The new Half-Life VR series stars as the evil and funny gnome

Half-Life: Alyx is great. One of the best virtual reality games I’ve ever played and one of my favorite games of 2020. It’s hard to improve on that. But a new Let’s Play series has found a way to make Valve’s VR hit even better: Add a really weird and annoying self-aware gnome to the adventure.

Half-Life: Alyx, but the gnome is aware began back in June 2021 as a series of live streams hosted by internet content creator and streamer, WayneRadioTV. However, edited, shorter versions of the streams did not appear on YouTube until November. And since then I’ve been addicted to every new part of the supernatural comedy.

The premise of Half-Life: Alyx, but the gnome is aware is simple: Wayne, the man who plays the game in VR, installed a secret, hidden mod for Half-Life: Alyx that would “breathe life” into the game. normally silent gnome chompsinky prop. Pretty quickly in his run, however, it becomes clear that the gnome is no easy mod, and he berates, frustrates, insults, and befriends Wayne while desperately trying to get him to the end of the game. gain an achievement.

To be clear, the mod is not real. It’s all roleplay. Wayne and the people involved in giving the gnome a voice and speaking to Wayne use improvisation to create a silly storyline along the way, often contradicting previous statements to create weirder or funnier jokes and gags. What makes this work so good is that Wayne is good at playing the straight man trying to deal with a supernatural entity that seems to want to drive him insane. It also helps that the people involved are really funny and good at improvising, often pushing each other to get weirder or sillier, with fantastic results.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s also hilarious Half-Life VR, but the AI ​​is self-aware

Let’s Play series of 2020, that’s because Wayne and his friends were also behind this hugely popular series. And how HLVRAI, uses the Gnome series half-life as a foundation on which to build. Rather than building sets and creating elaborate costumes and effects, Wayne and his friends can leverage the already established lore and world of half-life easier to invent and tell their own weird stories. The end result is a comedic Let’s Play series that’s already one of my favorite shows of 2022.

As of now, the series has entered its fourth Law. You can see past episodes on WayneRadioTV’s YouTube channelto catch up on all the gnome antics ahead of new episodes coming out in the near future.