this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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Half Life: Alyx is Five Years Old Today (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I genuinely can't believe Half Life Alyx is five years old.

No other video game has felt the way Alyx felt. No one else has taken such a bold swing in what a video game can be. It's burned into my mind as my Half Life game, the one that came out at just the right time for me.

It was also my "pandemic" game. While everyone else was playing Animal Crossing or Doom Eternal, I was playing and replaying Half Life Alyx.

It definitely feels like it's somewhat doomed to be less remembered in the popular consciousness than most big games that come out, and indeed the rest of the games in the Half Life lineage. Cries of "Half Life 3 when?" still abound in spite of the very clear effort Alyx made to move the story forward. But to me it feels like a game that still hasn't been topped in the five years since it came out, not by a long shot.

Half Life Alyx received a Game of the Year win from GameSpot, and nominations from a few other publications. When it came to events like The Game Awards with a dedicated "Best VR Game" category, it won handily.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

While I really enjoyed Alyx, it's very much a game built around it's own limitations. It's more of a survival horror game in a way, because of the limits on ammo and deliberately mechanical reloading. There's no melee at all, so once you're out of bullets you're done for.

For all the roughness of Half Life 2 VR Mod, I find myself enjoying it more because it has fewer limitations imposed by the move to VR. It doesn't always work (and the vehicle sections in particular really push it), but as a mod of a 20 year old game, it's really good.