Half-Life: Alyx Now Has Audio Commentary From The Devs

Half-Life: Alyx has received a major update, adding audio commentary from the game's development team. The VR game, which released in March this year, is now full of anecdotes and information about its own development process.

When commentary is turned on, tracks will appear throughout the game as headphone nodes, which you can pick up and "wear" by putting them on your head. The update is free for all owners of the game.

There are three hours of commentary in total, and in the trailer below you can hear some snippets. According to the update notes, this commentary was delayed when COVID-19 made recording it all in-studio impossible. "Like much of the world, we are all working from home, which means that rather than using our comfortable high-quality recording studio at the office, we have been recording our commentary voice overs in closets and blanket forts around greater Seattle," it says.

The commentary seems to cover many different aspects, including how the liquid physics were put together and other technical aspects, narrative choices, playtesting feedback, which sections were particularly challenging to make, and more. There are also some visual overlays toggled by these commentaries to better explain some of the topics covered.

The update also adds new localizations for numerous languages: Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian, Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

In GameSpot's Half-Life: Alyx review, the game scored a 9/10. "Not only has Half-Life: Alyx made good on its shift to VR, it has elevated many of the aspects we've come to love about Half-Life games," wrote reviewer Michael Higham. "It may not be as bombastic as previous games, but the intimacy of VR brings you closer to a world you might have thought you knew over the past 22 years."