After having acquired a PSVR2 last fall, I’ve been making my way through the gauntlet of popular VR games on the system like Horizon: Call of the Mountain, Resident Evil IV Remake, Resident Evil Village, Gran Turismo 7, and Hitman: World of Assassination. I’ve enjoyed these a lot, even the ones I’ve already played through on the flatscreen version. The sense of presence and immersion you get in VR is incredible, you’re in the world instead of being an outside observer looking into it through a rectangular viewfinder (i.e., your TV). Mechanics like manually reloading your weapons, throwing grenades with your hands by arcing it in specific ways, or lining up a shot with your bow and arrow with just the right timing and angle are all supremely satisfying in ways that traditional button presses, even with all the fancy of adaptive triggers, simply can’t match.
Horizon: Call of the Mountain was the first game I played, and I was a bit let down by it because I absolutely love the franchise and it has so much potential in VR, but the game played more like a climbing simulator and less like a Horizon game. Aside from the Horus climb towards the end and some interesting puzzle climbing, most of the game is you staring at a rock wall and finding handholds to make your way up. You do get some cooler climbing tools towards the end that makes it a bit more interesting, but overall I wish there was more of a focus on combat and machines and less on climbing. There are epic machine fights, but your movement is restricted to a circular area and it feels very dumbed down. I would’ve loved to play a proper Horizon game in VR.
The Resident Evil games are, proper AAA-games ported to VR, and they did an incredible job with it. RE Village’s weapons feel amazing, with the frantic manual reloads really adding to the tension as you’re being chased by a pack of wolf-people in a village gone mad. The highlight in RE Village was Castle Dimitrescu, with you slowly traversing your way through a large mansion as you’re being stalked by the giant Lady Dimitrescu. The flatscreen version simply cannot compare to the panic you feel as you feel her footsteps get louder directly behind you while you’re trying to beeline towards some room in the castle. My mental map of this castle exists only in first-person while I’m physically inside of it. I cannot picture an overhead blueprint or map of how it’s connected, I only know my way through when I’m in it. Resident Evil 4 also had incredible action mechanics, especially with melee combat. The minecart section was a standout highlight which felt like it was made for VR (despite not originally having been). I found it these both very satisfying to play through because they had a proper narrative and story and were made primarily as flatscreen games which just happened to be ported over to VR really well.
Gran Turismo 7 and Hitman are games I’ve been playing on and off whenever I feel like it. GT7 is most enjoyable with a wheel (which I don’t have), so I’ve been using it mostly as a relaxing driving simulator with just the DualSense controller. I do plan to eventually get a starter wheel to try this out in a more immersive way. Hitman is just amazing slapstick comedy in VR as you walk up to people and slap them with a fish while distracting nearby guards with coin tosses. I’ve played through the Hitman levels dozens of times in the flatscreen games, and I’ve been slowly making my way through them in VR, where they feel like completely different experiences. The dual wielding and accurate hand tossing of items add a level of believability to the world that wasn’t quite possible in the flatscreen games. I’m still working through it, but I occasionally tryhard to get Suit Only / Silent Assassin, which does require careful planning, especially for the Escalation Contracts.
After having burned through these core top recommended games, I wanted to have a go at one of the games that had been on my radar since it came out and was one of the first games that even got me excited about trying out VR: Half Life Alyx. As soon as it was revealed in 2020, I was trying to get my hands on a Valve Index to run it. Then my gaming PC died on me and I realized it would be quite the expense to get it fixed, updated to the latest graphics cards, fork out a thousand dollars for the headset, and buy the game. I also wasn’t particularly interested in any other VR games besides Half Life Alyx, so the investment didn’t quite make sense at the time. To top all of this off, prices for graphics cards went haywire in 2020 due to the supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, so I never quite managed to play the game. Now, five years later, I had a VR headset and a PC powerful enough to run it. All I had to do was acquire the PCVR adapter and hook it up to the PSVR2, which I did.
