I've said before that wearing a headset is fundamentally annoying, and headsets need to deliver experiences that are so compelling that they make that annoyance worth it. Playing Half Life Alyx was absolutely, unquestionably the most compelling experience I've ever had with a headset, and it made me not just tolerate the headset, but made me excited to put it on.

Steam Link for VR is astounding

You can play PC VR games on the Quest 3 quite easily if you have a PC and Steam. All I had to do to play this game was to put on the headset, open the Steam Link app on the headset to connect to my PC, and hit "play". No wired connections and no complex setups required, it just worked.

I was honestly a little skeptical about how it would work wirelessly. One of my biggest disappointments of last year was the PlayStation Portal, which streamed games poorly from my PS5, and my PS5 sits directly next to my PC and both are hardwired into my home network. The Portal struggled to make anything feel good at even 60Hz, but I was able to play Half Life: Alyx at 90-120Hz with zero discernable lag. Lag is annoying and makes games hard to play on a 2D screen, but in a fully immersive 3D experience, it's all that and nauseating, but at no point in my 9 hour play through did I even have a hint of lag. It was remarkable.

Another way to put how impressive this was is that there is a $80 link cable you can buy to establish a wired connection to your PC for Steam Link, I was fully prepared to buy it, and that cable sat in my cart at Best Buy's site for the last 2 months, ready for me to hit the "checkout" button as soon as the wireless mode inevitably failed me. That time never came, and I still have that $80 in my pocket.

What makes Half Life Alyx so amazing

Half Life: Alyx released in March 2020 for PC, and it received overwhelmingly positive reviews. The tragedy of the game was that due to its intense PC requirements for the best experience and the need to have an expensive and unwieldy VR headset (most of which still required you to put cameras all over your room) meant that many people who loved Half Life weren't able to play it. Thankfully, VR headsets have gotten smaller, better, and cheaper over the last 4 years and I was able to play this on a $500 Meta Quest 3.

It's hard for me to explain this game in words. It is very much a Half Life game, and it builds on the foundation set by Half Life 2 all those years ago. And while that game gave you the Gravity Gun which became the core that much of that game was built around, Alyx introduces the Gravity Gloves, which allow you to reach towards most objects in the world and flick your wrist to pull them towards you. When they get close enough you can grab it out of the air and examine it up close, or stash it in your backpack or pockets in either wrist (it makes sense in the game, trust me). This is how you collect ammo and resin, the "currency" in the game used for upgrades as well as some other items, and it was immensely satisfying from start to finish.

Very minor end game spoilers in this paragraph, but Half Life 2 did something very cool in its final chapter where it made the Gravity Gun completely overpowered and is one of the more memorable sequences in any game ever. Alyx has a similar thing happen at the end of it, and while it's probably not quite as incredible, it is a stunning moment that makes you feel like a god.

And without making this a full video game review, I'll just say what made Half Life Alyx so enjoyable for me was a combination of how tactile everything felt along with the fact it always felt like a real game, and a real entry in the Half Life franchise.

On the tactility, I can't overstate how immersed I was in this world. I've said a few times how I never forget I'm in a headset while I'm using the Vision Pro, but somehow Half Life Alyx made me forget I was wearing anything, and I genuinely felt like I was in this world. There are moments where they play this fact, having giant robots step just a few feet from you or trains zip by you with very little clearance. I flinched in a way I would never in a normal game for the first thing, and I physically leaned away from the train when it was a little too close for comfort. I actually wasn't using wrist straps on the controllers at first, but early in the game they ask you to pick something up and throw it, and I hurled my actual controller against the wall with some pretty serious force. It was quite embarrassing, but just felt natural in the moment (thank god I wasn't facing my computer display when I let it rip!).

And then there's the fact that this is very much a mainline Half Life game, not a side story and not a bonus mode on a traditional 2D game. It's honestly quite rare for both of these to be true for big game franchises. For example, Horizon: Call of the Mountain seems like a decent game, but it's very much a companion to the main series. There are also the recent Resident Evil games, which have gotten good VR modes added to them post-launch, but they're games built around 2D experiences and once again feel like bonus modes on top of the canonical version of the game. People have made mods that let you play Alyx with a mouse and keyboard, but from what I have seen of people playing that way, it strips everything that makes this game what it is.

The Vision Pro opportunity

Enterprising modders have already made this game kinda sorta work with a combination of numerous apps, mods, and Nintendo Joycons, which is great to see, although it still feels a bit too much like a proof of concept and not a way you'd actually want to play the game. It certainly not the plug-and-play experience it was with the Quest 3. For that, we need a couple things.

First, we need Valve to bring VR support for Steam Link on the Vision Pro. Steam Link can already run on a Vision Pro through its iPad app, but VR games aren't supported (also the streaming quality and lag is far worse than I ever experienced on the Quest 3 integration, but that's a problem for another day).

Then we need some sort of official controller support. Whether that's Apple-made controllers or support for existing controllers, we need something tactile for games like Half Life Alyx to work well, and they just aren't there yet.

And to get ahead of it, hand tracking alone would work for some of Alyx's interactions, but tons of the game would be much worse with just using your hands as input. I'll die on this hill, but controllers are good, actually! I fought this when people thought touch controls would make game controllers obsolete a decade ago, and I'll fight it now if people insist hand tracking is better for all games than physical controllers.

I am calling this the "Vision Pro opportunity" because the Vision Pro is technically superior to the Quest 3 in basically every way, so in theory playing on it would be an even better experience: we just need the pieces to make this happen. Hell, the Vision Pro has an M2 processor on board, so it's possible that Valve could even port the game to run natively on visionOS. Maybe the visual downgrades need to do that would be too much, but you gotta think it would be doable within another iteration or two of Apple silicon.

Anyway, Half Life Alyx is an achievement in my book, and is one of the most memorable gaming experiences of my entire life. The fact we're 4 years on from it and it still seems to be what many people call the best VR experience out there is a testament to how incredibly hard this was for Valve to achieve. If Apple wants the Vision Pro to lead the way with mixed reality and virtual reality going forward, these are the sorts of "holy shit, is this real??" experiences it needs to be getting people to make for their platform. I hope 4 more years from now Half Life Alyx isn't still the best headset experience I've ever had.