Play Project Borealis' Prologue on Steam Now, New Developer Update

The team at Ice Breaker Industries and the passionate and hard-working devs behind Project Borealis -- a fan-made riff on the outline for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (that never eventuated from within Valve) as revealed by Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw on his personal blog -- have triumphantly released a playable Prologue for the project, available now on Steam. This comes in addition to a brand new video highlighting where the team is at with the game while also pointing out some of the more modern features you can experience thanks to Unreal.

Here's the video skinny:

We've gone ahead and played for you, and can tell you this is very, very much a Half-Life game in every aspect of its DNA and feels about as legit as you want, but maybe with some secret sauce only available from die-hard fans. Not only is the Prologue immediately filled with mystery -- such as what are the holes in space-time? And what gameplay function will the temporal ghost assets play in the final game? (Unless they're actually placeholder ghost assets, but they look themed to the aforementioned rips in the fabric of space-time, so we're running with that and some sort of upgrade to the Gravity Gun.) It's also just on-brand, right down to the furry 'arctic headcrabs' who've clearly grown an outer layer of coverage due to the colder environment.

The Prologue itself is pretty short, but there's plenty to play around with, including physics and utilising the environment as your weaponised playground, replete with plenty of fodder to shoot, explode, dismember and bludgeon (among more creative ways of dispatching).

Still no word on when the full thing will be released, but given the quality of what we just played, we'll happily wait until the team is ready. No point rushing now, it's not like Valve is suddenly going to spring an Episode 3 on us all out of the blue.

Check out a handful of our own screens taken from our playthrough, as well as more content from the Project Borealis official press kit bringing up the rear in our image gallery below.