Black Mesa, a massive remake of Half-Life 1, is nearing completion. In fact, developer Crowbar Collective even wants players to test the release candidate build.

In a Steam announcement, Crowbar Collective announced that they have pushed a complete build to their public beta branch. In effect, this will be the release build of Black Mesa, unless there are unforeseen major issues that need to be fixed at the last minute.

However, Crowbar still wants people to test the game and push it to its limits. In their announcement, they stated that they need people to test everything from crashes and achievement unlocks to pacing and difficulty spikes. While there are still a bunch of known minor issues (mainly UI errors), Crowbar expects to have a full list of patch notes for the 1.0 launch available soon.

Black Mesa has been in development for a very long time; it started as two different mods for Half-Life 2 in the mid-2000s and was given the go-ahead by Valve to be released as a standalone game in Early Access in 2015. Initially only the Black Mesa portion of the game was available, with the later Zen level still in development until it was finally fully added in December 2019. Since then, Crowbar has been polishing and tweaking the game, leading to the upcoming 1.0 launch.

An actual launch date for Black Mesa has not been announced. However, if you want to try out the full campaign at launch, right-click Black Mesa in the Steam library, click "Properties," click "Beta," and select "Public Beta" from the drop-down menu.