Can You Beat Half Life Alyx Without Hurting a Headcrab?

[Music] if he had come to me three years ago and told me that half-life would be getting a new sequel I probably wouldn't have believed you nor would I believed you if you'd said that it would be a vr exclusive title when I started the game up and looked at the impressive view before me I still had a bit of disbelief tugging on the back of my mind valve would never make a new game there's too many memes saying they wouldn't it wasn't until I threw a book at a cat basking in the Sun and saw the insanely detailed animation that followed that I was able to accept that I was playing a new VR game with the polishing consistency that comes with valve titles but enough of me gushing over how good this game looks and how great all the character animations are it's time for me to get into the real reason I wanted to make this video half-life's headcrabs have been one of the most iconic video game enemies since pretty much the start of video games half-life 1 - cemented them as terrifying enemies that want to do unspeakable things to you in order to turn you into a zombie and then half-life Alex came along and made headcrabs queue because of that fact I decided I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could beat half-life Alex without hurting a single headcrab I would have made the challenge can you be half-life Alex without killing a single headcrab but I don't know how the YouTube algorithm works and I didn't want to kill my video before I even had a chance to finish processing the title the challenge is really whether or not I can beat the game without killing a headcrab but seeing as I attempt to do no harm to them in the act of not killing the title still fits the game starts with you trying to navigate the city in order to find your dad instead you find a bunch of combine soldiers that really don't like you trying to close doors or try to prep their guns I accidentally exposed myself as a button enthusiast and a large soldier decided to keep shame me with the shock you stick I woke up in the back of a van but this time instead of the neighborhood kiddy diddler Larry I saw that two combine soldiers were driving me to who knows where I never got to find out where we are going because the drone with the grenade decided to test how fast the van could go from operational to laying on its side with two dead combine soldiers in the front seats the drone offered me an Xbox 360 party chat headset and then King shaped me for trying to finger blast the outside of the van it was quickly sent to King shame Jail and I went on to meet Russell Russell comes off as a funny and kind character but much like Hannibal Lecter it only takes a quick trip to his fridge to discover that he's actually a giant [ __ ] I tried to make him confess to his crimes against headcrab kind but I was distracted when I saw fourth wall break sitting behind him I went into the next room and committed a little bit of hand masochism to get the gravity gloves which ended up coming from two microwaves rotated on their sides when I went outside to test them out Russell tried to reenact that shot from the trailers but just ended up shooting me in the ankle the pain ended up being worth it though because I traded a perfectly good pistol for a worthless Achilles tendon while I was messing around with the gravity gloves I found a familiar face passed out on a couch instead of putting him in a rocket I took him with me on the midnight train going who knows where I tried to wake up a guy who would obviously attended the same party as my buddy but he was thoroughly lost in the sauce I tossed my gnome friend away in order to have a free hand to pick up more useful things such as half-life Alex's form of currency resin after committing another act of hand masochism and injecting my hands with alien bug juice I tried to wake up a kind gentleman to inform him of the fact that his lungs were exposed to the outside world I was distracted when I spotted the gnome resting in the mud and decided to send him where he belongs in a pit of human mud one puzzle later I was opening the vault door to the quarantined a portion of the city and practicing my favorite pastime since puberty on a weird fungal growth I then encountered the first headcrab of the game unfortunately it was stuck on his aam be our reunion was cut short by a barnacle that had other plans for the little guy so I had to save scum my way back and kill the barnacle before he could reenact that one Newgrounds video with Raven and Starfire from the early 2000s you know the one now's a good time to explain a part of this challenge that requires a bit of explanation in my mind headcrabs resting on zombies heads are the Schrodinger's cat of the half-life universe I don't know if they are alive or dead until I free them from their zombie hosts so I make a point to only shoot the zombies that are underneath the headcrabs if the headcrab pops off and doesn't start moving it was dead before I encountered it and there's nothing I could do if it pops off and is alive I successfully freed it from a lifetime of protecting a zombie from