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 originally 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.”