Under the needles: the glove's heart display at the health station

About this game

Developer: Valve · Publisher: Valve · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Realistic 3D · Screen type: HUD & Gameplay UI

More Half-Life: Alyx screens in the Gallery

What to study

The treatment is the tutorial for the HUD. To be healed, the player holds their hand under the health station's bank of needles, and the station answers with a holographic scan of that same hand, while the back of the glove shows why you are here: its dotted red hearts and small cyan LCD are the game's entire health readout, worn on the body and checked by turning your hand over, exactly as the station forces you to do. Two interfaces mirror each other across the frame, the Combine's teal hologram above, the resistance's hand-built glove display below, and the charged canister glows solid yellow at the right, its grub spent. A flat HUD could show a health bar in a corner; Alyx instead makes checking your health a gesture, and being healed the moment you learn it. Frame at about 2:35 in the Gameplay 1 video (Steam), manually extracted at 155.0s; the scene-change pass missed the sequence entirely.

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

diegetic-controls status-row dual-meters

Components

Parts on screen.

Pips

Screen inventory

• gloved hand raised palm-out at centre, held under the station's needle bank
• back-of-glove display: red heart pips and a small cyan LCD with an icon and numeral
• bank of syringe needles hanging in the open bay of the station above the hand
• teal holographic hand-scan display glowing behind the hand
• charged canister glowing solid yellow at the right edge
• station's blank white panel at the upper right of the bay

Top 3 colors

#0d1816 27%#020306 22%#152221 16%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Valve, Half-Life: Alyx screenshot: Half-Life: Alyx Gameplay 1 and Gameplay 2 videos (Steam), shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Valve.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-20. verified 2026-10-21: frame manually extracted at 155.0s from the pipeline-downloaded Gameplay 1 video (Steam) and inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); genuine in-game frame confirmed (raised glove with legible red heart pips and cyan LCD, needle bank, holographic hand-scan display and charged yellow canister all visible); no trailer text or watermark overlays the frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-21); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.