Seven years after being announced, Project Borealis – a fan-developed game based on an unused story treatment for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 – has a playable ten-minute Prologue on Steam.
Project Borealis was formally unveiled by developer Icebreaker Industries back in 2017, as an attempt to make ex-Valve writer Marc Laidlaw’s Epistle 3 a reality. Epistile 3, for the uninitiated, was a gender-swapped story synopsis charting the adventures of Gertrude Fremont that many believed detailed the events orig inally planned Half-Life 2: Episode 3.
The Project Borealis team continued to share updates on its progress until March 2020, but then all went silent, suggesting another fan game had met an untimely demise. However, the project’s social media feed briefly sputtered to life in 2022 with a short video of a crowbar laying in the snow, and now two years later again, it’s finally all systems go.
September brought word Project Borealis had been reborn in Unreal Engine 5 and that Icebreaker would soon be releasing a ten-minute Prologue, set before the events of the full game. And now that Prologue is now here, whisking players to a version of Ravenholm “transformed by time and the elements”. As per its Steam page, “The once-familiar town now lies buried under a blanket of snow, hiding the past and new present dangers beneath its pristine surface. As you navigate through this hauntingly beautiful landscape, you’ll encounter some classic enemies reimagined and completely new secrets hidden within.”
Icebreaker calls Prologue a “condensed, standalone game experience showcasing an early look and feel of the upcoming full Project Borealis game”. It promises “completely updated visuals”, a “faithful recreation of iconic Half-Life 2 movement and gameplay mechanics”, and an original score. And as to why Icebreaker has decided to release this small slice of its bigger project, studio director Postulio recently told PC Gamer, the decision to use Unreal Engine 5 instead of Valve’s Source engine had necessitated recreating Half-Life 2’s movement, physics, combat, and ambience, and that the team wanted to “make sure we were on the right track”.
“This also gave us an excuse to refine our own internal processes as a community studio,” Postulio added, “until we were left with a pipeline that could produce a ‘finished’ product.” A little more detail on the project and where it’s heading next can be found in Project Borealis’ newly released Update 6 developer video, and the Prologue itself is available to download for free on Steam, but requires a copy of Half-Life 2 to play.
It is, then, a bit of an intriguing time for the legendary first-person shooter series. Not only is Icebreaker exploring one possible future for Gordon Freeman, it’s heavily rumoured Valve may be returning to the series itself, with August bringing reports a “fully-fledged non-VR Half-Life game” was in the works. Just don’t expect it to have a ‘3’ in the title.