Black Mesa opens an interdimensional 'Xen Museum'

A museum plaza full of alien and terrestrial exhibits

(Image credit: Pry Collective)

Grim Mesa took its time acquiring Xen right. The Half life overhaul notoriously spent the better part of the 2010s trying to nail the original's divisive final chapters—and now, you can retrace those steps with an authorised "Xen Museum" workshop mod.

Containing over 56 maps and framed around a Jurassic Parking lot-style main lobby, the Xen Museum tracks over 5 eld of experimentation and iteration on Half-Life's borderworld. The hub itself contains a gallery of inactive and antecedently-unobserved assets, only the real exhibition lies in the museum's three wings.

Divided into hubs representing Xen's three chapters (Xen, Gonarch, and Interloper), the museum contains wads of work-in-progress maps, all with sever, representing various stages of development. There are often multiple editions of each stratum, letting you manner of walking through Xen atomic number 3 it goes from a barren, toxic green wasteland to the overgrown, thriving dimension-'tween-dimensions we finally ended up with.

An early, garish look at Black Mesa's Xen remake — (Image credit: Crowbar Collective)

"We hope you enjoy this playfulness and interactive tour of our intensely difficult 5 years of development," the Black Mesa team wrote on Steamer. "We thought this was a really cool and unique way to swan the way a mettlesome can develop and evolve over clip. We've never rather seen anything like it, and we trust you guys have as much of a smash playing it every bit we did devising information technology!"

It's a fitting way to cap off a mod that's been a perpetual comportment in the Uncomplete-Life community for over 15 long time. Last November, Wrecking bar Collective finally closed the book on Nigrify Mesa with a 1.5 "Definitive Edition" update—though otherwise modders have already begun using that base to start remastering Half-Lifespan's Blue Shift expansion.

20 years past, Nat played Jet Set Radio Prox for the first time—and she's not stopped up thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of paid reporting at Rock Paper Scattergun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie shot and having herself developed critically acclaimed small games like Can Androids Pray, Nat is always looking for a refreshing curiosity to hollo about—whether it's the next best indie favourite, Beaver State simply soul modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She's besides played for a competitive Splatoon team, and on the side appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.