ALYX IN WONDERLAND

Revisiting City 17 in VR is a thrill in HALF- LIFE: ALYX.

Iplayed the final three hours of Half-Life: Alyx in a single session. Before Alyx, I never used VR for more than 30 minutes at a time. I don’t get motion sick, but I do get generally tired of VR. Tired of wearing a headset, tired of having to stand and stoop and awkwardly reach around. But I didn’t even think of taking a break during the final chapters of Half-Life: Alyx. I was completely enthralled and unwilling to stop playing.

When I played through the ending (no spoilers here, but trust me, you’ll want to keep your VR headset on through the credits), I reloaded my last autosave, and played through the ending a second time. And then I went back to the beginning of the game and started playing again. I didn’t have much doubt Half-Life: Alyx would be a great VR experience—Valve makes its own VR headset and software, after all. But I was sceptical it could also be a great, proper Half-Life game, and I was thrilled to discover it really is.

While it’s sandwiched between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, the repercussions of its story extend well into whatever future there is for the Half-Life series, and its technical accomplishments will leave most other developers, once again, struggling to keep up.

ON A RAIL

Five years before the events of Half-Life 2, Alyx Vance is performing surveillance and recon in the Combine-controlled City 17. It’s immediately engaging to be back in City 17 again, so familiar yet so much more impressive in VR, an environment I don’t need to just look at and admire, but one I can actually run my virtual fingertips across and crane my neck back to take in fully. When a city scanner takes my picture, I instinctively hold my hands up against its blinding camera flash. Combine Metro Cops seem larger than life because they’re now actually life-size. I’ve seen Striders before, but I’ve never had one step over me in VR as I stared up at it, utterly dumbfounded, watching it sink its massive feet into the side of a building, using the crumbling masonry as a step to walk itself up to a rooftop. During the opening minutes, and at plenty of times during the entire game, I just had to stop, stand still, and take it all in.

The attention to detail is obvious not just in how the world looks, but in the ways you can interact with it. Alyx’s disembodied hands react wonderfully to each object in the world, and it’s hard not to just stand there admiring the way my virtual fingers close in different ways depending on what I’m holding: Curling around a bottle, gently clasping an iron railing, holding a discarded cigarette butt between your thumb and forefinger, gripping an empty water jug by the handle, pulling up the antenna and then gently twisting the tuning knob on a radio. Even discovering I can pick up a marker to scrawl something on a dirty window pane, and then realizing I can use an eraser to wipe it off, is delightful. You could very easily spend around 15 minutes just messing around with the physical objects in the starting area, and that’s exactly what I did.

Even while dallying, there’s a surprisingly brief beginning to the game when compared with HalfLife’s opening train ride and Half-Life 2’ s similarly lengthy stroll through City 17. While there is a jaunt through the city streets and a train ride at the start of Half-Life: Alyx, you’ll still pretty quickly be holding your first gun and wearing a pair of gravity gloves (or as their inventor Russell likes to call them, Russells) which let you point to an object and yank it through the air and into your hand with a simple and satisfying flick of the wrist. How many objects did I Force-pull to my hand over the course of Half-Life: Alyx? Hundreds? A thousand? I don’t know, but it never once got old.

APPREHENSION

After the intro you descend into City 17’s quarantine zone, a murky labyrinth closed off by walls within

I’ve seen Striders before but I’ve never had one step over me

the walls of City 17, where most of the game takes place. Your father, Eli, has been captured by the Combine, and you’re trying to intercept the train he’s on by making your way through a Xen infestation that has filled the metro tunnels, dark sewers, and basements of crumbling buildings.

The Half-Life series, especially the original, has always been as much about horror as it is about action, and that horror was often gross. Plump, fleshy headcrabs leaping at your face from darkened air ducts, shambling zombies with bloody, elongated claws and gaping midsections suddenly lurching to life, the Gonarch’s massive and pendulous testicles swinging as it gallops after you, the giant fetus-like body and swollen cranium of the Nihilanth. Disgusting.

Here in VR the graphic grossness increases by at least a factor of ten. Barnacles with their sticky, dangling tongues belch and barf human remains directly onto me when they expire, giving me another good reason to avoid standing under them. Apartment walls are covered with pulsating tendrils and toothy alien blossoms that gibber and snap at my fingertips if I hover too close. Shiny gas sacks cling to the walls, swelling and inflating when I approach until they rupture and spew noxious particles into the air. Half-Life: Alyx is gleefully and effectively disgusting, though the grossness does feel a bit much at times.

Progressing through the quarantine zone is slow work, both due to the nature of movement in VR, the need to search through each room for spare ammo and resin (a resource you can use to upgrade your guns), and the unsettling, spooky, occasionally pitch black environment. Thankfully, jump scares are downright restrained so they never feel cheap. Sure, I yelled when I opened a kitchen cabinet and a dead headcrab rolled onto me, and I jumped a little when a zombie thumped a hand against a window I walked by, but these scares don’t happen as often as they could and the horror strikes a fair balance between tension, dread, and startling “Oh wow!” moments.

SURFACE TENSION

The second half of the game opens up into the more dynamic types of combat encounters I loved from earlier Half-Life games. Antlions are also infesting the quarantine zone, and they’re much more fun to fight than headcrabs and zombies—faster, alarmingly huge, and much more directly aggressive. Combine soldiers begin showing up more often in the second half of the game, too, both to fight you and the antlions. After hours of slowly creeping through the early sewers and basements you can finally freely navigate the environment, take cover, displace, and by coming across a fight already in progress, plan your assault by using a grenade or explosive barrel to conserve ammo. The nature of VR movement means you’re not exactly strafing around at full speed and these fights are usually pretty brief, but they’re still extremely fun, chaotic, and challenging.

Unlike Gordon Freeman, Alyx Vance does not have a massive arsenal to deal with her enemies. In addition to a standard pistol, you’ll eventually acquire a shotgun and a Combine pulse rifle. The guns each have a different method of reloading which makes them enjoyably distinct. Eject a spent mag from your pistol, grab another from your backpack, or use your gravity gloves to yank one into your hand, slap it home, and click the slide into place. The shotgun breaks open allowing you to shove in fresh shells two at a time before snapping it closed again with an upward hand movement. The Combine pulse pistol loads ammo pods from a side feeder and a quick sideways flip of the wrist snaps it shut again. These actions remain satisfying to perform, especially during a mad scramble as antlions and headcrabs scuttle toward you or Combine soldiers try to flank your position.

UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES

I played through Half-Life: Alyx using the HTC Vive Pro, and then spent a few more hours replaying it with a Valve Index. (It’s worth mentioning that the version I played was still being patched on a daily basis by Valve to improve performance and fix bugs.) Apart from a single crash to desktop, and one quicksave that wouldn’t reload, I didn’t experience much in the way of technical issues. Both headsets provided a smooth experience with all performance settings on high with my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080.

Half-Life: Alyx took me roughly 13 hours to complete, and while the slow and measured pace and claustrophobic setting of the first half felt occasionally stifling, the second half flew by as the intrigue of the story took its hold, and the combat got far more exciting, varied, and excellently fast-paced.

The ending is, frankly, wonderful, surprising, exciting, not to mention more than a bit puzzling when you really stop to think about it. I’m eager to see Half-Life fans react and dissect and discuss it, as I’m sure they will for months afterwards, and it makes all sorts of follow-ups to Half-Life: Alyx seem possible. I just fervently hope whatever that follow-up is, that Valve (please, please) doesn’t make us wait another 13 years for it.

Jump scares are downright restrained so they never feel cheap