A blind zombie with powerful hearing lumbers toward me, groaning beneath a fungal crust that covers his body like saran wrap on past-date leftovers.
Frantically, I reach out a gravity glove and yank a vodka bottle to my outstretched hand, catching it just in time to alley-oop it into the cement a few feet away with a loud crash. Mucus-flecked maw inches from my face, my enemy turns, screams, and shambles off toward the noise.
Half-Life: Alyx — Valve’s first narrative-driven single-player game in nine years, and its first Half-Life game in 13 — is ruthlessly devoted to making you fumble your way through moments like these; making you feel like your feet are nailed to the ground as death closes in. Ever have a dream where you level a pistol at a monster, but *click* *click click* it won’t fire? Or that a horde of creatures have backed you into a corner? Or that, as you face down a heavily armed gunman, you drop your ammo in the dirt?
Valve has repeatedly said that the Half-Life franchise runs on technological innovation. The original game paired exhilarating shooting with a serious sci-fi story back in 1998 when most shooters were communicating their narrative, if at all, through text slides in between chapters. Half-Life 2 spun an even better yarn and paired it with a staggeringly impressive physics playground. In the aeons that have passed since Half-Life 2: Episode Two, the Seattle-based developer has searched in vain for tech advancements momentous enough to warrant a new Half-Life. In VR, Valve found something it deemed worthy.
It’s in those close call moments that it’s most clear Valve’s decision paid off. With Half-Life: Alyx, the horror elements that have occasionally bubbled to the surface in previous entries are placed front and center. In this prequel to Half-Life 2, you aren’t Gordon Freeman, brilliant theoretical physicist who fought his way out of Black Mesa with a crowbar. You’re Alyx Vance, Gordon’s companion from previous games, who, as the story begins, is a significantly less experienced hero than in HL2 and its episodes. As this story begins, Alyx’s father, Eli, has been kidnapped by the Combine, and with the help of Russell, a humorous engineer voiced by Flight of the Concords’ Rhys Darby, Alyx sets off to rescue her father. This task eventually morphs into a quest for a secret weapon hidden in the Vault, a hulking mass of Combine tech suspended above City 17.
Half-Life: Alyx feels like the first big adventure for a familiar character. You learn how to load a gun, chamber a round and fire. You learn how to use the Russells™, the gravity-manipulating gloves which allow Alyx to pull objects to her from all over a room (and, helpfully, keep track of your health, ammo and inventory). The motion controls feel great. Yanking a wooden crate to yourself and smashing it into a shower of splinters and packing peanuts feels as good as whacking boxes with a crowbar ever did. Valve has tapped into a rich vein of ludonarrative harmony by pitching this as a welcoming first big adventure for the VR agnostic. And it is! Though, in order to see the massively important story beats hidden in the final hours of the game, they’ll need to be up for a healthy dose of horror.
It’s a logical pivot that seems to flow naturally from the change in perspective. A headcrab leaping at your face in a PC game is a nuisance. A headcrab leaping at your actual face strapped into a VR headset will jolt you out of your skin. In our interview with Valve developers Tristan Reidford and Dario Casali, they said that, in VR, a little horror goes a long way. That’s certainly true in Alyx, where you’ll encounter, at most, a handful of slow-moving zombies at a time.
Alyx requires competence, not mastery. It doesn’t ask you for twitch timing, but instead tasks you with coming to grips with learning to use your IRL hands to handle your weapons. But managing to smoothly load your pistol and take down a single monster will make you feel the same sense of accomplishment that beating back a horde of the undead would in another zombie game. Using motion controls to sight down and fire off shots feels deeply satisfying, especially once you nab the punchy shotgun.
The motion controls are also a joy to use for acts as simple as searching for ammo. As you travel through a host of memorable levels — an abandoned zoo, a distillery, a hallway studded with stalactite-like explosive barrels — you’ll need to search for ammo, health injections and resin to upgrade your weapons. This makes the act of rummaging through an environment far more interesting than it is in most games. Instead of holding a button down to loot a body, you need to physically grab downed enemies and rotate their corpses with your simulated hands. Instead of seeing simple UI prompts that alert you to the presence of important objects nearby, you need to root through the refuse, opening drawers and moving boxes to reveal hidden objects. Half-Life: Alyx is wonderfully tactile as a result.
There are occasional impediments that stand in the way of enjoying those moments though. First, provided you can afford it in the first place, VR can be a massive pain in the ass to set up. Back in January, I bought an Oculus Quest and link cable in preparation for Half-Life: Alyx’s release. But, the weekend before my review code was set to arrive, my set-up stopped functioning. I troubleshot every imaginable issue and still couldn’t get the game to run on the Quest.
Thankfully, when Valve offered the code, the company also informed me that they would be sending over a Valve Index in time for the review, which is the best way to play this game, anyway. But, I quickly found out that my laptop, which is high-end enough to run a demanding game like Control on max settings, was lacking a display port completely, a feature I had never needed before. So, I did the sensible thing (lol) and ordered the 2020 edition of my laptop which includes a mini display port. It arrived, but only came with an 8GB stick of Ram, which I needed to trade out for a 16GB stick in order to run Alyx.
Eventually, I got Alyx running. But, each session, after about a half-hour, the framerate became almost unplayably choppy. I realized that my computer was overheating, and set my laptop on top of a box fan and from there, had little issue. Though, I did have one persistent glitch that caused the right lens to stutter nauseatingly during load screens (which are pretty long). Those technical issues, combined with the fact that playing VR for longer than an hour or two at a time can bring on headaches and nausea, are the reason this review is over a week late.
None of these problems are in any way the fault of Valve. Half-Life: Alyx is a great game! Skip to the bottom if you want: I’m giving it a good score! But, the problems I had in getting VR to work with a solid set-up and a provided Index highlights the steep financial investment that making the jump into VR requires. The story I included above is a simplified overview. In reality, I purchased a half-dozen other cords and parts before I finally got the game running. If you don’t yet have a headset and want to play this game, you will likely spend substantially more money than you expect before all is said and done.
So, Half-Life: Alyx will, for now, be an inaccessible game for many folks. You’ll need a high-end PC, an expensive headset and enough room to play the game comfortably without constantly butting up against virtual walls. These are real barriers. But, if you can overcome them — or borrow a headset and/or PC from someone who can — Valve has served up a terrific single-player sci-fi horror experience. Long-time Half-Life fans will be thrilled to see where this one goes, and horror enthusiasts will find plenty of jump scares to keep them entertained.
Half-Life: Alyx review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Half-Life: Alyx is out now on Steam for PC VR formats.