UV rays I tried to upgrade a headcrab at weapons upgrade station but it was perfect just the way it was and opted to take a nap instead after using a propane tank in my pistol to free a few more headcrabs from their parasitic hosts I encountered the first living headcrab in the game see the game clearly expects you to kill the two headcrabs in this area but you can easily walk past them into the loading area right behind them I met a new friend while trying to search an office for resin and came across a very creepy floating green high behind the eye I found two head crabs that had clearly tried pole vaulting without knowing the proper techniques and a bunch of alien graffiti after freeing some more cardboard and completing the puzzle that totally didn't take me 20 minutes to figure out the first time I played through the game I entered a hallway that had very sinister vibes the headcrab stuck in a cage was a bad omen but before I was able to get Pete on the phone I found myself in a hallway that somehow reminded me of the one from event horizon after ringing the dinner bell I met my personal favorite character of the game unfortunately in the context of this video he's pretty much one of the most evil bastards I've ever had the misfortune of encountering it doesn't take long to realize that the headcrabs and cages and hanging from hooks in his home aren't there for esthetic purposes the only positive aspect of this area is the amazing animation work on display but it's easily overshadowed by the atrocious treatment of headcrabs after showing me his figurine collection and going on a rant about how Israel is not a legitimate state the gorgonite decided to taunt me one last time with the corpse of a precious headcrab fortunately it didn't take long for me to encounter a living headcrab and an armored one at that i took special care to avoid shooting one of the headcrabs weird glowing I bellied thing and dodged my way past them to get to the battery for the next area two of the little guys ended up in a hole in the ground and I found myself face-to-face with my favorite weapon in the game the shotgun the shotgun is the perfect weapon for freeing headcrabs from the zombies underneath them in one swift shot the next area was a pain in the ass to navigate I wanted to get the headcrabs into a lower portion of the hallway in order to get uninterrupted access to the weapon upgrade station down the hall this meant making seven headcrabs into following me and falling down into a lower portion of the hallway I died a few times trying to do so and every time I thought I had baited every headcrab in the area a new one would show up eventually I successfully upgraded my pistol with the bullet reservoir an upgrade that allows you to hold twice the amount of bullets without having to reload after watching one headcrabs shake what his head grabbed mama gave him and getting startled by another that blended in with empty shells on the ground I quickly hopped through an unnecessarily dark room to get the flashlight [Music] it was in this chamber that I met the only headcrab variation that this game couldn't have made cute if it tried the poison headcrab luckily I got a break from dealing with headcrabs in the next section where I met a man hack in a hallway which sounds like a sick metal band name and ran into the aftermath of what looked like a badass rave that had gotten interrupted by some angry Bionicles but I wrote Bionicles I met sea barnacles but I wrote Bionicles I'm keeping it in anyways I found myself in an area that really only serves to remind you over and over that red things and video games usually explode after narrowly missing a flying propane tank I was able to take a brief stint above-ground and enjoy the fresh air and horizon that reminded me of the city of dunwall from Dishonored before hacking into a console and fixing it with a gross meat circle thing after breaking off a handle I had to hold a lever to let train go down the wrong track a few minutes later I happened upon my dad just hanging around waiting for me to give him a hand but I was too late and he died severing the storyline for the half-life series just kidding he was actually saved by alien voodoo magic I recreated that one shot from Valve's Twitter teaser and found myself looking at the vault that the whole game is centered on getting to I avoided harming and getting harmed by three headcrabs with a handy drawer and took the elevator downstairs while I watched some poisonous headcrab do his thing I tried desperately to find a redeeming quality about him but there was nothing to find then I freed a headcrab from a zombie with just a teensy tiny bit of explosions and encountered one of the first new enemy varieties introduced to the half-life series in over a decade before I could get a closer look at it I took in a room that reminded me heavily of an environment that could have easily been pulled straight out of the Last of Us the zombie corpse in the next room covered in alien fungus added further to the illusion that I was actually in the last of us but fortunately this wasn't the last of us - I did my part in reversing