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Half-Life: Alyx
Step into City 17 as Alyx Vance in a VR-only Half-Life story built around physical exploration, tense firefights, and hands-on puzzles.
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Half-Life: Alyx is a story-led virtual-reality game set between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. You play Alyx Vance as she and her father Eli work with the Resistance against the Combine, an alien force controlling Earth. Knowing the earlier games adds context, but the central task is easy to grasp: search for a way to strike back while surviving a heavily watched City 17.
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The game is designed for tracked hands and a headset, not an ordinary flat-screen control scheme. You can look around a room, pick through shelves for supplies, handle objects, aim around cover, and solve physical puzzles. The pace shifts between careful exploration and battles against Combine soldiers or creatures. That hands-on approach makes a small action, such as finding a healing item while danger is close, part of the experience rather than a menu choice.
Valve developed and published Half-Life: Alyx on March 23, 2020. Its original release was for PC virtual reality through SteamVR, and the Steam listing still labels it VR Only. Valve added a Steam Frame standalone update in September 2026, but that later hardware support does not change the original 2020 release date. This is a full game in the Half-Life series, not a short VR demo or a remake of Half-Life 2.
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