I came here with the intent of saying the same thing.

Maybe putting “immersion” and “VR” in the same paragraph is a cheap shot. But Alyx is the first and possibly only VR title that, in my opinion, actually manages to nail all the aspects of real world presence to the extent that it actually does feel at times that you are standing in a genuine place. It’s not just the visual design and fidelity of the world and the models in it, but all the little details and aspects added together that make HL:Alyx feel right, and when you go back to other VR titles afterwards you suddenly realize how they’ve been getting it so wrong all this time. Even other games that have “realistic” rather than cartoony graphics.

It’s things like the scale of the world, which feels genuine. A lot of VR games seem to scale their world slightly too large, and as a result there are lots of familiar objects in them that seem uncannily wrong until you figure out that their scale is off. All the doorframes are just too big, so you don’t feel like you’re getting stuck in them. But you’ve walked through a million doorframes in your life and they feel wrong. And the desk tops are nearly at chest height, so you don’t have to bend over to look at their contents. But you’ve sat at a desk a thousand times in your life so that feels wrong, too. Etc., etc.

Alyx doesn’t do this. Everything is life scale. This means that, yes, you probably will have to get down on your knees or grovel around on the ground to search the lower drawers in that desk or turn over all the boxes on the floor looking for ammo and resin. All the window frames are at realistic, rather than convenient, heights. So you might have to get down very low to avoid incoming fire below that windowsill. Or stand on your tiptoes to reach a top shelf.

Sometimes it’s just as simple as being able to look down and see yourself. Or see Alyx, anyway. So many VR games present you, the player, as just a floating pair of hands. Alyx doesn’t. As a matter of fact, the developers even experimented in the beginning with fully modeling Alyx from the perspective of the player, i.e. giving her not only hands but also arms and elbows. They gave up because the experience was visually disconcerting.

Then there’s things like the gunplay and manipulation of healing syringes and so forth. This is another aspect where a lot of “realistic” games fall down, by trying too hard to mimic real life firearms and tools which inevitably winds up shoehorning the controls onto the available buttons in a way that winds up feeling unnatural. But all the guns in Alyx are Half Life sci-fi guns, so Valve could make them work however they wanted to. So they seem real despite being pure fantasy, and operate in an intuitive manner that matches the controllers very well and feels right. The only thing I don’t like is the squeeze-to-arm grenades. I get it, but I think a ring-pull mechanic would have been a bit more intuitive as well as potentially allowing players to put the pin back in… (Perhaps, if you can’t put away the gun in your main hand in a hurry, an available gesture should have been pulling the ring out with your teeth.)

It’s also packed with incredible setpieces. I can’t list them all, but one that absolutely will stick with you is watching a 1:1 scale freight train careening at high speed with the wheels screaming mere feet away from your face, and crashing into a wall.

And despite being so immersive, Alyx is not an immersive sim. It’s thoroughly linear, and your interactions with most objects do boil down to shooting them, poking them, yanking a lever on them, slotting a key item into them, or throwing stuff at them. And every interactable for the most part only has one way for you to interact with it. Yet even despite this, emergent gameplay… well, emerges. I read a story online (and you probably did, too) about one player who absolutely could not stand leaving grenades and stims and grub jars lying around that they couldn’t use just then thanks to the limited inventory space. So they found a crate and dumped all their extra items in it and carried the crate around with them everywhere, throughout the entire campaign. And the game lets you do this. Even bringing your junk with you across loading zones. It is an incredible benefit to immersion if you can logically think of a thing and then find out that you are able to do that thing, even if it’s not an explicit game mechanic that was explained to you in a tutorial.

It’s unfortunate the barrier to entry to even be able to play this is so high, because it’s a damn shame a lot more people haven’t played it. Sure, you can watch a playthrough on Youtube or whatever but that absolutely does not do it justice. You have to be there.

I probably wouldn’t have bought it, but it came with my Index and Holy shit what an incredible experience. I’ve been playing the Arizona Sunshine remake and it’s been scratching the same itch. The reload mechanics are a ton of fun.

Subnautica is so immersive I’d find myself holding my breath if I was running low on oxygen as if it would help.

Dishonored is the one game I’d love to erase from my memory just to have to joy of playing it for the first time again. It’s easily in my top 10 favorite games of all time. I wish there were more like it - Prey was great, too, but not quite the same, and there hasn’t been anything else that’s really scratched that itch.

With that list of games, you may like Green Hell.

Prey yes

That was an enjoyable read in the same vein of reading about crazy EVE Online shenanigans. I will probably never touch it but I admire how fun you make it sound.

do you follow tradition and put on a suit for the Finals?

Elite got too real. When you pick a “job” the grind gets real enough to feel like a real job.

Same. I remember seeing a lot of buzz surrounding it on release day, but I’d never played a TES game before. Decided to download it and play for an hour just to see what it’s about. I remember after what felt like roughly an hour I suddenly had massive hunger pains, checked the time and realised I’d just been playing for about 9 hours straight with no break. I don’t think I’ve ever had another game do that to me before.

The ashtray maze was a great sequence and a ton of fun, but immersive? I don’t think so.

Came here to say this. One of the only games I went back to beat several more times. I was sad to finally stop playing, but I definitely got my monies worth. I don’t think I have been that into a game since half-life 2.

That’s virtually immersive. Literally immersive was when I fell into an actual pool while playing Super Mario on a gameboy.

I love TLD but have never played the actual game. I just get lost playing survival mode

Playing for the first time currently and I can’t put it down. We finally got a good successor to system shock 2 and I am so happy

VR Skyrim.