the thing to do, probably a reference to the war]. It’s really conflicted, but I can’t help but feel that most of what Handle With Care tries to say is true.

If you’re looking for some succinct, meaningful, and impressive storytelling for FREE, I highly recommend checking this mod out. I will definitely be critiquing further entries into the series, as the current plan for follow-up installments looks very intriguing.