Shiny gas sacks cling to the walls, swelling and inflating when I approach until they rupture and spew noxious particles into the air.

Apartment walls are covered with pulsating tendrils and toothy alien blossoms that gibber and snap at my fingertips if I hover too close. Barnacles with their sticky, dangling tongues belch and barf human remains directly onto me when they expire, giving me another good reason to avoid standing under them. Here in VR the graphic grossness increases by at least a factor of 10. Disgusting.Д«arnacles with their sticky, dangling tongues belch and barf human remains directly onto me when they expire. Plump, fleshy headcrabs leaping at your face from darkened air ducts, shambling zombies with bloody, elongated claws and gaping midsections suddenly lurching to life, the gonarch's massive and pendulous testacles swinging as it gallops after you, the giant fetus-like body and swollen cranium of the Nihilanth. The Half-Life series, especially the original, has always been as much about horror as about action, and that horror was often gross. Your father, Eli, has been captured by the Combine and you're trying to intercept the train he's on by making your way through a Xen infestation that has filled metro tunnels, dark sewers, and basements of crumbling buildings. How many objects did I Force-pull to my hand over the course of Half-Life: Alyx? Hundreds? A thousand? I don't know, but it never once got old.ДЄfter the intro you descend into City 17's quarantine zone, a murky labyrinth closed off by walls within the walls of City 17, where most of the game takes place. You could easily spend 15 minutes just messing around with the physical objects in the introduction, and that's exactly what I did. Even discovering I can pick up a marker to scrawl something on a dirty window pane, and then realizing I can use an eraser to wipe it off, is delightful. Alyx's disembodied hands react wonderfully to each object in the world, and it's hard not to just stand there admiring the way my virtual fingers close in different ways depending on what I'm holding: curling around a bottle, gently clasping an iron railing, holding a discarded cigarette butt between my thumb and forefinger, gripping an empty water jug by the handle, pulling up the antenna and then gently twisting the tuning knob on a radio. The attention to detail is obvious not just in how the world looks but in the ways you can interact with it. The opening minutes, and at plenty of times during the entire game, I just had to stop, stand still, and take it all in.

I've seen Striders before but I've never had one step over me in VR as I stared up at it, utterly dumbfounded, watching it sink its massive feet into the side of a building, using the crumbling masonry as a step to walk itself up to a rooftop. Combine Metro Cops seem larger than life because they're now actually life-size.

When a city scanner takes my picture I instinctively hold my hands up against its blinding camera flash. It's immediately engaging to be back in City 17 again, so familiar yet so much more impressive in VR, an environment I don't need to just look at to admire but one I can actually run my virtual fingertips across and crane my neck back to take in fully. Here's the the best GPU and VR headset for Half-Life: Alyx.ДЇive years before the events of Half-Life 2, Alyx Vance is performing surveillance and recon in the Combine-controlled City 17. Looking for a VR headset for Half-Life: Alyx? Wondering if your GPU is up to the challenge? We've got you covered.

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