You can now play Half-Life: Alyx without VR using this mod — but I wouldn’t

Following Valve’s announcement of the latest Half-Life game in over a decade, I wrote about how I probably won’t play it, since it’s a VR title and I don’t have the necessary hardware. But as you’d expect, there’s now an unofficial mod that promises to let you play through all of Half-Life: Alyx using just your mouse and keyboard — no headset required.

Developer r57zone has made the mod available on GitHub, and also detailed a lengthy setup process to get it to work. You can see how it plays in the video above.

However, I’m not sure I’ll get in on the action myself. The field of view seems to tear every time you turn to look in another direction, and it seems like it might be a bit tricky to learn how the VR controller bindings map to the keyboard. I think I’ll stick to my original plan of simply watching a playthrough online – of which there are now several.

If you’re braver than I am, you can grab the mod from here, and support r57zone via their Patreon page.