The Strider is the greatest of all Half-Life’s creations, if you ask me. Sure, you could argue that it’s just another spin on HG Wells’ tripods, but seriously, look at the thing! Those legs, so horribly long and horribly jointed, that hideous hint of poultry flesh and machinery spliced together, all pain and wrongness. In Half-Life 2, I watched one of this awful lot stoop to duck under a bridge, and the thing about the Strider is that it never reminds you of just one thing, always a horrible bodging-together – almost a flamingo as its joints worked, yet almost grandparent nipping up into the attic for something heavy too. An internal life: that sense of self-preservation and cruel intelligence they have, of seeing only their own priorities. That sense of being autonomous in the moment, but also deeply mission-driven. They give me goose-bumps because it’s so entirely clear that they can probably get goose-bumps themselves.
Half-Life: Alyx reviewDeveloper: ValvePublisher: ValvePlatform: Reviewed on PC with IndexAvailability: Out 23 March on PC
I had been waiting for this moment, then. Half-Life: Alyx, set five years before the events of Half-Life 2 and delivered sixteen years – is that possible? – Half-Life 2 and thirteen years since Episode Two, the last installment. (How we had talked at the time about that gap between the first two Episodes. We had no idea.) Suddenly, City 17 lies before me once more. I am on a rooftop somewhere: Alyx Vance, 19-year-old daughter of Eli Vance, on reconnaissance for the resistance.
The metropolis is a mess of alien cables, black and heavy, draped thoughtlessly and sagging over honey-coloured European architecture with its weary finials and tiles and crenelations. It’s VR, so a moment or two to look at the creamy skybox dithering into distant mist, then another moment to delight in a nearby radio, fiercely analogue tech, that can be picked up and heaved around, the dials turning and moving a little marker along the display, an aerial that properly extends and everything.
Behind me, inside a little conservatory, there is a video call from Dad, and more importantly there’s a range of felt pens that have been used on the dirty glass to map Combine movements, but which can also be used to – what? – do anything really. Graffiti, Killroys, my daughter’s name in my own instantly recognisable handwriting, somehow captured inside a video game space. I’m on the move, so I heave back a hidden door and explore a few dingy Winston Smith bedsit rooms. Then out again onto a different ledge and, do tell me, what in the world is that sound?
Let’s Play Half-Life: Alyx Episode 1: DREAMIN’ OF CITY 17 – Ian’s VR Corner Watch on YouTube
That sound is a strider, horribly large and horribly close, heaving its carcass body up the side of a building, stepping where it wants because the crumbling world of human things is not really a concern for an alien invader. It stops. Has it seen me? I stare up – because it’s VR, I’m actually staring – at this awful, wretched thing that I have always loved, and which is now here more fully than ever before, its knotty joints bolstered with servo-motors and shards of the Combine’s black-slate tech. It hasn’t seen me. It doesn’t care. It turns and unplugs a clump of cables from a nearby building – the human world is its junction box – and then it’s off into the distance. And yes! I had been waiting for this moment. And this moment did not let me down.