Headcrabs leaping from the shadows. Fanged barnacles hanging from dark ceilings, eagerly awaiting an opportunity to pull unwary creatures into their veiny maws. The eerily mysterious G-Man, entering and exiting our universe like a knife breaking the skin.

Undercurrents of horror have always run through Valve Software’s Half-Life series. And, with Half-Life: Alyx, out today, the Seattle-based developer had the opportunity to enhance the scares, upping the intensity through the illusion of real, physical presence.

Last week, in anticipation of the launch, we sat down with Valve artist Tristan Reidford and level designer Dario Casali to talk about the way VR accentuates horror, the responsibility that comes with that, what it was like working on the beloved series after all this time and why the scariest zombie is the one you can’t see.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Bloody Disgusting: Bloody Disgusting is, obviously, a horror website. So I wanted to ask you guys, is Half-Life: Alyx scary?

Tristan Reidford: I’m very affected by horror and scary stuff, especially jump scares. And there’s parts of this game I dread playing. I mean, it’s a thing we’ve been very responsible with in the game. Like, we definitely ramp the players into it. But, it’s still definitely a scary game, for sure.

Dario Casali: We have made attempts to avoid the shocking, startling jump scare ideas and we use more of a kind of mood and setting and atmosphere and sort of tension to develop that, rather than the instant, like, try to give people heart attacks. Although there are probably a couple of places in the games — there is one particular place in the game that I nickname “Heart Attack Hallway.” [laughs] But, that’s just one place.

BD: One of the first things that I noticed in the reveal trailer back in November was that this seemed scarier than previous games, partially because of the change of perspective that comes with VR. Like, when a headcrab jumps at you in the game it’s actually jumping at your face. Were there ways that you guys took advantage of VR as a medium to bring out the horror in a way you might not have been able to in previous Half-Life games?

TR: Right out of the gate, horror is low-hanging fruit for VR. Previously, games appeared in this little window in front of you that’s this [portal] to another world. But, as soon as you put a headset on, it’s all around you. There could be stuff behind you now and that would never have happened before. You just get that for free in VR. It’s immediately terrifying. I remember, earlier on, like before we had the engine up-and-running, we had some higher-res zombies that were made post-Left 4 Dead 2 and had put them in a room, just static models, all the way around you, and there they were right in front of you, and it was horrible. But, as you turned around to see them, the one that went out of your peripheral vision was the scariest one in the room, not the one in front of you. So, I think our job was to be responsible with this new, super low-hanging fruit for horror.

DC: The immediacy of the scale, the feel of actually being there and your body’s involved rather than just your fingers moving and the screen ahead of you being that little portal into the world, it doesn’t take a lot to establish that sense of dread; of what’s coming around the next corner, honestly. Just a little bit of darkness here and there. Because all of that sound is very spacialized. So you can have a little sound out of the corner of a dark room. And that wouldn’t do much in a flatscreen game but when you have this perception that your body is there, and the stakes are real because of the scale of things, like you say, with the headcrab jumping at your face. I had no idea how big a headcrab was until I put it into VR and I realized, oh, this thing is actually the size of a dog or something like that. 

They’re pretty scary just because of their presence in the world, and that presence is so very tactile in VR, so yeah, we didn’t have to work too hard — in fact, we probably dialed back in many instances — the level of anticipation or horror that some areas would have. Just because players would come through and they would have certain responses that we weren’t too happy about and in some cases they would pull the headset off and say, “I don’t want to play anymore because I saw this creature scuttle away in the darkness and now I don’t know where he is.” So we were careful to respect certain boundaries so that we definitely have those moments of tension and unease, but we tried not to push them over the edge so that we wouldn’t end up alienating a section of the user base.

BD: It definitely sounds like with VR and horror, a little goes a long way.

DC: Absolutely. Your whole body is involved. You’re leaning and you’re bending over and you’re reaching and when your whole body is involved it really does feel like there are stakes there. And this giant six-foot zombie in front of you, you don’t want them to get anywhere near you. Whereas on the flatscreen, it’s no big deal; you have to throw hundreds of zombies at the player on a flatscreen to make them feel like you’re being overwhelmed. But, one real-sized zombie in a small room with you is like, that’s all it takes.

