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Half Life Alyx (3) is OUT & it’s AMAZING!

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Valve just made VR impossible to ignore.

Half-Life: Alyx launched on Steam on March 23, 2020, giving the franchise its first full single-player entry in over a decade — and it arrived built exclusively for headsets like the Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality. PewDiePie wasted no time diving in, posting Episode 1 of a blind, full playthrough titled “Half Life Alyx (3) is OUT & it’s AMAZING! – Full Playthough” the same day the game went live. The video captures the opening chapter, back when players are still figuring out how a headcrab actually moves in three dimensions.

• Half-Life: Alyx released March 23, 2020, on Steam for $59.99, running on Valve’s Source 2 engine and requiring VR hardware to play.
• The game is a prequel set between the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2, putting players in control of Alyx Vance alongside her father, Dr. Eli Vance, as they organize resistance against the Combine in City 17.
• PewDiePie’s video, published the day of launch, is Episode 1 of a blind playthrough and highlights physics-based object manipulation, manual weapon reloading, and encounters with headcrabs and barnacles.

A Prequel, Not a Threequel

Despite the “(3)” tucked into PewDiePie’s video title — a nod to years of fans begging for Half-Life 3 — Alyx isn’t a continuation of the story where Half-Life 2: Episode Two left off. It’s a prequel, slotting in between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, following Alyx Vance and Eli Vance in the early days of resistance work against the alien Combine occupying City 17. Valve first announced the project in November 2019, and the wait for a proper single-player Half-Life game — the first in more than ten years — is what made launch day feel like an event rather than just another Tuesday release on Steam.

For a channel that’s covered everything from how Cyberpunk 2077 actually feels to play to open-world survival experiments, a full VR playthrough is a different animal entirely — no couch, no controller in the traditional sense, just two motion controllers and a headset standing between the player and City 17.

Playthrough Reveals Key Gameplay Mechanics

The opening chapter PewDiePie plays through is designed to teach the game’s systems without a tutorial screen in sight. Players rummage through debris drawers by hand, reload weapons by physically manipulating magazines and slides, and manhandle crates and furniture using Source 2’s physics engine — the kind of environmental interaction that a flat-screen game simply can’t replicate. Classic series threats show up early too, with headcrabs skittering out of dark corners and barnacles hanging from ceilings waiting to snatch anyone who wanders underneath.

Half Life Alyx (3) is OUT & it’s AMAZING!

That’s the whole premise of the video in five words, and it lines up with the reception the game got across Steam and the wider VR community the moment it went live — critical praise centered specifically on how tactile and physical the interactions feel compared to anything else on the platform.

VR Requirement Impacts User Accessibility

Valve didn’t hedge on hardware. Alyx is built exclusively for VR — no flat-screen mode, no compromise version for people without a headset. That’s a bet on the format itself, using a full-budget, mainline entry in one of gaming’s most dormant franchises to argue that VR is ready for something bigger than tech demos and rail shooters. It’s the same kind of format-defining swing other studios have taken with genre experiments, similar in spirit to how VTOL VR pushed immersion in flight simulation by leaning entirely into what the hardware can do rather than working around its limits.

PewDiePie’s Episode 1 is just the start of a full playthrough series, and with Alyx running roughly fifteen to twenty hours depending on how thoroughly players search every drawer and shelf, there’s a lot of City 17 left to cover — headcrab canisters, jukebox puzzles, and whatever Valve’s saved for the back half of the campaign still waiting in the next episodes.