No, I Will Not Get Some Grub

Last night I wrote about the main menus of the Left 4 Dead games as a way to recover/distract my mind from getting the Get Some Grub achievement in Half-Life 2: Episode Two, but unfortunately it still remains in my mind. I mentioned it there, but getting this achievement was one of the most upsetting things I have done in any game, ever.

To get the achievement you must squish every Antlion Grub found in the game, which are larvae found all around the mines in the second section of the game. Now, I am not the biggest fan of bugs or larvae, but I can usually look past that. The issue is that the ones in Episode Two are some of the most unsettling ones I have ever seen simply due to their sheer size.

Now, it was already upsetting enough having to constantly think about these guys, even though they don't attack you or anything (in fact if you squish them you get some health pellets!) they are just kind of gross.

The real issue is there are 333 of them.

So uhh… yeah… This is the rarest achievement in any of the HL2 games, having been achieved by only ~7.5% of players*, and now one of them is me.

This kinda made me a bit upset that there was a part of the game that I didn't really enjoy, at least in the same way I did with the rest of the game. During the call with the friend I even started playing the finale of the game to show them something, but I ended up finishing the whole sequence since it was just that fun, and I didn't feel the itch to go back to squishing Grubs again (but I did anyways).

This is probably the only achievement in the entire series that, to me, actually detracted form a section rather than adding onto it. Some of my favourite achievements are relatively difficult ones, sometimes even rarer than Get Some Grub.

Zombie Chopper is probably my favourite achievement of them all, as it requires making it through Ravenholm while only using the gravity gun and absolutely no other weapons. This added a whole new layer of strategy and a multitude of new ways to get through situations, which make you think more than just "use gun".

Keep Off The Sand! is another of my favourites, where you have to cross the antlion beach without touching the sand at all, which might sound a bit daunting, but if you're paying attention it isn't that bad and you can tell pretty easily if you failed.

There's also lots of smaller achievements which you can get by just simply doing silly stuff. Probably the most famous of the game is Flushed which requires killing an enemy with a toilet, but there's also OSHA Violation where you have to kill 3 enemies using the crane during Highway 17, or Targetted Advertising where you have to use a crossbow to pin a soldier to a billboard!

Even the more strictly difficult "game changing" achievements are actually pretty fun for me! One of them, The One Free Bullet, is from Episode One and is achieved by playing through the entire game having fired only a single bullet (which you are literally forced to shoot to get through a door as soon as you get your first pistol).

This achievement changes the entire game completely (or at least after the beginning once you're in actual combat mode), just like how Zombie Chopper did, requiring a whole new approach to the game in terms of traversal and strategy, and you can at least use more weapons than just the gravity gun, like the crowbar, grenades, and even the rocket launcher!

In conclusion, I guess I really just needed to vent. I knew that I would dread the Get Some Grub achievement, but I did want to interrogate that feeling a bit more rather than just shrugging it off as my disgust for the Grubs.

Half-Life 2 has some of the best achievements in any game I have ever played, that often make you do challenging or unusual stuff, always giving an interesting twist to the game that still remains fun to do.

Unfortunately, though, Get Some Grub is a massive exception to that, and I have now been able to see that it isn't just my ick against the grubs, but the fact that is just turns the section into a monotonous quest to catch every last detail in a chapter, which is just not that fun.

Oh also fun fact, the most achieved achievement in both Episode Two and Left 4 Dead 2 is called Acid Reflex! So that's a neat coincidence.

Footnote

* That number is in the original separate release of Episode Two. The rate of it appears as 0.8% in HL2 after the games were bundled in, but that number only includes people who have either gotten the achievement in the original release and transferred their stats, or people who have gotten it after the 20th anniversary update in November 2024.)