If you want to play Half-Life: Alyx but need a VR console, we’d like to share some info with you: you can now play Half-Life: Alyx with your mouse and keyboard on your PC without any hassle. The game is part of the Half-Life series. It is also available on most PC-compatible VR headsets, including the Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality Headset.
Valve recently announced this game on March 23 of this year. Half-Life: Alyx, the daughter of Dr. Eli Vance, is a first-person shooter game exclusively for VR headsets by Valve. This game is set five years before Half-Life 2. Alyx is a brilliant scientist and skilled fighter on a mission to seize a superweapon to combat aliens.
The game has already been one of the best VR games, having sold over 3 million copies in the first months, so it’s a commercial success. It has made a major contribution to building the VR gaming market. According to some professionals (Unreal Academy), the game has hidden non-VR commands activated with the mod.
Play Half-Life: Alyx without VR using the NoVR Mod by Björn Feber.
Before proceeding, we want to let you know that this method isn’t official and may not be the best way to experience or expect performance, as the game was primarily designed for VR consoles. Björn Feber (GB_2 Development Team) released a Half-Life: Alyx NoVR mod on GitHub or ModDB for free. With this mod, you can bypass the VR requirements to play this game.
This mod also supports all native functionality, like the motion controls or gravity gloves, with the latest update. However, you can only enjoy the story, levels, and enemies. This mod is in the early stages of development but is playable. There is also an addition of levitation and extraordinary value support. Developers are still working on mod bug fixes and patches, and soon it will be fully compatible with all Half-Life: Alyx.
The game natively supports mods, allowing players to use different VR headsets and modders to create a mod that allows them to play the game with a mouse and keyboard. Despite most of the features being supported, it’s not a perfect solution as it’s still under development and has some limitations, like saving files created while playing Half-Life: Alyx in VR that are incompatible with or saved with NoVR that are incompatible with playing on VR, and vice versa.
The game was designed to offer an interactive experience, like cranks and doors that require physical manipulation with VR controls. In contrast, they are now operated using keys and gravity gloves. Many things have been adjusted with the mod to allow players to play the game without VR. In the current version, you can’t achieve 9 out of 42 Steam achievements, which require players to interact with objects with their hands.
Keymapping for Half-Life: Alyx NoVR
To play the game, use the following key mapping while playing without VR:
- Left Click: Select in Main Menu/Throw Held Object/Primary Attack
- W, A, S, D: Move
- Space: Jump
- Ctrl: Crouch
- Shift: Sprint
- E: Interact/Pick Up Object
- F: Flashlight (if available)
- H: Cover your mouth.
- F5: Quick Save
- F9: Quick Load
- M: Main Menu
- P: Pause
- V: Noclip (if you get stuck)
You can play the complete game without VR with a standard PC setup. This game also won the 2020 Game of the Year Award.
If you encounter any bugs or issues, remember to report them to the developer so they can start working on a fix. The developers have confirmed that they are working on making the game more like a native standard PC FPS and less like a VR game.