Half-Life: Alyx has received a new ‘No VR’ mode, allowing players without a virtual reality headset to play through the entire game’s campaign on a flatscreen.
Originally released in 2019, Half-Life: Alyx was a VR exclusive developed by Valve to promote its efforts in the virtual reality space, as well as its innovation with the SteamVR platform.
However, many Half-Life fans were disappointed that the first game in the series since 2007 was exclusive to a platform that many people didn’t own.
While VR has become more popular nowadays, in 2019 it was still a small but growing platform, which is why fans not interested or unable to play in VR were upset at not being able to play the game in flatscreen mode.
Now, it seems players can enjoy Half-Life: Alyx as a traditional experience, with the No VR mod getting a new reveal.
Although flatscreen mods for Half-Life: Alyx have been available for quite some time, this mod adds new types of interactions to the game, which do a much more solid job at emulating the VR experience without using virtual reality itself.
These interactions work similarly to games like SOMA or Amnesia, where you need to aim at an interactable object and hold down a button. Moving your cursor will then allow you to interact with that object in a way similar to how you would if you were playing in VR.
The mod is currently still in testing, and at the moment only includes Half-Life: Alyx‘s first chapter. A public release is expected soon.
Half-Life: Alyx is meant to be played in VR, but that doesn’t make this mod a bad idea
Even if it does have a rather disappointing ending, Half-Life: Alyx has been one of the best virtual reality games that you can play today.
Set five years before the events of Half-Life 2, you play as Alyx Vance in the early days of the human resistance, who fights alien Combine factions and other threats in City 17.
At its time of release, it was the ‘killer app’ that the VR space needed to bring it more into the mainstream, and has often been cited as the main reason many PC gamers picked up a virtual reality headset.
For that reason, the game is obviously best played in virtual reality, as it has been built from the ground up to accommodate that playstyle.
For example, there’s a level where you need to cover your mouth to prevent Alyx from making noise, and this is something that you simply can’t do easily in flatscreen mode.
We’d always recommend trying to play the game as it was intended, but still, that doesn’t mean we’re going to gatekeep this game to keep some people from experiencing it for the first time.
If owning or playing with a VR headset isn’t an option, then this mod does at least allow players a way to experience the story and snippets of gameplay with some degree of interactivity. It’s better than at least watching a playthrough on YouTube or Twitch.