the damage done to the earth by the combine and rubbed an alien's belly to more easily grab his balls the next section of the game represented the first real roadblock in this videos challenge in the form of this guy I thought he was a new form of headcrab the first time he played through the game but when I encountered him in this playthrough I was met with a difficult decision on the one hand if he is a headcrab I can't continue this challenge because you need to kill him in order to progress through the story however I think the challenge lives on because for all intents and purposes whatever this thing is it's closer to a dog than the head crap no other headcrab variants have tails and every other headcrab tries to jump on your face and stay there this guy is teeth that are much more like the mouth of a dog or cat and shoots lightning out of its stomach needless to say I decided that he wasn't a head grab and elected to put it out of its misery I didn't feel any better putting a cool blue alien dog thing down but doing so meant that I could continue on with this videos challenge I got a brief look back up at the sunlight in some much-needed vitamin D before I delve even further into the bowels of the city I encountered some poisonous headcrabs that used clever distracting tactics to lure me into a closet and came face-to-face with an armored headcrab that turned out to respond positively to threats of force who would have thought I encountered another one of the things that I will henceforth refer to as Sparky's and watched him do the opposite of what the prepubescent aliens did in the Alien movies after watching him change his mind over what side of the zombies chest he wanted to be on I put him out of his misery and went on to call the elevator down I upgraded my shotgun by adding a grenade launcher attachment baited a poisonous headcrab past me thought he was a fool until I nearly killed myself by using the aforementioned grenade launcher on a zombie only a few feet away and proved myself the fool i shamed along an edge that totally didn't play on my fear of heights and stumbled on a cool bit of environmental storytelling three zombies were trying desperately to get out of a room with the boarded-up door I helped them get over their obstacle with a free grenade and discovered the source of their panic another one of the zombies must have had a serious BM to keep it on the toilet even after death I found an unbound combine rifle and enjoyed the cool reload animation and went on to see if I could shut down the power from the relay to the vault I freed a board account and made an easy shot in one try I watched a headcrab bump his cute little head and plummet down a non-lethal distance and stumbled on another tried to explore his feelings for mannequin not wanting to be one to kink shame I made sure to reunite him with his mannequin gf and continued on my merry way it wasn't until I saw the scene with the Sun on the horizon in the gorgeous city landscape sprawled out in front of me that I remember just how beautiful this game was then I dodged the headcrabs futile attempts at turning my head into its next perch and check to see how my leg crops were doing the harvest will be plentiful this year a zombie generously cleared the way of Mines for me and I reminded to combine soldier as to why it's a bad idea to keep explosive barrels of propane on your back this challenge was relatively easy up to this point but this poisonous headcrab turned out to be a real pain in the ass for some reason or another it was born without a sense of self-preservation the first time I encountered it it jumped into the tentacle of a barnacle and was promptly chewed to a pulp by the time I tried to free it the second time I attempted to save it from dying to the barnacle it was caught but I killed the barn cold before it had a chance to munch on the four-legged friend after save scumming one more time I was able to shoot the lock distract the barnacle raced to the door and killed the tentacled bastard before he was able to give the headcrab another lethal poke in an act of appreciation the headcrab tried to jump on my face and kill me this footage doesn't quite do the fear I felt justice when I was jump scared by Russell's drone but it worked out in the end when the combine soldier got revenge on my behalf I added an autoloader to my shotgun and happened upon a combine scientists that had evidently gotten absolutely lost in the sauce I got to enjoy one more beautiful look at the skyline before I started one of my favorite chapters of any video game ever Jeff I'll also take this opportunity to gush over the character animation one less time in this video take a few seconds to appreciate how valve meet every NPC in this game look and sound like they were really there in front of you thanks for the money which is up inside this guy the effect is even more convincing in VR Larry introduced me to Jeff by wasting a perfectly good bottle of vodka and we parted ways but not before I was able to appreciate his stylish hat it wasn't until my third playthrough of the game that I realized that all the nails and screws