Fan-made Half-Life 2 Episode 3 demo arrives with Project Borealis: Prologue now on Steam

We may never get Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (basically Half-Life 3), but at least we have the first taster of Project Borealis out now with Project Borealis: Prologue. You know how these prologues work, it's a glorified demo with a fancy name.

Powered by Unreal Engine 5 this game is "inspired by the epic cliffhanger from Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Project Borealis represents a fan-made effort to realize a cohesive story conclusion to the episodic series. This prologue chapter invites players back into the HEV suit of Gordon Freeman, offering a glimpse into the next chapter of his journey".

There's no Linux version, so you'll need Proton to try it out. Although, you will need to swap it to Proton Experimental, as the current main Proton 9.0-3 results in this error:

It loads up fine with Proton Experimental. See more in my Proton beginner's guide if you're confused.

The developer said they are already planning plenty of updates to fix up various bugs and performance issues. If you can't even launch it, you might be able to with the "-vulkan" launch command on the game (right click -> properties) but the developers noted it's not directly supported on that mode.

Performance on my system showed it to not be especially great, but playable enough when changing a few settings down. But even on Medium overall settings it struggled to stay at 60FPS with my Ryzen 5800x / Radeon 6800 XT.

Don't expect something big (yet) from it, the demo is incredibly short. I managed to finish it including the credits rolling in only about 15 minutes. Incredibly exciting though, they've clearly put a huge amount of effort into this and it really does look and feel the part.

Although we might not be getting Half-Life 3 exactly, Valve do appear to be working on something Half-Life related as we saw from a previous leak.