Half-Life 2 on PS Vita: an open beta playable from start to finish

Half-Life 2 runs on PS Vita: after two years of work, Barabbo's port is out as an open beta, playable from start to finish, with dynamic shadows.


The port

On October 12, 2026, Barabbo released v0.1.0-beta of his Half-Life 2 port for PS Vita, with help from Lucky13x on design, the LiveArea screen and testing. It is based on a cross-platform fork of the Source engine, and rendering goes through vitaGL, Rinnegatamante's OpenGL layer, which has already powered dozens of Vita ports.


What works

• The game is playable from start to finish; the repository estimates it is “about 95%” complete.
• The engine spreads the work across multiple cores of the Vita, in a stable way.
• Dynamic lighting and soft shadows.
• A single VPK file of about 24 MB, with a dedicated LiveArea screen.

What still needs work

• The sound is partly, or even completely, broken according to user reports.
• The frame rate drops in busy scenes, and there are geometry glitches.
• Some game scripts fail.

This is a beta: expect crashes, and report them to the author.


How to play it

You need a PS Vita with HENkaku (Ensō or h-encore): see our selection of the best Vita homebrew for the rest. The VPK contains no game files: the author points out that you must own Half-Life 2 and copy the data from your own copy, for example the Steam version. It is a free, non-commercial fan project, not affiliated with Valve or Sony.


Sources: Half-Life 2 Vita (GitHub) · r/vitahacks