BD: Are there other ways that being in VR changes your approach to level design? As a level designer approaching making a Half-Life game in VR, did it feel different to draw out a level than it did for a flatscreen game?

DC: Very much so yes. So the level of fidelity that we have in the world is a direct result of players coming through and wanting to inspect everything. And the movement speed through VR is more of a regular walking speed that you would normally take. If you look at video games, a lot of those movement speeds are like 30 miles an hour. But, when you bring things down to a human scale, we’ve found that a lot of the fidelity of the world is condensed down into more realistic-sized spaces. So the considerations we had to have in VR were a lot like “Well how much space are people going to want to traverse, because we don’t have vehicles. We don’t have very fast-moving things that could make people motion sick.” It’s all about, pretty much where you can walk around to. So there was that consideration. 

The other consideration was of course, “What’s the experience? What are interesting experiences, fun experiences in VR?” And those can be fairly different from flatscreen because you’re interacting with everything with two hands and a head and they’re all six degrees of freedom and they all have to work how you expect them to work because you don’t have this complicated keyboard in places where you have keyboard mapping of six different keys or 12 different keys that all do different things. This is all intuitive interactions. Like how do you open a door? Well, now you just grab the handle… and rotate to push the door, rather than pressing the use key or something like that. When you apply that to all of the things that happen to you in the game that you interact with, it’s a very different design process. 

As far as interacting with enemies and stuff, that’s a little more similar to regular FPS games. We just adapted the AI so they wouldn’t be overwhelming. We tried to use the fast zombies and the fast headcrabs from Half-Life 2, but they move so quickly that players were just overwhelmed by them too fast. We have a pretty complicated reloading system; you don’t just press R to reload. It’s like one of those things that we just don’t have all these keyboard mapped, it’s actually physical simulated movement, and so when somebody’s trying to actually reload a gun, using fairly real movements, and they’re being attacked by an incredibly fast monster at the time, it all falls apart. So, yeah, there are quite a few considerations in going from traditional FPS level design to VR level design.

BD: Did both of you work on the Left 4 Dead series?

DC and TR: Yep.

BD: So, the last time a Half-Life game came out you guys hadn’t made any of the Left 4 Dead games. So, were there things you learned from Left 4 Dead that you were able to bring back into the world of Half-Life?

TR: Perhaps some of the worldbuilding we did in the Left 4 Dead series. In safe rooms, there was an awful lot of work put into writing all these messages that previous people had left behind. And there’s a bit of that in Half-Life 2 as well, with the underground railroad and so on. But, in Left 4 Dead we learned that that goes a long way with players. And so, we’ve gone, as Dario was saying, like the player wants to inspect every part of the world. We put an awful lot of effort into putting a lot more of that stuff into the game, I suppose, like non-critical story items that tell a little bit of backstory or do things to the mood. One side of horror is the monsters attacking you and so on, but there are the corpses, and static stuff, that is just as fascinating and gross as the monsters because you can get right up and peer into the chest cavity of like a dead zombie. And he’s not doing anything and it’s just, “ugh.” It’s bloody and disgusting [laughs].

DC: We did a lot of work in Left 4 Dead on the visceral response, that when you shoot something it responds in a certain way that was way advanced from Half-Life. I think that was a fairly big part of the Left 4 Dead experience; just the feeling of wading through a ton of bodies with powerful guns and, subconsciously or not, we definitely put some [of that] into Half-Life: Alyx, where the characters would respond fairly realistically… when they got shot. There is definitely a combination of physics and ragdoll animations that make it rewarding when you shoot something. Especially with some of the more powerful guns in the game or explosions.

TR: There’s the banter between characters in Left 4 Dead 2, especially, and we have a bit more of that in Half-Life: Alyx as well, between Alyx and Russell, which is like a departure from Half-Life 2 where Gordon didn’t say anything. I don’t know if we consciously did it, but yeah, we definitely did that again in this game. And it was really successful in Left 4 Dead 2, I think, like characters talking to each other.

BD: So, I think when people think of Half-Life and horror, they think of Ravenholm. So, as experts on level design and art, what aspects of Ravenholm made it as memorable and horrifying as it was for players?

