Project Borealis, the fan-made effort to bring Half-Life 2 Episode 3 to life, returns after years of silence with a new ‘Prologue’ teaser

The team behind Project Borealis, a fan-made effort to turn former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw’s Half-Life 2 Episode 3 synopsis into a playable game, has released a brief new teaser for Project Boreal: Prologue, taking players back to the newly snowed-in streets of Ravenholm.

Project Borealis was unveiled in 2017, a few months after Laidlaw shared his ideas for Half-Life 2 Episode 3 in the form of gender-swapped fan faction that saw physicist Gertrude Fremont make her way to Antarctica in order to investigate the Aperture Science vessel Borealis. A script was reportedly completed in May 2018 and we got a look at some early, incomplete footage of new maps a year later.

But the project has been largely silent since a March 2020 update on the game’s “wind and air drag system,” with its last tweet until recently being a picture of a crowbar lying in snow posted in 2022.

Now, two years after that, we have this, and at first I wasn’t sure what to make of it. The teaser is simply some brief clips of Ravenholm, the most famous (and, dare I say, grossly overrated) level in Half-Life 2, except now it’s covered in snow and the headcrabs are the furry Arctic type we first saw back in 2017. Even Alyx’s “we don’t go there anymore” narration is intact. The YouTube listing describes Project Borealis: Prologue as “a fan-made gaming experience set before the events of Project Borealis,” which, I’ll remind you, does not itself currently exist as a playable game.

“Since Project Borealis is made in Unreal Engine 5 and not Source, the team had to recreate all the core Half-Life 2 elements: movement, physics, combat, and of course its ambience,” studio director Postulio told me. “Recreating the familiar ambience gamers instantly recognize yet also represents unexplored territory is a huge challenge, especially when you’re doing it in an entirely new engine.

“To make sure we were on the right track to accomplish this, we told our fans early on we would release a small demo which showcased these features in a familiar environment, Ravenholm. This also gave us an excuse to refine our own internal processes as a community studio, until we were left with a pipeline that could produce a ‘finished’ product.”

And thus, Project Borealis: Prologue, which Postulio said serves as “a bridge between the familiar and the unknown” and represents the studio’s commitment to delivering “the next chapter in Gordon’s journey.”

Postulio said Valve’s recent tightening of Steam rules regarding the use of “prologue” games, aimed at reducing their use in favor of conventional game demos, should not impact the release of the prologue chapter: “We’ve reviewed the new rules, and while we will never speak on Valve’s behalf, we’ve taken the proper steps to address any concerns.”

More information on Project Borealis: Prologue will be released sometime in fall 2024, which means we should be hearing more soon: Fall 2024 starts in less than a week, after all. There’s still no release target for the full Project Borealis, but Postulio said a new update on that is in the works too, and will arrive in the same “fall 2024” time frame.

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