about 3.5 hours into Alyx. It's fun. The AAA environment polish is great. It better be for a 48GB download, and it hasn't disappointed so for. Rustling around shelves for shit feels good, and the gravity glove mechanic feels good too, more so than the vanilla "force grab" that e.g. boneworks has, even though it's functionally equivalent. The sort of whip-like motion feels more dexterous than point and click. The hologram puzzles are cute, very escape-room-core mechanics. The new enemy is cool, neat mini-boss battle.

On downsides, the lack of full physical interaction is disappointing compared to boneworks. No melee. Having to teleport to hop gaps or jump, or the fact that you can only smooth move at a snails pace, so you pretty much have to teleport between cover in combat. I'm playing on normal difficulty, and enemies are pretty bullet spongy; maybe I'm shooting them wrong, i dunno. I respect valve's decision for just taking 2016-era VR mechanics and polishing them though. There's nothing fundamentally wrong, just like there's nothing wrong with a flat first-person game; it's just a different era of videogame interaction.