Half-Life was the same. The game doesn’t spoon feed you a narrative, the same way real life doesn’t have a narrator (at least one outside of your head).

You need to pay attention to your surroundings, listen in to NPCs talking, read posters on the wall, etc to piece together the story.

It was and is one of the cooler ways to do storytelling in my opinion. Cutscenes etc are fine but for a first person game, I love the immersion of the story happening around you rather then being loredumped on you while you’re agency is taken away from you.