on the top of his hat were to keep barnacles from grabbing him I then started Jeff's section of the game this entire encounter is one of the most perfect executions of suspense dread and misdirection that has ever been implemented into a video game and the horror was expounded upon by Jeff's treatment of this poor headcrab the initial horror from my first time playing through this section had waned considerably but I was still able to appreciate the way the game designers made me get close to Jeff for one reason or another despite every attempt I made to distance myself from him unfortunately just as I got caught up in appreciating one of the coolest enemies in the past decade of gaming Jeff had to go and cement himself as a headcrab hater and thusly my enemy I got some catharsis in the form of finding a headcrab safely an event before teasing Jeff and luring him into a trash compactor I got vengeance for the countless headcrabs lost to Jeff's vile goop but I didn't spend much time gloating one giant door opening and creepy hole in the ground later I was upgrading my combine rifle one last time and moving on to the next portion of the game this part of the game in odd words is plenty interesting and fun in a normal playthrough but for the purposes of this challenge it is not that's because from this point on interactions with headcrabs become fewer and farther between after my first time through I also find this part of the game much less interesting because most of the combat takes place against antlions antlions look cool don't get me wrong in there animations and behavior are a definite step up from previous half-life titles but fighting them feels like the only gamey portion of half-life Alex you shoot the glowing parts until they die once you've fought one antlion you fought them all despite my disappointment in the antlion behavior the game still had a few pleasant surprises for me this headcrab helped me back up my claim that headcrab secretly adorable harmless little creatures that want to protect our scalps from harmful UV rays this headcrab I found also reinforced the idea that headcrabs are really only a threat to themselves as the game progressed I discovered something that encouraged me to continue with the challenge it was if the headcrabs could pick up on the fact that I meant them no harm I found that they became less and less hostile as the game went on this was evidenced by the fact that this headcrab tried to give me a hug after denying him and his friends advances I found and climbed a beautiful ladder leading up to the surface and disposed of a combine soldier with one swift clean shot as I neared the end of the game I found that the environments got more impressive as time went on and watching the vault falling only to get caught by some sort of combine tractor beam I was reminded that I was playing a new half-life game who would have thought I totally marked to combine soldiers after making sure the grenade launcher wasn't primed and then died to a tripmine that totally shouldn't have been set off by outsmarted the lasers with a bucket and encountered a familiar problem I had to kill a barnacle before it got the chance to get its grubby paws or tentacle or whatever on a headcrab caught a grenade out of midair like a total badass and found myself face-to-face with the vault I had gotten different vibes from plenty of areas in the game in this area totally reminded me of the cities featured in dying light I found the controls that needed to be used to bring the vault down and totally didn't mess everything up I can see it moving and then it happened I encountered the last living headcrab in the game I didn't know at the time that he was the last but something told me that he would be at least one of the last if I known he would be the last living headcrab I would encounter in the run I would have let him jump on my face one last time after leaving him behind I encountered one of the more tame enemies in the half-life series defeated him easily and started the end of the game from this point onwards I had very little to do but walk through the vault and enjoy the sights I came across one of the viruses Jimmy Neutron find that one episode bullied a ghost and encountered gravity that was messed up in all kinds of ways I also encountered the last headcrab of the game only this time it was a dead poison headcrab the vault messed with my head a few more times with a few more assaults on gravity and then stole my loaf of bread fortunately I got to enact my revenge for every loaf of bread lost to the combine when they invaded earth and found myself freeing who I originally thought was going to be Gordon Freeman and with that I successfully completed half-life Alex without hurting or killing a single head crap [Music]

Channel: NerdFuel

Views: 1,237,287

Rating: 4.9284739 out of 5

Keywords: Half Life Alyx, Half Life Alyx gameplay, Half Life Alyx review, half life, half life alyx, half life alyx headcrab, half life vr, half life headcrab, half life alyx vr, Half Life Review

Id: JR8O3Iuf9hA

Length: 20min 42sec (1242 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020