I know I don’t have the best knees. My body informed me of this during a drunken dance-off in a Leeds night club when one of them popped out of place and tore a line through the back of my knee cap. It told me again a year later when I did the same thing playing frisbee. And a third time when I slipped on some grass while walking Jeremy Peel’s dog on a rainy day. Put kindly, they’re shoddy.
Yet, I’m developing a whole new appreciation for their shoddiness while playing through Half-Life: Alyx, Valve’s VR spin on City 17.
I’ve had an on-again off-again relationship with VR headsets since the days of the Oculus Rift. I’m both fascinated by the tech and the experience of being within a virtual environment, but often running up against the discomfort of wearing a headset for a long period of time over a pair of thick glasses. As such, I’ll take the headset out for a few weeks at a time before putting it away for a year or more when the fun of the games starts being outweighed by the awkward sight of the blotchy red outline of the headset cushion on my forehead.
With my partner away for a month and no one to point out how silly I look playing an invisible drum kit in Beat Saber, I’ve had my Meta Quest 2 out of its box for the first time in a couple of years. I wish I had taken it out sooner; I hadn’t realised how incredible Steam Link streaming for the Quest 2 would be.
The last time I had the headset out, I started playing Half-Life: Alyx but gave up after 30 minutes because I had to run a USB-C cable from the headset to my desktop. Turning around to gape at City 17’s Eastern European brutalist architecture saw me wrapped up in wires. Now, I can have the game running on my desktop and stream it to my headset in the next room. I don’t want to sound like I’m overstating this, but it’s a genuine marvel and I hadn’t thought the functionality of the headset would drastically improve within its lifetime. I tip my headset to the engineers at Valve.
Now, back to the failings of my biological hardware.
In that first hour of Half-Life: Alyx, I only faced head crabs and zombie threats. Don’t get me wrong, they were terrifying, but as they’re more swipe-y enemies than shoot-y ones, I didn’t need to take cover at any point.
Freed of the USB-C cable and progressing through the story at a steady clip, I’ve now started coming up against the Combine, City 17’s fascist stormtroopers. The first time I got into a firefight, the two soldiers I faced riddled me with bullets, sending me back to my last save file. I’m an okay shot, but I couldn’t work out how I was supposed to withstand their fire long enough to take out both troopers. When I realised I had been standing in the open like I was shooting cans at a carnival with a BB gun I genuinely put my hand to my forehead (forgetting I was wearing a VR headset and hitting myself with the controller).
I would need to physically duck down behind cover if I wanted to avoid being shot.
I reloaded and went back into the fight. Squatting down behind a low wall, I could peek up and take potshots from relative safety. After I heard the telltale whine and static of the Combine soldiers’ radios going dead, I went to stand up and felt the aching protest of my joints. I went into the next fight, squatted again, now noticing the sore ache. Next fight. More pain.
Going by chapter count, I’m now just over halfway through the campaign and my knees are aching outside of the game. Nothing’s popped yet, but I’ve had to develop new battle tactics, particularly when I find myself in a tough firefight. For a while, I could just sit down on the floor, but getting up after each battle was murder, so now I’ve got a fold out chair off the side of my play space. I plonk myself behind a car or a low wall, blindly reach for the chair, sit down and duck low in my seat when I need to hide. If the Combine knew they were being cut to shribbons by someone sitting on a Habitat foldout chair they would be ashamed of themselves.
Half-Life: Alyx itself is a marvellous game and I will push through to the end (and hopefully before my partner sees me sat in the living room, hiding low and trying to toss a grenade over an invisible car bonnet). All I ask of Valve is that for their next one, they potentially put an octogenarian in the lead role.
Half-Life: Dr Kleiner, anyone?