Half-Life: Alyx, VR’s first — and hopefully not last — killer app, turns 5

New Half-Life games make me do stupid things. When Half-Life 2 came out on PC, I trekked to GameStop to trade in my Xbox, controllers, and games. I had hoped to score hundreds in trade-in credit, but the associate discovered my console was soft-modded and quartered the quote as a result — barely enough to cover the game. It didn’t run very well on my parents’ eMachines desktop (as a console player at the time, I didn’t know what recommended specs were). I was very sad when a port of the game eventually came to Xbox.

Half-Life: Alyx launched on March 23, 2020, nearly five years ago. I actually had a solid gaming PC that could run it. However, I didn’t have a VR headset, which is a necessary component. I immediately had to have one, ideally a model that wouldn’t leave a $1,000 crater in my checking account like Valve’s Index would. I ended up buying a refurbished Oculus Rift for $250 or so, and over the course of a memorable week, I beat Alyx, then promptly returned the headset for a refund while my jaw was still on the floor from its incredible finale.

It wasn’t long until I bought the wire-free Quest 2 later in 2020, another questionable financial decision, but I kept this one. Then I replayed Alyx the way that it was meant to be experienced, which is with roomscale movement — no headset-tracking base stations required. I could kneel down, turn around, and just generally feel like I existed in the world, without concerns of tripping over a cable tethering me to my PC.

These hoops were worth jumping through for Half-Life: Alyx, and those of you who’ve played it would likely agree. I haven’t played a VR game since with as much graphical polish, as much atmosphere, or as much consideration for different play styles and varying levels of comfort with VR mobility. It’s also the best-paced game I’ve played in VR; it’s the only title I’ve wanted to keep playing beyond my “oh, I don’t feel so good” threshold, which is somewhere around the 30-minute mark.

While the end goal of most of its encounters is to shoot bad guys and creatures with guns, Alyx offers more open-endedness to encounters and to exploration in general. Once you clear a room, you can practice thwipping and throwing items with your gravity gloves, play the piano, or gawk at the stellar quality of the liquid shaders in bottles before you smash them on the ground. You can open cabinets, fridges, and more, stacking each item you pull out realistically on top of the others. Why you would want to do that is beyond me (also, I did this), but the point is that you could do it. Alyx put you in charge of how you spent your time in VR, not the other way around.

It’s trite to say this five years after launch, but Half-Life: Alyx felt like a door being kicked open, revealing what’s possible in VR. And, with the backing of one of gaming’s most beloved developers, I considered its release a possible turning point for VR tech going mainstream. I just really wanted everyone to be able to try it.

VR headset adoption has grown exponentially since 2020, thanks to Meta’s somewhat affordable Quest lineup of headsets. The PlayStation VR 2 can now be used on PCs, no longer exclusively tied to the PlayStation 5 (and it’s $200 less than it was at launch, costing $399.99). But since owning a powerful, costly gaming PC is the other part of the equation, that growth hasn’t made it all that much easier for more players to try games like Half-Life: Alyx. I wish Valve would port the game to PS5 so PSVR 2 owners could play it there. But since it hasn’t happened yet, more than two years after the headset’s launch, I’m not holding my breath. Maybe Valve is prepping a version of the game for its oft-rumored wire-free VR headset “Deckard” that our pals at The Verge have written about. Or maybe it’s not.

While there have been other great VR-only games since Alyx (Horizon Call of the Mountain, Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR, Batman: Arkham Shadow, to name a few that swung for the fences), the virtual reality segment has struggled to keep up the pace with new, must-play games. That’s sad, though it makes me treasure Half-Life: Alyx even more. It was a huge gamble to release the long-awaited prequel to one of the most influential games in virtual reality, requiring hardware that very few had then, and still very few have today. To that end, every developer making VR games is knowingly making a huge gamble that may not pan out in their favor.

Sure, I wish that Alyx’s story could be played directly on consoles and PC so that more fans can play the game, but without gravity gloves, that would spoil all of the fun. When or if that’ll ever happen isn’t for us to decide. So, go ahead, do a stupid thing and buy a VR headset just so you can play Half-Life: Alyx, even if you return it right after (I won’t tell). The game is just $17.99 during the Steam Spring Sale, which lasts until March 20.