Half-Life Alyx is now fully playable without VR hardware

When we named Valve's Half-Life Alyx as one of our favorite games of 2020, we added an important caveat that the game was wholly inaccessible to a "majority of interested players who either don't own a suitable VR system to play it or have no intention of getting one." Those non-VR players can rejoice this week, though, as there is now a "NoVR" mod that makes Half-Life Alyx completely playable without a headset.

Since launching on GitHub almost a month ago (and hitting "early access" on ModDB in late March), the NoVR mod has attracted "thousands" of players, according to its creators. But it wasn't until Script Update #6 this weekend that the "entire game can now be played from start to finish" without a VR headset, the creators wrote.

Installation is as simple as copying a downloaded folder into your Steam installation and adding a short text string to the launch options. And while the mod doesn't work with any save files created in the VR version of the game, you can use a handy level select to jump to your favorite parts without getting into virtual reality.

The mod's creators also say that NoVR mode is "much less demanding" than Half-Life Alyx's high-end (for 2020) system requirements would suggest. That's because the game no longer needs to effectively render each frame twice to create VR's stereoscopic 3D effect. The modded version of the game seems to run just fine on a Steam Deck, too, if you're looking for a gaming experience that's about as different as possible from the original, all-encompassing virtual reality design.

Lost in translation

For a game built with VR controls and viewpoint in mind, the Alyx NoVR mod is impressively playable without a headset. Everything from shooting headcrabs to picking up items with the gravity gloves works more or less as you'd expect in a "standard" first-person shooter (though we did have to restart a few times to get some interactions to work during our testing).

That said, the mod uses certain shortcuts and tricks to get around puzzles and moments designed for hand-tracking controls. An early multitool puzzle that involves tracing your hands along electrical wires through a wall is now automatically solved with a simple press of the E key, for instance.

Base functionality aside, even simple interactions lose a little something in the transition to the flat screen. The experience of opening a door, for instance, loses some of its physical immediacy when using your hand to pull a handle is replaced with a simple press of a keyboard button. The same goes for using a keyboard to activate a health kit on the wall rather than sticking your whole arm in and watching it get robotically stitched up in VR.

And as we noted in 2020, a mouse and keyboard can't effectively simulate "us[ing] one hand to magnetically yank a useful object in the distance while using the other to aim and shoot a gun."

Those experiential differences aren't a surprise to at least one member of the Half-Life Alyx development team. In 2020, Valve's Robin Walker said in an interview with Polygon that he knew even before the game's release that a non-VR version was "going to happen" eventually. That said, Walker felt that version "will clearly demonstrate to people why we did this in VR... it will be a very crisp way of seeing all the stuff we got for the move into VR."

Despite the compromises, though, the VR-free version of Half-Life Alyx opens up the game's stellar storytelling and top-notch environments to a much wider audience. If you've been wanting to see what all the Alyx hype is about without taking the full VR hardware plunge, now is your chance.