This ambitious Half-Life 2 mod asks: what if Iron Lung had a submarine and an airship?

Like many people, I'm a big fan of quickfire submarine horror adventure Iron Lung. Yet despite receiving rave reviews and spawning a film adaptation by Markiplier, surprisingly few games have picked up its baton of vehicular terror. There are other submarine horror games like Barotrauma, as well as job-based horror games like Klekta and Shift at Midnight. But the former has quite a different vibe, while the latter pair seem more inspired by Lethal Company than David Szymanski's 2022 horror.

Which is why I'm so intrigued by The Temple, an upcoming Half-Life 2 total conversion that likewise lets players pilot a terror submarine. But the temple ups the ante by adapting the scares into two other forms of transportation, taking players out of the depths all the way up into space.

The Temple is set on an aquatic planet dotted by strange, concrete megastructures, which you're tasked with exploring using three separate vehicles. One, as mentioned, is a submarine that will take you into the depths of its ocean. The others are an airship for exploring its skies and abandoned towers, and a space shuttle that lets you travel to asteroidal moons that orbit the planet.

The Temple was originally released as a pair of maps for MapLabs, a mod that collects together maps from various Source engine modding competitions. While that initial version was fairly short—around 20 minutes in length—the total conversion will revamp and expand those two existing maps, while also adding a third map for over two hours of exploration-based sci-fi horror.

Details

There's a trailer for the mod that you can watch above, which shows all three of its vehicles in action. For a short Half-Life 2 mod, it looks pretty accomplished, with a real eye for colossal structures. The mod also features Amnesia: The Dark Descent-style invisible water monsters, and a talking crow (or at least, a crow whose corvid language you can understand), which will help guide you through the experience.

That alone is sufficient to convince me to check The Temple out. While there's no specific release date for The Temple yet, its creator, who goes by Klems, says that it will launch "very soon, possibly next month".