The classic saying is that Valve cannot count to three. All of these games—Left 4 Dead, Portal, Dota, and of course Half-Life—have been left without complete sequels or follow-ups. Particularly Half-Life 3 has evolved into a sort of acronym for all the crushed hopes and unmet expectations of PC gamers everywhere. The community that surrounds Steam’s most popular first-person shooter game, however, continues to produce magnificent fan-made mods and missions. This time, a fully-fledged new campaign for Half-Life Alyx was released, and it looks and plays so good that it could have been created by Valve.
Free to download on Steam, Half-Life Alyx: Re-Education follows the eponymous adventurer as she travels to a safehouse on the outskirts of City 17. Forced off of her train, Alyx must make her way through an abandoned school, a seemingly simple task that soon takes a turn for the worse – and a lot of physics-based puzzles.
With full voice acting, superb visuals, and a focus on environmental storytelling that you would expect from the Half-Life series, Re-Education is like an official Half-Life Alyx DLC. It’s slower-paced than the mainline game, featuring more exploration and ambient narrative than action or shooting. But there are still a couple of good combat sections, and the imitations of both Alyx and Russell are spot-on. You can see it in action below.
Head over to Steam Workshop to try Half-Life Alyx: Re-Education now. You might also want to try Levitation, another Half-Life VR game inspired by the events of Alyx, or perhaps Entropy Zero, a pseudo Half-Life 2 sequel focusing on a rogue member of the Combine’s Civil Protection.
Alternatively, check out some other great VR games, or perhaps the best VR headset for 2023. You might also want to know what happened to Half-Life 3, but don’t get disheartened – one day, one day, it will be real.