DC: I actually worked very heavily on Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 so I’m glad you asked that question. For that section of the game, we used tension and apprehension a lot more than out-and-out, large scale action sequences. We had a lot of darkness and sound design to get the player thinking that the town was larger than it was and scarier than it was; used enemies like the poison headcrab zombie; the guy who sounded like a cow. He was all bowed over and he had those headcrabs on his back and he would throw them at you. I think we only had one or two of those guys in the whole level, but we would use sound cues to get you feeling uneasy before you could see him. 

And we introduced the crabs that he would throw before we introduced you to him. So you’d think, “Ah crap! Those crabs were bad enough, but now we have a guy who’s throwing them at us, as well.” So, we used those same ideas in Half-Life: Alyx, where we try to prelude what’s going to happen in a few minutes or in a couple of seconds or whatever with some sound cues and some environmental storytelling or some mood setting. 

And, we have a number of those examples in Half-Life: Alyx. There is this one particular area that, it’s a giant hotel that’s been really messed up by, not just the Combine, but by Xen as well. And you come into this area and the first thing we do is just play some sounds of scuttling and you have this very long corridor with nothing in it whatsoever except some skittering headcrabs at the other end with a big bright light; you don’t even know what you’re getting yourself into. The further you get into there we’re just investing a lot of time in setting the scene and not really throwing any enemies at the player so you just build up this anticipation of “What is this space?” you know. I think that anticipation is a really big part of feeling that anxiety, rather than throwing jump scares at people it’s like what you don’t do, I think, is what’s powerful and what sets the scene. And as you get further into this area, you’re presented with a giant sort of eviscerated part of the structure where at the very bottom you have this very dark, Xen-infested basement with little creepy-crawlies in it. And you don’t have to go down there; you don’t want to go down there. You look up to the top and you realize, “Oh that’s where I have to go.” But, of course, eventually, we make you go down into that really nasty dark area with crawling enemies. But, the whole reason that works is because we set the scene to begin with and you don’t overdo the introduction of those terrifying elements and you let the player fill in all those gaps. It’s been fairly well play-tested, so… A lot of attention has been paid to that particular aspect, of setting the mood, just because it’s so powerful in VR. It doesn’t take much, as we’ve been saying, so when you really focus on that being the goal of an area, it’s pretty powerful.

BD: Does that approach apply to other aspects of the game’s tone? Like humor? People have noted from the gameplay videos that you guys have shown that this is funnier than other Half-Life games have been. But, I think when people think of comedy in games, they think of the games that overdo it, that are throwing lame jokes at you frequently and maybe one out of ten will be a hit and the rest are misses. So, was there a similar approach to humor and levity in the game, to making sure that the jokes that are there are winners?

TR: I dunno if they’re really jokes. This comes from Rhys Darby’s performance mainly, being a comedy actor. He’s like your companion on the game and like, you do feel alone in this game when you go deeper into the game. And it’s just super reassuring to know that there’s another person, even though he’s a fictional person, hanging around and talking through these things. I feel like there’s a slight brittleness about his humor, like he’s trying to make you feel better about where you’re going. It’s not like a gag machine, it’s like a little bit of nervous back-and-forth, as Russel’s with you and you’re [going into this] awful place; just an awful place to be. And because you’re invested in the story, as well, so the player wants to get through it. But, like Dario says, as the mood starts to build up and the dread starts to form, it’s just really nice having this voice in your ear just gently encouraging you to go through, and you have a couple brittle, little jokes between you. I think the writers did an amazing job with that.

DC: They do an especially good job at addressing what earlier playtesting on the product showed us which was that player’s going through this game feeling like there are these moments of tension and excitement and they kind of wanted to diffuse that sometimes, so the pacing wouldn’t be this high-set pacing. So, a lot of the writing was in response to that tension and I think that humor is a big part of that. And just those writers, I’ve worked with them for many years, they did a lot of Portal work, and Left 4 Dead work, and they seem to understand exactly — I think because of that playtesting feedback — exactly what was needed and they delivered really well. And we have some environmental humor going on, too. Like, the original Half-Life was a lot heavier on environmental humor and situational humor. Half-Life 2 sort of stepped a little bit away from that I think, but there’s definitely some of that has come back in this product.

BD: City 17 seems even more oppressive in Half-Life: Alyx than it did in past games. What goes into making it feel like a frightening, authoritarian place from a level design and art standpoint?

