10 Secrets You Didn't Know About Half-Life: Alyx
7. The Origin Of Alyx’s Pet
Before Dog, Alyx's giant robot, there was another pet.
In a child-like, wondrous state of mind, many players will have interacted with literally everything in the first five minutes of the game. If there’s a speck of peeling paint on the wall, we touched it. VR is just like that, there’s nothing that isn’t interesting.
In one of these initial rooms, filled to the brim with things to interact with, is a creature with a green light inside a jar. You can feed this lil guy through the top of his cage and get an achievement. I would be shocked if no one did this.
We’ve all interacted with it, but what is this creature?
Clearly it’s not from Earth. These tiny fellas are called Snarks. Like everything hostile or gross in Half-Life, they are from the Borderworld, Xen.
In Half-Life 1, Gordon Freeman picks them up as weapons. If enough are thrown, they’ll mount an attack against nearby enemies, munching them to death. However, if no threats are close, they’ll start eating Gordon instead.
A Snark. A bit like a shark but on land and also an alien…