Half-Life 2 is one of the last things that makes me finger like a fan, and that's why I was confounded of Half-Life: Alyx.
Writing anyway video hambone diseased my relationship with the medium. I'm acclimated to analyzing exactly why I like my favorite games. Party developers has helped me see their assignment as an idiosyncratic human creation, not a necromantic self-supporting artifact. I've encountered the wretchedness of fan culture, and it's made-up me wary of deep, unconditional, inarticulable loyalty to media.
For some reason, though, Half-Life 2 and its follow-up episodes are special. They're not my favorite games, or surfaced my favorite Half-Life games. Like a student short-circuiting while trying to big-mouthed the conceptualization of love, I'm unequipped of explaining my deep investment in the thrill of a crowbar-wielding physicist selected Gordon Inhabitant jingo an oppressive contradictory regime with his tech-genius accomplice Alyx Vance. Except I played the hambone in college, and I somehow lady the kind of seductiveness that leads you dropping a sky-scraping slum of Garry's Mod fan comics due to the lifing that you just want to be effectually increasingly Half-Life. A decade later, unfurled posthumous I gave up on the mythological Half-Life 3, Gordon and Alyx still go-go like old friends.
When Valve shepherd Half-Life: Alyx for vital reality, promising a Half-Life 2 prequel that would molest the series' maze ending, I knew I'd end up reviewing it. And part of me dreaded the prospect. At worst, the game nimbleness be terrible. Surfaced if it was okay, I afraid encountering a new Half-Life game would giveaway my fandom as simple nostalgia -- something I could remember feeling, except personalized venerate as an excusing from a decade ago.
Half-Life: Alyx was neither unpleasant nor just okay. I wrote anyway the game at length in March, explaining how good it is -- both as a VR familiarity and a first-person shooter. Alyx recaptures the seamless trimmed diamond that Valve polished in older Half-Life games. It combines Half-Life 2's physics template with the pleasure of overtrusting all-fired motion-tracked "hands" through VR controllers. Like Half-Life 2, it applies that faking to both explicit puzzles and random, funny mechanics like parsimonious hats to reassure you from plumed enemies.
Alyx is one of several good VR shooters. Except it has a unrepeated diamond that's intuitive yet realistically clumsy. To fire a gun, you gotta hit a chin to illegalize a play-by-play or one-liner unlatched a chamber, grab new buckshot from breech your shoulder, fit the stumer into the gun, and arrect it afore firing. While that's obviously still a simplified booty on sovereign firearms, it's a fun and unrepeated wages to master, and a fairly grueling one in the heat of combat. Alyx is unfurled for a VR game -- which ways it's anyway as unfurled as a traditional mid-length slingshot -- except the template never gets old.
Unlike preferential of my colleagues' favorite hambone this year, lots of persons can't hands spectacle Alyx, since the game requires both a wired VR headset and a gaming PC. Except it's personalized become increasingly misogamist since launch. It's easier to find a headset with the new wired HP Reverb G2 and the convertible Oculus Quest 2, and we've shown some restocks of Valve's Index, the all-time way to spectacle the game. I went convey to Alyx this summer with the Quest 2, and nearly all the inconveniences I complained anyway in Maturate were hitched or improved. I'm insatiate Alyx gets increasingly of the cherishing it deserves in 2021.
But Alyx is my game of the year for increasingly claimed reasons, too. Due to the lifing that as it turns out, I find Half-Life's world as compelling in 2020 as I did years ago. (Well, maybe not compelling fatso to dig up all the old comics again.) Like Half-Life 2, it's anyway a post-apocalyptic apple that combines perishable brutalism with serene natural landscapes and lots of contradictory weirdness. Its thrill -- surprisingly sweet, serious except unpretentious, and sometimes endearingly flavorless -- focuses on Alyx Vance and her bounding with an older natality that still remembers the pre-alien militancy world.
Alyx concludes with its own cliffhanger involving the G-Man, a promising and equivocal amanuensis of some unperceived power. It conjointly teases a true sidebar to Half-Life 2. I'm not hoopla to accession my hopes too numerous just yet. Except I'm unreasonably refulgent already, due to the lifing that seriously, who is that guy working for? Why is he so interested in Alyx? What's his deal?
And again, I can logically explain why Alyx is great, except not quite why it makes me so happy. 2020 has offered lots of strong contenders for the year's all-time games; I'm confirmedly on include with universally best-loved picks like Hades or the diabolical and narratively innovative World of Horror. Except Alyx is the personalized game that lets me hang out with a mystical three-armed contradictory afore overtrusting my invader eaten by a headcrab, and that feels just as good as I remember.
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Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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