TR: From an art point of view, we knew the state of the world in Half-Life 2 and we knew we were turning the clock back a little bit because we’re a prequel, and we wanted to show earlier versions of some of the things you might recognize from Half-Life 2, but we didn’t want to go as far as to tell that full backstory, because some of the story players can come up with themselves and we wanted to give the player room to have that. But, again, I guess as you play through the game when you start off in the city and there are still people running around, going about their business, perhaps even more so than today [with the COVID-19 crisis], it seems. But then, you get to a point where you go through a gate and then the state of the world completely changes, when you go into what we call the “quarantine zone,” which again, seems [appropriate]. And so I suppose you have like the formal impression of the Combine invasion and how they’re trying to manage that impression and they’re not quite fully there yet, but you can see the way it’s going. But, as soon as you leave the main city and go into the quarantine zone, the impression completely changes tone. Because that’s when all the alien infestation and all the monsters show up. You’re in City 17 the whole time, but there are perhaps two or three very distinct acts to the game.

DC: We did a lot of work to try to escalate, to evolve the feel of the city over the course of the game because Alyx is basically moving toward this structure called the Vault, which is storing the secret weapon that the Combine has. So, as Alyx progresses further and further into the game and closer to this facility she excites more attention from the Combine, we have this escalation. Like, to begin with, it’s fairly safe to be moving around and as you proceed you start to encounter more heavy resistance, you start to encounter more dark environments where you have different enemies that are coming from different heights and as you get closer and closer the environment becomes more and more surreal and more and more unfamiliar… So, what we tried to do is to dial down that familiarity of the environment as the game goes on so you kind of feel more and more like you’re where you shouldn’t be.

TR: And as we’re doing that in the world the player’s proficiency in playing the game, like, it really goes on quite a noticeable ramp. Their proficiency with the weapons, with dealing with different enemies, so as the game gets more oppressive and darker, you get better and better at playing the game over the course of the thing. I think those two things work out really well.

DC: You get more comfortable with all the mechanics and all of your tools in order to deal with the scale of the threat as it goes.

BD: So, because we’re a horror website, I should ask: is it scary to be releasing a new Half-Life game after all this time?

DC: [laughs] I think there is this humility that comes along with working on this IP, which is, “Hey we really want to do a good job, and we really want to put out something that people are excited to play.” And that’s always a very scary prospect. That aside, the fact that this is in VR has given this invigoration. It’s like a new frontier to explore the Half-Life IP with and I think it’s given us a lot of very interesting, fruitful results of our work. Just the VR platform itself has really worked well for Half-Life. So part of that trepidation of working on another Half-Life game is “what is going to be the big selling point of Half-Life 3?” We had such major selling points to the previous ones and big innovations and stuff and big differentiators in Half-Life 2 from what was available at the time. And I think VR gives us that this time which alleviates some of that terror of how do you follow in those footsteps. Like what do we do next? And I think VR is a great answer for that, and I think we’ve seen that it’s given us a lot of novelty and a lot of invigoration for the franchise.

TR: We never ran out of ideas, I think, and a lot of our ideas, it was difficult work and required a lot of iteration and playtesting. But, enough of them worked that just as the project’s gone on we’ve gotten more and more confident that this is going to be good, and that we were going to be able to put something out that respects the fans who are waiting for the next Half-Life game and so like right now as it’s all coming together, the music is coming in, the whole experience is coming together when you play it. Like, I hadn’t actually played the start of the game for months. I’d been working on different parts of the thing… but, I put it on and played through the first few levels and I was genuinely blown away by it. Just seeing everything in place, all the choreo animations, all the music, all the tone, all the pacing. So yeah, I don’t think I am really scared at all. I’m pumped.

BD: Now if I’m remembering correctly, the first game that you worked on at Valve was Half-Life 2: Episode Two?

TR: Yeah, I built a few models for that.

BD: So, I would imagine that you would be excited to get to return to that world after coming in right at the very end of it.

TR: Yeah, very much so! Over the past 12 years, I’ve had lots of things that I’ve been really excited to do for the next Half-Life game. And it was just like a child in a candy store when we first started working.

Half-Life: Alyx is out now on Steam. Compatible VR Kit required.