Stonking Half-Life remake Black Mesa is the cheapest it’s ever been on Steam, offering Barney Calhoun in glorious 4K for a mere 2 bucks

Check it out, guys: I think this Half-Life game is gonna be pretty big potatoes. You’re a mute scientist who starts shooting people at work and then you fight a large baby in space. Let’s just hope they don’t kill it with too many sequels.

Sound like the kind of thing you’d like to play? Then do I have good news for you: the official-unofficial fan remake of Valve’s ridiculously influential 1998 FPS is the cheapest it’s ever been (according to IsThereAnyDeal and SteamDB, anyway). Black Mesa is currently $2 (£1.70) on Steam until May 19, meaning you can enjoy the incredible re-do of Valve’s classic for about as much as it’d cost you to leave a lamp on for too long in an unoccupied room.

If you’re not familiar, Black Mesa is the HL1 remake that started life two decades ago as a totally independent fan project. Its aim was to rebuild the classic in a shinier, newer Source engine with all the graphical and gameplay bells and whistles it didn’t get in Valve’s own Half-Life: Source.

As a mod, it was released for free, sans the final levels in Xen, in 2012, before Valve pulled a Valve and invited its creators to sell the thing for cash-money on Steam in 2015. The team kept working on it even after that, making the whole thing more slick and finally adding Xen in time for the game’s full release in 2020.

It’s very good, if you ask me (or if you ask our reviewer Andy Kelly, who scored it 84% in his Black Mesa review in 2020) and well worth the pittance it’s currently going for on Steam. The game just got a big, 10-year anniversary update too, winkingly called “Resonance Decade,” which continues to improve the game and bring things like “Relaxed triangle vertex validation in ToGL to accept structurally valid input even when geometry is ambiguous.” Thank god.

I’d pick it up quickly if I were you. You’ll need to beat it before Half-Life 3 comes out. It’s right around the corner, guys. Any day now.