Hospital

"What kind of hospital is this?"

- Alyx Vance

The Hospital is a building visited by Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance during their escape from City 17 in the fourth chapter of Half-Life 2: Episode One, Urban Flight.

It does not have a precise name, since the sign only reads "Стационар" ( "stacionar" in Latin letters), which means "Hospital" in Russian, although it is more commonly spelled "госпиталь’" ("gospital" in Latin letters).

Overview
The hospital presents the conventional features: several individual rooms with bathrooms, operation rooms, washing machines, lockers, etc. The walls are covered with typical late 19th century white tiles on their lower parts, while walls are completely covered in some rooms. Signs indicating the directions to the different sections are written in Cyrillic alphabet, while some are in English.

Half-Life 2: Episode One
Nearby is located a small Resistance outpost where Barney Calhoun and other Rebels are stationed late in the city uprising, and a freight train station used by the Resistance to help refugees escape the city.

When Gordon and Alyx proceed through the building, they discover it filled with each kind of Zombie (due to the building having been shelled), Combine Soldiers, Elite and standard, and Hopper Mines. Gordon also takes down a Gunship with the RPG in the hospital's attic and falls through several stories to end up in the flooded basement where he is separated from Alyx for a little while. Alyx also finds a shotgun and wields it for the rest of the chapter. It also seems that operations, the study of human and conceivably zombie anatomy, or torture experimentation have been conducted in the operation rooms.

Behind the scenes



 * The hospital was first featured in the Episode One second teaser, HL2:EP1 Launch Teaser 2, with the tagline "Alyx hates zombies. Even more than you do."


 * According to Randy Lundeen, the hospital was mostly designed from scratch. Like most of the City 17 style, it was inspired by Eastern European architecture. The surgery lamps and the overall white and yellow color scheme were drawn from photos of a hospital in Chernobyl (not Prypiat), while the tile work and the high archways were chosen to give the area the institutional feel of an old European hospital; the metallic beds were based on World War II images. The team wanted to avoid modern-looking fixtures and furniture altogether in order to differentiate the place from a contemporary hospital.


 * Follow Half-Life and its expansions, the room numbers are associated to last names of Valve employees, such as Marc Laidlaw, Ted Backman, Chet Faliszek, Erik Wolpaw, Adrian Finol, Bill Van Buren, Gautam Babbar, among others, put there as an Easter Egg.

List of appearances

 * Half-Life 2: Episode One