And when you put that into game mechanics, the kinds of interactions that we can do, we couldn't possibly do with a mouse and keyboard. When you can track your hands separately from your head, they're all 3D space, all simultaneously tracking and moving, you just can't get that with a mouse and keyboard. The more we used the controllers and the headset, the amount of possibilities these things give us, the more we realized that there’s so much opportunity that we can’t really translate back to the keyboard.

We would love to be delivering a version of that you could play with a mouse and a keyboard, but as we said, it began as an exploration of VR. Here’s what Valve’s Dario Casali had to say about that… Lots of interesting tidbits included in that video, including the fact that Campo Santo (Firewatch) helped with the development of Half-Life: Alyx, but the juiciest bit was when Keighley asked about the possibility of a more traditional mouse-and-keyboard version of Half-Life: Alyx.

Half life alyx demo download