Valve announced Half-Life: Alyx will be released in March, 2020.

The announcement trailer for Half-Life: Alyx reveals a full-fledged return to the dystopic world of Half-Life 2, with the alien Combine in charge of Earth. A single-player VR first-person shooter, Half-Life: Alyx is set between the first and second Half-Life game, during the period of time when Half-Life protagonist Gordon Freeman was held in stasis by the G-Man. Speaking of…

According to Valve, Half-Life: Alyx follows Alyx Vance and her father Eli as they “mount an early resistance to the Combine’s brutal occupation of Earth.” The new Half-Life is set shortly after humanity lost the Seven-Hour War, as the Combine cements its reign with construction of the Citadel that towers above City 17 in Half-Life 2.

“You and your father were relocated to City 17. In the years since, you’ve continued your clandestine scientific activity—performing critical research, and building invaluable tools for the few humans brave enough to defy the Combine,” Valve’s plot description for Half-Life: Alyx reads. “Every day you learn more about your enemy, and every day you work toward finding a weakness.”

Rather than a traditional FPS interface, Half-Life: Alyx is designed from the ground-up for virtual reality, with floating hands being a prominent part of the gameplay experience. The trailer shows Alyx’s disembodied hands pushing aside objects in the environment to get a better look at enemies, re-wiring electrical boards and manually reloading weapons.

Valve described a few more possible in-game actions using a VR interface that could be using during Half-Life: Alyx:

“Lean around a broken wall and under a barnacle to make an impossible shot. Rummage through shelves to find a healing syringe and some shotgun shells. Manipulate tools to hack alien interfaces. Tear a headcrab off your face and throw it out the window.”

But while the interface is a radical redesign centered around the motion of actual human hands, in other ways Half-Life: Alyx looks exactly like the Half-Life 3 fans have been clamoring for. In addition to Combine soldiers, this first trailer features other Half-Life enemies, including headcrabs, zombies, antlions and striders.

Almost as disorienting as the VR-heavy interface introduced in Half-Life: Alyx are its radically improved graphics, showing off a crisper, gooier version of the Half-Life universe with lots of impressive lighting effects.

Half-Life: Alyx will be a flagship release for Valve’s Index VR platform, which launched in June. The “high-fidelity” virtual reality headset and system combines high definition LCD displays with a 120Hz refresh rate and off-the-ear stereo headphones designed to make playing VR a more natural part of the local environment. The follow-up to Valve’s HTC collaboration, the Vive, Index includes new virtual reality controllers enfolding 87 different sensors in an effort to capture hand movements and finger positions as accurately as possible. The complete Index VR kit costs $999, making a killer app like the next Half-Life game a tantalizing selling point for the cost-prohibitive VR hardware.

However, Valve has also announced that Half-Life: Alyx will also be compatible with other VR headsets, including the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality.

Half-Life: Alyx is available now for pre-purchase on Steam.