Another interesting pattern is that they don’t make games to tell stories. This has always been a misconception since Half-life has such massive following over the story, and hurt over unfinished plots. But if you check closely, those games where never about the story. Usually Valve makes something with a fun mechanic to play, then they work on writing a creative and cool story/dialogue around that gameplay. Never the other way around. 99% of their games are about gameplay, if you stripped all flavor text, voice dialogue and art from Portal it would still be a solid and extremely fun puzzle game.

I think you’ve just uncovered why I like valve games so much 😅