In the mid-2010s, Valve began experimenting with VR, and released a collection of VR minigames, The Lab, in 2016. Valve made several attempts to develop further Half-Life projects, but could not settle on a unifying idea, and Valve's flat management structure made it difficult for projects to gather momentum.
The previous Half-Life game, Episode Two, was released in 2007 and ended on a cliffhanger. Like previous Half-Life games, it incorporates elements of combat, puzzles, exploration and survival horror. Players use VR to interact with the environment and fight enemies, using 'gravity gloves' to manipulate objects, similarly to the gravity gun from Half-Life 2. Set between the events of Half-Life (1998) and Half-Life 2 (2004), players control Alyx Vance on a mission to seize a superweapon belonging to the alien Combine. It was released for Windows in March 2020 and Linux in May 2020, with support for most PC-compatible VR headsets.
Half-Life: Alyx is a 2020 virtual reality (VR) first-person shooter developed and published by Valve.
