I got about 15 minutes through the game before I realized that it wasn't supposed to be as silent as it was - Alyx's dialog wasn't loading at all. I saw a fix in a thread about Portal having the same kind of issues where somebody suggested changing the language to French / German, restarting, then changing it back to English, and restarting again. I did that, and my computer crashed on the uptake. Now, Steam is saying I only have 59% of Episode 2 downloaded.
What. The. Fuck.
What. The. Fuck.