Half-Life: Alyx

Set between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, this virtual reality action adventure follows Alyx Vance as she and her father, Eli, resist the Combine’s rule over City 17. Explore the quarantine zone, solve spatial puzzles, scavenge supplies and handle weapons by hand while searching for a way to weaken the occupying force.

Half-Life: Alyx takes place between the Black Mesa incident and Half-Life 2, during the Combine occupation of Earth. Alyx Vance and her father, Dr. Eli Vance, are members of a small human resistance operating under pressure from an alien regime that confines survivors to cities and exploits their scientific knowledge. The opening establishes Alyx’s connection to Russell, a resistance engineer who communicates with her remotely and provides equipment for the mission. The immediate objective involves Eli’s capture and a dangerous journey through City 17, but the story also concerns what the Combine is keeping in the city and how its control might be challenged. The game stays with Alyx’s perspective throughout, giving familiar locations and factions a close, physical scale. Its setting moves from occupied streets into a sealed quarantine zone where Combine infrastructure, human remnants and Xen growth overlap.

The game is built exclusively for virtual reality, with tracked controllers standing in for Alyx’s hands. Reaching, crouching, leaning around cover, opening drawers and turning handles are physical actions represented directly in the world. Russell’s gravity gloves, often called the Russells, let Alyx pull objects toward her with a wrist movement and catch them with a hand. They bring distant ammunition, keys and other small objects within reach, while ordinary hand interaction handles nearby doors, switches, containers and tools. Items can be stored in a backpack or the gloves’ wrist pockets. The gloves also show health and resin indicators. An item on a shelf may be useful, but retrieving it takes attention and leaves Alyx’s hands occupied until it is secured.

Exploration moves through apartments, service areas, metro passages and other enclosed parts of City 17, where the quarantine zone has been overtaken by alien life. Headcrabs, barnacles, zombies and hazardous Xen growth make the environment itself a threat. Alyx can move debris, open cupboards, check bodies and break marked supply crates to find ammunition, resin or healing items. The spaces also contain routes and devices that must be understood before the journey can continue. Her multitool interacts with Combine security systems: some puzzles ask her to manipulate points or traces in three dimensions, while others involve following electrical connections through walls and around a room to locate junctions. A locked supply cache or inactive fabricator can require both a successful tool puzzle and a power source. These tasks make the surrounding architecture part of the problem, since Alyx may need to move closer, change her view or reposition herself to see a circuit.

Combat uses a small arsenal whose operation is tied to the tracked hands. Alyx begins with a pistol and later gains access to a shotgun and a Combine pulse weapon. The player ejects magazines, retrieves ammunition from the environment or backpack, seats it in the weapon and performs the motion to ready it. Shotgun shells are loaded individually, while the pulse weapon uses power cells. Ammunition is limited, so searching rooms and choosing when to fire matter alongside aim. Enemies include Combine soldiers and creatures from Xen: cover can protect Alyx while she reloads, and exposed weak points reward accurate shots. Grenades can be thrown by hand, and the gravity gloves can pull objects into reach. Encounters range from cautious movement through dark spaces to direct fights.

Resin is a scavenged Combine material that Alyx can spend at Combine fabricators to modify weapons. A fabricator must first be brought online, often by using the multitool to bypass security or solve a nearby power problem. Once active, it accepts a weapon and offers upgrades that change its functions, such as aiming aids, ammunition capacity, burst fire, a faster shotgun reload mechanism or a grenade launcher attachment. Resin is found off the main route as well as in more visible places, so exploring side spaces can create more options at later stations. The resource is finite within the journey, making upgrades a choice among different weapons and uses rather than an automatic tree of improvements. Ammunition, resin and healing supplies all occupy physical space or limited storage locations, and handling them is part of moment-to-moment preparation.

Health is represented through the equipment rather than a conventional floating display. Alyx can use wall-mounted health chargers or inject a healing syringe kept in a wrist pocket. Grenades also occupy wrist storage, so the two pockets require choices when entering a dangerous area. Weapons and ammunition can be stowed in the backpack and retrieved over a shoulder; a reload or equipment change involves movement and shifts attention away from threats. The campaign advances through connected chapters rather than a hub of side missions. Russell’s radio conversations maintain contact when Alyx is alone, while Eli’s situation gives the journey direction. The route shifts between finding a way through an obstructed space, dealing with security, gathering supplies and surviving encounters.

Alongside the single-player campaign, the Steam release includes Source 2 level-authoring tools and Steam Workshop support for community-built environments. The tools expose gameplay components used in the VR game, allowing creators to construct and share additional spaces. Workshop levels can build around the same hand-based interactions that define the campaign, from manipulating objects to using the multitool and weapon systems. Valve’s Hammer editor was updated with VR gameplay components, so creators can work with the game’s objects and interactions while assembling their own environments. This creator toolkit extends the places where Alyx’s systems can be used, while the authored campaign remains a continuous journey through occupied City 17 and its quarantine zone.