Half-Life: Alyx multiplayer mod lets you join a friend as a useless floating robot

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The open-source mod lets you hang out in a friend's map, but not much else.

A pair of greebly hands
(Image credit: Valve)

An open-source Half-Life: Alyx mod will let you join a friend's VR journey through City 17. Just don't expect do be able to do much more than hang around and watch the fireworks.

As spotted by PCGamesN, alyx-multiplayer is a fairly simple mod that lets you invite a friend into Half-Life: Alyx in a very limited fashion—as the floating faceplate of a Combine scanner, drifting and jittering around Alyx as a kind of robot buddy. 

Since the mod only tracks head position and rotation, you can't exactly do much but float about as an extra pair of eyes. Physics interactions and game states aren't shared between players. It's rudimentary, but the modding community is nothing if not resourceful—after all, efforts to remove the VR from the VR-exclusive title have already come a long way since the game's release. 

Alyx-multiplayer is free to download over on its official site, with full instructions for getting you and a friend set up for kinda-sorta-cooperative adventures. For a more ambitious twist on Alyx, Return to Rapture turns the VR Half-Life entry into a shockingly good Bioshock mashup.

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Natalie Clayton
Natalie Clayton
Features Producer

20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she's not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.