Just realized all the food items that the combine provides in half life Alex is water flavored. Honestly that just makes the line "sometimes I dream about cheese". Just sad honestly. Like all these people have to eat is from I can tell is water flavored crackers. It's quite surprising humans are fighting for freedom instead of killing themselves with how they really ligit don't have any creature comforts at all. Life under the combine really is just soo miserable that anything that has flavor is just a far off dream. You are alone repressed and in constant fear of getting arrested with nothing to comfort you at all.
The food tastes like water, and the water makes you forget. The suppression field makes reproduction impossible, adults who don’t collaborate but behave are corralled into ghettos, or get turned into inhuman cyborgs for lashing out, while the combine strip the planet of useful biomass and minerals.
The tone in HL2 was seriously dark if you paid attention