Is this Our First Look at 'Half-Life 2: Episode 3'?

Half-Life 2: Episode 3 has become something of a joke among the gaming community; a joke that typically ends with many of us weeping softly in a corner, praying to an altar of Gabe Newell. It's a game we all want so, so bad, and one that Valve seems intent on delaying indefinitely. That's why I for one eat up any tiny bit of information on the project, and today, quite a few bites just landed on my plate. A site called Valve Time has dropped 32 images that they purport are concept art pieces from Episode 3. Are you salivating too? Good, read on for more information.

Obviously, this could all easily be an elaborate hoax, or purely bad information; but Valve Time is assuring us that they are in fact real (for as much as that counts for).

"I just want to stress that we absolutely would not release these pictures if we didn't know for a fact they were real. They absolutely are. I mean, it's not like we're doing it to attract traffic to our site. We know our server can't cope with the load so we don't want massive influxes of traffic like this. You may have noticed we've been offline since!"

To their credit, their website is actually currently down.

As such, I've posted a few of the images below, and you can check out all of them at their  Facebook page. Some are what you might expect, with some nice touches (Alyx wears Eli's jacket), but others are quite... stylized to say the least. Are we to expect some crazy alien adventures? I hope so.