• An accidental resume update of a voice actress may be evidence that Valve is developing a new Half-Life game.
• The game in question is being developed by Valve and is under the codename “Project White Sands.”
• A noted Valve dataminer believes that this is indeed the next mainline Half-Life game.

The Great White Whale of gaming has seemingly breached the ocean of rumour, and we’re raising our harpoons and aiming for its crooked brow. Half-Life 3 is back in the news cycle after an accidental leak confirmed that Valve is working on a new single-player game, one which a noted data miner believes is the next mainline Half-Life instalment.

According to a report from Eurogamer, voice actress Natasha Chandel, likely unaware of how insane gamers are about Half-Life nonchalantly updated her personal website to include that she is working on a title at Valve called “Project White Sands (Video Game).”

Chandel didn’t name the character that she is voicing in the title, nor anything else about the game, but the project is marked to belong to Valve. The very whiff of a potential Half-Life 3 took her little website down due to thousands of people leaping to check out the information and seeing if they can sus anything else out.

The website is still down as of time of writing.

But what exactly is White Sands? Well, it immediately gets us thinking about Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, essentially a Source Engine demo that sees Gordon Freeman massacre a few Combine soldiers in an area where you get to see a few white, sandy beaches.

Users on r/GamingLeaksAndRumours also suggest that the project codename may refer to either the White Sands National Park or the White Sands Missile Range, both of which are in New Mexico, where Black Mesa – the setting of the first Half-Life game – is located.

But these are far from concrete evidence that Half-Life 3 is in development. Luckily, a follow-up story cites a noted Valve data miner Tyler McVicker who got wind of this recent leak and correlated it to his own research on the matter.

“Almost everything you’re about to hear is real, is not speculation, and comes directly from datamines of Valve’s recent updates,” McVicker says in a YouTube video titled “The Half-Life 3 leaks we’ve been waiting for” which seems like the umpteenth time we have seen such a title.

“Valve and the team behind Half-Life Alyx started pre-production on another single-player title [around the same time as Half-Life Alyx]. We found out the codename of that title in 2021: HLX,” he adds.

“In the interim, I have been slowly and silently digging into this story. HLX is a confusing one. HLX seems to be a fully-fledged non-VR Half-Life game, something that seems too good to be true, and something that I wanted to be very sure of before going live with any of this information.”

McVicker says that through datamining strings in other Valve games like DOTA 2, he has discovered that the character you play in HLX “wears an HEV suit” and will go “Offworld” to fight creatures like “workers”, “storks”, “pentatanks”, “feral man hacks”, and “Xengorillas, Xenjellyfish, and Xenswoopers.”

He believes that it is a certainty that Project White Sands, or HLX, is indeed Half-Life 3, or at least the next instalment in the mainline Half-Life games.

“I think this is a non-VR, Half-Life game [in which] you play a HEV Suit-wearing character in development at Valve Software that has been in development since Half-Life Alyx.”

Taking into account the ending of Half-Life Alyx, that essentially points out that the story of the games will continue, we think we may be getting (for real this time) closer and closer to that damned whale.

[Image – Steam]