’Half-Life: Alyx’ Shows VR’s Power, but Might Not Win Converts

The catacombs beneath City 17's Quarantine Zone are dark and infested with zombies. Possessed by alien monsters called head crabs, an iconic Half-Life staple, they wander the tunnels, attacking anyone they meet. You think you have a perfect trap: an explosive barrel in a pathway that's blocked by two zombies. Perfect videogame logic. You fire a quick shot from your pistol and hide behind a nearby corner, peeking out to watch them lumber closer.

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They step forward, almost there … Until the lead one sees you, rears out its arms, and swings them wildly, knocking the barrel off the table and sending it flying past your head. You don't bother to look at where it went. You can't take your eyes off the zombies. Here's where, in the virtual reality environment of Half-Life: Alyx, you might notice things about them that you wouldn't in any other medium. Like how big their arms are. Or how they're taller than you. You start shooting, backing away, your heart in your throat.

VR can be an intense and strange experience. While mostly elaborate smoke and mirrors—motion tracking plus wraparound screens and just the right amount of sensory deprivation—virtual reality, as a medium, conveys a sense of being that most mediums don't. When it's working properly, it gives the impression that you're actually physically occupying a novel, digital space. It's not quite the full realism that VR's most significant proponents suggest. It's more like a surreal, waking dreamspace, a reality you inhabit even as you face its own unreality, a morass of little imperfections that make the whole thing feel more like an engrossing hallucination than The Matrix.

Half-Life: Alyx, Valve's newest, VR-exclusive game, is an attempt to take advantage of the particularities of VR's dreamspace for fairly traditional ends. The game begins like a tech demo, with you as Alyx Vance, years before the character is set to become Gordon Freeman's sidekick in Half-Life 2, leaning over a balcony in the slums of alien-controlled City 17. There are objects to tinker with, a whiteboard to write on, and a striking vista to glance at. Then it progresses to a phone call with Alyx's father, some lore, and, quickly, a mission that involves fleeing from the alien Combine and racing against time to a set, linear goal that the game will now shepherd you toward.

It is, in short, a Half-Life game, just like any other. The game does so little to change or progress the logic of the Half-Life series that, if such a thing had been done before in VR, it would be called unambitious. But here, now, what's most striking about Half-Life: Alyx is how effectively Valve manages to pull it off.

It helps that Half-Life, as a series, is well suited to the needs of virtual reality. In a medium that is still trotted out by most adopters only as a party trick, Alyx benefits from the fact that Half-Life is a fundamentally curated experience. It's the type of triple-A traditional videogame experience that might, in fact, be most suited to VR. Half-Life as a series might be best described as a sort of rollercoaster, a curated suite of locations and self-contained events that don't rely on player agency. Play is fundamentally reactive. The player removes obstacles, including enemies, and pushes forward according to the demands of the situations they're put in. While the berth of possible interactions is still fairly wide, especially in the more directly interactive virtual reality, the engagement experienced by the player is still basically controlled by the designer. You never make choices about how to play a Half-Life game, and here that allows Valve to curate a set of Half-Life-style experiences that take advantage of VR's strengths.