The Many Deaths Of Half-Life 3

Explore The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx

If you didn’t look into it when announced due to a lack of VR equipment, you had probably thought this was a sequel to the VR-only Half-Life Alyx game from March of this year.  The $10 purchase on Steam is not a game, but instead a look at the past decade of Valve and the closest you will ever get to Half-Life 3, or Episode 3 for that matter.  It makes use of VR to provide a virtual storybook for you to wander through to learn the behind the scenes secrets of Half-Life, those that worked on it, and even a headcrab sound mixer you never knew you needed.

Simple text will not be able to reveal all of the details you can enjoy in the VR version, but it can certainly destroy any dreams you have retained about Half Life 3 emerging.  The Final Hours reveals that there were numerous incarnations of HL3, all of which decayed before they could be revealed. 

There was an incarnation which was a procedurally generated FPS focused on combat with bits of story intertwined to try to tie it together, sort of a Left 4 Dead meets Half-Life, but not in a Ravenhome way.  There was another version internally called Borealis which was a time hopping thriller that saw you jumping along the timeline of the Half Life and Portal games, including some gameplay during the mysterious Seven Hour War.

Ars Technica is glad to give you a glimpse at the extent this 12 chapter VR experience offers, which encompasses far more than just the Half Life series, and might even reveal what hotdogs have to do with zombies.