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The moment you step into Half Life Alyx and catch the view of City 17, you’re immediately blown away. The draw distance and scale is massive, and there’s all sorts of things going on in the city with Combine activity and large Striders crushing everything in their path. The game plops you onto a balcony with tons of interactive objects, the most mind-blowing of which is a glass bottle with actual physics simulation for the liquid inside of it. The drink will slosh around the inside of the bottle as you shake it and turn it around accurately. This was the moment where I knew the game was something special, a mere two minutes into it. As you walk into the building, you see a bunch of diagrams drawn on the glass window and you’re given an eraser and some markers. My first instinct was to pick up the marker and draw on the glass, and lo and behold, it works perfectly. I was stunned by how perfectly it tracked my hands — I was able to draw actual lettering with pixel-perfect accuracy. I was able to draw illustrations and complex diagrams with ease, and this was another moment that just blew the potential for VR wide open for me.
The most impressive thing about these early minutes of Half Life Alyx is that there are absolutely no tutorials. No training range, no VR mechanics introduction, nothing. You’re just plopped onto a balcony and your own curiosity to pick up and interact with things guides you. You organically learn what you can and can’t do by experimentation, the purest form of play. Valve has always been a masterclass at this show-don’t-tell type of tutorialized gameplay going back to the first Half Life game, and they’ve totally nailed it here too. Every other game I mentioned before had some kind of “introduction to VR” tutorial, but Half Life Alyx totally nailed it without needing anything at all and just letting the player tinker around at their own pace. I was in disbelief at how seamless and integrated they made it all feel.
As you progress into the game, you’re introduced to the game’s primary mechanics, the gravity gloves. You can highlight and grab almost any small or light object in the game world this way. This was now the moment I realized why this game wouldn’t work in a non-VR version, answering my own question from five years ago about why Valve wouldn’t just release a flatscreen version of the game so that those without expensive VR setups could experience it. The gravity gloves rely entirely on your physical manipulation of objects in the VR world: you have to point your hands at something, highlight it, and then pull it towards you. This whole interaction is the core of the gameplay experience and it would completely fall apart in a flatscreen version because you’d be reduced to quicktime events and button presses, making it feel shallow and lifeless.
You do have weapons too, and you’re frequently flinging magazines to yourself to reload your weapons. The weapons feel very satisfying, even moreso than the Resident Evil games because the models for the weapons feel like they were specially made for VR, with weapon mods and ammo counts built in a way where you could easily glance at it and figure out what’s happening without needing a HUD to describe ammo levels or the need to reload. Aside from magazines for ammo, the other main thing you’re grabbing with your gravity gloves are resin for weapon upgrades, health injectors for a quick boost, and grenades to toss at enemies from cover.
Everything I’ve described so far makes the game sound like any other shooter with the added ability to fling objects towards yourself, but there’s more. The crazy thing about this game is that nearly every single object in the world is interactive. You can pick up, fling, inspect, and carry just about anything: hard hats, wet floor signs, explosive barrels, boxes, crates, mannequins, dead headcrabs, food boxes, pots, bricks, and so much more. Pretty much anything that looks small and like something you’d be able to carry, you can. This adds such a level of dynamism to the game that it really lets players craft their own experience. For example, I would constantly grab buckets or empty crates to toss at enemies as a temporary distraction while I reload, or toss some inanimate object to a barnacle in front of me so that it pulls that up instead while I freely walk through. I’ve stacked multiple boxes in a staircase patten to reach areas that would otherwise be inaccessible to me, which was wild. The potential for using any object as a weapon, a distraction, or just a tool is endless. This video sums up the experience really well.
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Proper simulation physics for fluids and drawing, gravity gloves to fling objects, excellent weapon mechanics, and full interactivity would have been enough to seal the deal as an amazing “must-play” VR title, but this is Valve we’re talking about. They’re not going to settle for “good enough” in the first title they’re putting out in almost a decade, especially one that is a canon storyline in a franchise as storied as Half Life. They went further. Every single environment in this game is hyper-detailed to the point of absurd beauty. The alien environments in particular stand out as a mix of freakish fungal sprawl mixed with ballooning bacterial overgrowth, all with extremely detailed textures and subtly pulsing animations that you can explore up-close if you really wanted to. I spent so much time just taking in the space and sounds, because you don’t really get to be “in” the experience when playing the flatscreen version. It adds so much to the immersion in ways that I really didn’t expect.
And then there’s the characters. Russell in particular is a standout fan favorite. As the main character you interact with over comms throughout the entire game, he is funny, entertaining, and witty. The banter between him and Alyx is a consistently solid throughline in the game, and it’s much appreciated in the more horror-themed levels where complete silence could otherwise be terrifying. When you do see Russell and other characters briefly, the animations and models are unbelievably good. They really steal the show with lifelike animations, movements, and highly detailed facial models. It really feels like you’re standing right there next to them.
