One of the reasons I disliked HL2 so much was because my experience of it was so controlled and funneled. I felt like the designers removed my agency, and tried to ensure that there was one right way to solve a problem, to the point of punishing me [1], or worse, main-routing[2] me when I sought an alternative route.
[1] One location early on requires you to break into a tunnel to come up behind and flank a guard shooting down at you with a mounted gun behind a screen. The problem is that the fact that a flanking tunnel exists means that the designers had no reason to make him possible to hit; it is actually possible to kill him head on, but it's difficult, and you will almost certainly take a lot of damage in the process (the punishment). The tunnel is just too damn convenient though, and breaks the suspension of disbelief; it's too obviously designed in.
[2] I invented the word main-routing to describe a situation where, when you're exploring shady nooks that you spot out of the corner of your eye, they look like they go somewhere interesting, so you go back to the main route to find out what the main stream does. But instead it dead-ends, and in fact that shady little corner you were exploring was the only way forward; what you thought was a secret shortcut was just the main route again, in a different guise. This is a double-whammy: not only does it break suspension of disbelief again, but it also punishes exploration. It teaches you that nooks are either dead ends that are pointless to explore, or that the main route will dead-end itself and you'll be forced to explore the nook. Either way, you have no choice in the matter, so you're better off sticking to the main route until it forces you to explore.
I really did not enjoy HL2. It was a cripplingly disappointing experience, especially after having played Deus Ex, which greatly increased my expectations from a game. Going back to playing a mute scientist with an alleged PhD yet whose only mechanism of interacting with the world is violence was like going back to the 90s.