Half-Life: Alyx

Half-Life: Alyx is a virtual-reality first-person shooter developed and published by Valve. It launched for Windows on Steam on March 23, 2020, and was built for PC VR headsets rather than as a conventional screen-based Half-Life sequel. Valve made it compatible with multiple SteamVR headsets, including Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality devices, and later Oculus Quest through a Link connection. The game uses Valve's Source 2 engine and supports room-scale movement as well as teleportation and other locomotion options. Its design centers on physical interaction: players reload weapons by hand, search shelves and drawers, handle objects, and manipulate environmental puzzles with their hands. Use Alyx Vance's Gravity Gloves, wrist-mounted devices that pull distant items toward the player rather than reproducing the Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2. They are especially useful for catching ammunition and resin, the resource used at fabricators to upgrade weapons. Alyx carries a pistol, shotgun, and rapid-fire SMG, while enemies include headcrabs, zombies, antlions, barnacles, and Combine soldiers. Health is represented by syringes stored in wrist slots, and ammunition is managed through physical magazines and weapon-specific loading actions.

The story is set in City 17 five years before Half-Life 2, after the Combine have conquered Earth. The player controls Alyx, a Resistance member and the daughter of scientist Eli Vance. Her father is captured while investigating a heavily guarded Combine structure called the Vault. Alyx and her collaborator Russell set out to rescue him, communicating by radio while she moves through quarantine zones, tunnels, and Combine installations. Russell provides the Gloves and much of the game's comic dialogue. Along the way, Alyx encounters Vortigaunts, learns that the Vault does not contain a weapon as the Resistance assumes, and discovers that it imprisons the G-Man.

After freeing him, she is offered a job by the G-Man and instead uses his power to save Eli from his future death in Half-Life 2: Episode Two. In the final scene, Eli, now alive, gives Gordon Freeman a crowbar and says they have work to do. Valve announced the game in November 2019. It was the first full-length Half-Life release since Half-Life 2: Episode Two in 2007, and its release was widely noted as a major Valve return to the series. It received the Game Award for Best VR/AR in 2020 and was nominated for Game of the Year at the same ceremony. Its campaign has eleven chapters total.