Half-Life: Alyx, the prequel to Half-Life 2, marks a return to the franchise after over a 12-year wait. Despite that, for many remaining Half-Life fans, playing a virtual reality game is either difficult to accept or simply too expensive. Perhaps in response, Valve has released a new short clip from Half-Life: Alyx. The clip uniquely displays why a Half-Life game in virtual reality is so important. Unsurprisingly, it focuses on an encounter with a headcrab.
The headcrabs are perhaps Half-Life’s most iconic enemy-type. Headcrabs are small creatures that will leap at the player’s face given the opportunity. If successful, they’ll take over a person’s body, turning them into a sort of zombie. In other words, headcrabs are terrifying and are all the more so in first-person via virtual reality.
The clip isn’t just about headcrabs, though. The headcrab just adds an opportunity to showcase what Half-Life in virtual reality really means. In Half-Life and Half-Life 2, the player’s response to a headcrab leaping at them would be simple. The player could run away, they could hit the headcrab with a crowbar, launch it with the gravity gun, or otherwise use a gun to kill it. In Half-Life: Alyx, the player’s options are much more dynamic.
Wielding an office chair, the Half-Life: Alyx player confronts the headcrab. As the headcrab leaps at Alyx, the player uses the office chair’s base of wheels to block its leap. They then carry the headcrab, using its momentum, to throw it through a broken window. A piece of the broken window can even be seen getting caught in the throw, falling as part of a physics-based response. It’s such a short clip, but still an incredible showcase.
The clip implies a level of environmental interactivity that many gamers may not have considered. Considering this is the developer that gave players the Gravity Gun, maybe it should have been expected. Who could have predicted using an office chair to battle a headcrab, though?
If Valve’s working on a new Half-Life game then it can be reliably assumed that it’s going to be full of a lot of experimental gameplay. Half-Life: Alyx isn’t just going to be a first-person shooter in virtual reality. It’ll be a game at or above Valve’s lofty expectations of itself, offering unique experiences the whole way through. Of course, that was Valve’s priority back when Half-Life 2 was made. Perhaps the studio isn’t the same as it once was. This clip is good evidence of the contrary, however.
Half-Life: Alyx releases March 23 on PC.
