Half-Life: Alyx Late Narrative Review

Alyx is a good game, but its narrative could've been much better.

To say I'm tardy on this one might be an understatement. But Alyx has become, effectively, the gold standard of VR games. It is universally praised. It's certainly a game worth talking about.

And I have some thoughts that I haven't read elsewhere.

Don't get too worried.

Yes, I liked Alyx. Even I'm not that much of a contrarian. In fact it is, in many areas of design, excellent, and a triumph of the nascent VR technology of which it made use.

Except for narrative design.

The quality, or lack thereof, of the writing and narrative design in Alyx surprised me greatly. Valve is known for good writing, generally; I can't think of any game with their name on it which isn't competently designed from a narrative perspective.

Alyx is the exception.

In fact the narrative components in Alyx almost exclusively make the game worse overall--not only do they fail to add, but they actively subtract from the experience as a whole.

This will be a brief examination. I might come back and expand this into an essay when/if I find time to replay the game.

The Silent Protagonist

Half-Life and Portal both feature notable silent protagonists. Half-Life's silent protagonist is perhaps the most famous in all of the medium. You would expect this trend to continue into the world of VR.

It doesn't.

Alyx is fully voiced. Her words will issue from your mouth more or less constantly while playing as her.

I suppose this was the price of making this game about Alyx Vance and not Gordon Freeman. Alyx in HL2 does not, after all, have any particular aversion to speaking. But in my opinion, going in this direction was a huge mistake.

The silent protagonist can often feel awkward in narrative-driven FPS. It isn't right for every game. What you gain as a designer in return is the alleviation of most dissonance between the player and the protagonist. This is why silent protagonists can work in games where the narrative does not call for a particularly driven main character--military sci-fi in particular comes to mind.

In VR, this general rule is put on steroids. It is seriously jarring to hear Alyx' voice come out of my mouth. I am constantly being reminded that I am not this person whose eyes I am literally seeing through and whose body I am physically inhabiting. Virtual reality should be a tool for extreme immersion, but in Alyx I was constantly pulled out of the experience by Alyx's endless talking.

The game would have been much better if Alyx had been silent.

Shut Up Already

Alyx is a masterfully done horror game. It is probably the best horror game I've ever played. The level design is brilliant, tense, with great sound work and systems that pull everything together.

Or, Alyx would be a masterfully done horror game, if it wasn't for the fact that SHE AND HER DUMB AUSTRALIAN FRIEND WON'T SHUT THE FUCK UP.

With only a few exceptions, the horror sections in this game will see Mr. Australia endlessly talking directly into your ear, and Alyx often talking back. Not only does this dispel huge amounts of tension being so fabulously cultivated by the designers, they often go the extra mile and turn the dialogue into comic relief.

There is comic relief in this game...that happens simultaneously with headcrab horror.

Apparently no one but me is bothered by this, but I have to file this one away in the gaming's most baffling decisions category. Being attacked by headcrabs isn't scary when some asshole with a funny accent says, "Look out! Headcrabs! I bet they taste great on sandwiches--oh, wait, sorry, go ahead and fight them Alyx! Don't worry! You can do it!"*

In my opinion, then, Alyx suffers from some rather serious tonal issues. It isn't dark enough overall to pull off the extremely dark subject matter--a problem former Half-Life games have not suffered from.

*a paraphrase of actual dialogue, not a direct quotation

It's Just a Little Bit Derivative...

Someone at Valve played The Last of Us before designing the game's most memorable horror section. This doesn't really bother me, though. A lot of the medium's best games are derivative (Horizon: Zero Dawn comes to mind)--this is the nature of systems design.

...and a Lot of Bit Predictable

This was basically what happened while I played this game:

The writers: They're holding a superweapon inside of that floating box!

Me, immediately after seeing the box: Gordon Freeman is inside that box.

The writers, eventually: It's Gordon Freeman in the box!

Me: oh, it's the G-Man. The G-Man is in the box.

Guess who was in the box?

Maybe it's supposed to be painfully obvious. I had actually changed my guess to be G-Man even before the Gordon Freeman false flag was planted. Still, in general, the big reveal at the end, although neat, wasn't all that interesting--not when I had worked out the mystery more or less immediately. I'd be more willing to forgive this if the writers hadn't played the ending like it was actually some kind of twist.

A Cutscene By Any Other Name

...would smell just as bad.

This is the line I use whenever someone criticizes a game like The Last of Us for using cutscenes but praises a game like Half-Life for keeping everything in first person. Here's the deal:

Half-Life and BioShock and all the rest of these sorts of games do, actually, have cutscenes. The gamestate freezes. You're forced to listen to some NPC exposit for a while. Nothing you can do impacts the outcome of the story. Yes, you can run around like a monkey and the NPCs will headtrack you, but this has no outcome on the story. It is token interactivity.

Meanwhile, the actual events you're bearing witness to...aren't all that interesting, because there can be no cinematography or interesting staging when the player has the ability to run around in circles, paying no attention to anything while NPCs talk.

A Naughty Dog-esq cutscene may not be ideal, but they are always going to be more interesting from a filmmaking perspective than being compelled to watch some talking head for five minutes while you wait to get to the next arena.

If you're going to have a cutscene, make it a cutscene. Otherwise, find some way to include real interactive gameplay while the talking happens. That's my hot take.

Obviously this is not an option in VR. We have to stay first-person. But the game still suffers from the Half-Life problem, which is that you have to sit through boring talking head pseudocutscenes constantly throughout the game, none of which are at all interesting. Even when the writing itself is tolerable, this shit makes me bored out of my mind. The narrative at large is not being weaved into the gameplay, not really. That's not very good design.

The Characters

...are decent , but Alyx, despite not being a blank slate, lacks charisma. Her dialogue, through some combination of clunky writing and a mediocre performance, did not grab me.

Valve replaced Merle Dandridge as Alyx, a fabulous, classically trained actress, with some no-name random credited as "Ozioma Akagha," saying they wanted to move in a "different direction."

If that is actually the answer, that "different direction" they wanted to go in must have been THE BAD PERFORMANCE HIGHWAY.

She's just really not very good at all. I suspect the actual reasons for replacing Dandridge were that 1) Dandridge was too expensive or unavailable and/or 2) they thought Dandridge was too old to play an 18-year-old. My money is on the latter more than the former.

Can a 40-something actress play an 18-year-old? Probably, yes, and even should it stretch believability, the quality of her performance itself would alleviate the problem.

Maybe Akagha is a fine performer overall. She didn't work for me in this game. I wanted Dandridge back.

Final Verdict

If you have a VR headset, you should still absolutely play Alyx. These problems I've brought up here do not even come close to ruining the game. The gunplay is satisfying, the level design is excellent, and Alyx's gravity gauntlets are the closest I've ever come to feeling like a real-life Luke Skywalker or Spider-Man. They are unbelievably fun to use.

And the game's narrative design isn't exclusively awful. It has some high points; I just think it could have been much better. I hope Alyx's sequel, to be released for VR c. 2035, will be able to rectify some of the issues I've identified here.