Virtual reality means options. If you own a high-end VR headset like the Valve Index, you likely have money and, therefore, options that those less fortunate than you do not. Also, you can do funny things with headcrabs.
Half-Life: Alyx players have embraced VR’s bold new frontier voraciously, testing the limits of the medium’s invisible confines like rocket scientists trying to find new ways to break free of Earth’s orbit. This has primarily involved parking cones, latrines, and dead rats.
YouTuber 2/3kliksphilip managed to pet a headcrab. He also tried to catch it in a bucket, but that part didn’t go so well:
Player Andreas Garbe found a creative solution to the game’s limited inventory: fully physics-simulated baskets that he carried with his own two hands:
Ubisoft Montreal character artist Liz Edwards stumped the hyper-advanced Combine alien mega-species with humanity’s finest invention, the latrine:
Twitch streamer SirActionSlacks attempted to hide under a cone—fully obscuring his own vision—and Metal Gear Solid his way through the game. You can probably imagine how that went:
He also played with a dead rat in a park. As he rolled the small rodent’s lifeless carcass down a slide, he said, “Guys, how depressing would it be to see a young person on a playground doing this? This is as dystopian as it gets, I think.” He is not wrong:
Speaking of the dead rat, player Cakewalking discovered that it does not like smoking:
And VR enthusiast Nathaniel de Jong gave it a gun:
Artist Krazy kissed a headcrab while a friend looked on in abject horror:
Writer Andy Kelly did not kiss a headcrab, thankfully, but he did dance with it:
These next two, though, take the cake. First, PC Gamer’s James Davenport created an Olympic-caliber gauntlet of headcrab sports including golf, bowling, baseball, and shadow puppets:
And Charles Coomber, a seventh and eighth grade social studies teacher at Otay Ranch Academy for the Arts in California, taught an entire geometry lesson on the makeshift marker board at the start of Half-Life: Alyx:
Now it’s time for artist Blueasis to play us off with their certified club banger (ft. Half-Life: Alyx’s health station):