9 Mind-Bending Levels That Will Melt Your Brain

With Portal 2 having been the last true hit produced by Valve and Crowbar’s Collective’s Half-Life remake, Black Mesa, arguably being a better Half-Life than Half-Life, many wondered whether the once legendary studio could still craft a decent game.

Then came Half-Life: Alyx, and the answer was yes, yes they can. And for emphatic proof look no further than Point Extraction.

It is a technical marvel of a level. Whereas games like Control and Dusk perform wonders with topography, Alyx goes further by taking gravity and moulding it into a work of art. Here objects fall up, and sideways, or drift gently down from the ceiling to hang suspended in mid-air, only to fall back up in an entrancing weightless dance.

It is also an atmospheric marvel, a place of shimmering ghosts, uncannily mundane apartments drenched in spectral green light, and an ominous, forbidding dodecahedron bedecked in crackling green electricity, all bathed in a beautifully surreal soundtrack that feels caught in temporal flux.

It is a jaw-dropping, mind-blowing, tour-de-force of a level. And it makes the point: if Valve can do this, then they can do Half-Life 3.

Get on it, Valve; you have no excuses now.