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.

Loading....pb_twn_5y pic.twitter.com/UhFEcS6mlmAugust 25, 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