The story overall is also no slouch. What starts off as a simple “rescue dad” mission quickly turns into a more dramatic rebellion plot to steal the Combine’s superweapon, and the story begins to connect to the events of the main Half Life games in really unexpected ways. It addresses fans’ long-standing questions about the infamous Episode 2 cliffhanger by tying this game’s ending directly into that one’s (not going to spoil it), and opens the door to even more questions about the future of the franchise as well as the mysterious G-Man. I was not expecting a VR Half Life game to have such a strong connection to the main storyline, but this one absolutely does and it absolutely works well. It makes me even more excited for the next one.
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my most memorable experience with this game — the level simply titled “Jeff.” I had a complete eureka moment in this level about the potential of VR that just isn’t possible in regular gaming and was in utter awe of Valve’s ability to integrate something like this into the game. You’re essentially trapped in a tight space with a zombie named Jeff who is blind but will react to the sound of anything substantial. It’d be a shame if the level takes place in a vodka distillery with lots of glass bottles around that would shatter by the simple act of you stepping on them, wouldn’t it? Well, that’s exactly the master troll that Valve planted here.
As you try to keep quiet to not draw Jeff’s attention, the game constantly toys with you. It puts you in a spot where you have to open various shelves and cabinets to find items and glass bottles will roll down as you open them, which you need to catch or else they risk falling to the ground and shattering. Your careful tiptoeing and hyper-awareness in ensuring that you don’t make a sound will often be ruined by a headcrab appearing out of nowhere and knocking over a glass bottle that shatters and summons Jeff. You’ll be asked to rotate a crank to open a gate, but the crank is so loud that you need to plan ahead by sending Jeff somewhere far away and keep luring him away from you as you turn the crank. There is so much creative usage of this one mechanic and it all only works in VR.
At one point in the level, you’re trapped with Jeff in a claustrophobic spot where he’s smashing a headcrab against an elevator and you have to cover your mouth with your hands to keep quiet. I didn’t realize until a few seconds in that I literally wasn’t breathing in real life, an absolutely surreal level of immersion that I wasn’t expecting. At many points in the level, you have to cover your mouth to avoid breathing in spores, and you only have one other hand free in which you can either wield a weapon or a glass bottle to lure Jeff away. Most of the time, I chose to carry a glass bottle, which speaks volumes as to how effective this level’s design was.
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All in all, Half Life Alyx is a true masterpiece in VR merging art, design, and technology in the most unbelievable ways. Despite all the praise for it, I still think it’s underrated and not talked about enough. Valve literally created an entire VR engine and physics simulator to tell this story, and it is an epic achievement. I’m surprised we haven’t been flooded with VR follow-ups to this in the past five years like we got when the original Source engine was released with mods for Quake, Counter Strike, and Team Fortress, all of which went on to spawn entire franchises of their own. There is so much goodness in this game that I honestly think it will be studied for decades to come as the pinnacle of VR.
Ultimately, those that experienced this game in March 2020 when it released may be a bit let down to realize that nothing has surpassed Half Life Alyx in the years since. There hasn’t been a single VR game that has matched this game in terms of ambition and quality. VR is a bit of an expensive hobby at the moment and is still in its infancy, and it will take time to gain critical adoption to get to a point where the industry has standardized into a few main platforms with a large enough install base to make it worth investing in VR projects. The technology is also evolving rapidly, with Valve on the verge of releasing their Deckard headset that can allegedly run standalone VR games which would lower the VR barrier to entry for many who don’t have an expensive gaming rig.
It’s a bit ironic that the best game I played on my PSVR2 isn’t even actually available on the platform and is only playable on Steam. I can’t believe I waited five years to play this game, but I’m glad I played it after I checked out the other VR big hitters. If I had started with Half Life Alyx, I’m pretty sure my experience in all those other games would have been diluted and disappointing because of the high expectations for VR that Half Life Alyx would have set. I’ll continue to check out and play more games on my PSVR2, of course, but Half Life Alyx is forever going to hold a special place in my memory as the most incredible, immersive, and groundbreaking gaming experience I’ve ever had in my life. I’ll be thinking about this for years to come, and I’m already itching to replay it soon with the dev commentary to learn more about the design process for this masterpiece of technical wizardry.