A Portal remake arrived at the tail end of August with barely any advance notice, and anyone who already owns the original on Steam pays nothing for it.
The project comes from Rhubarb & Rhubarb, who rebuilt the entire first Portal game inside the Portal 2 engine. Every test chamber, reconstructed on newer technology. It’s an ambitious undertaking that revives the original in a genuinely fresh way, with more content possibly arriving down the line.
The guy who made Portal has notes, and they’re all good ones
Jeep Barnett, who worked on the original Portal, gave it a go and walked away impressed — an endorsement that carries more weight than any review score.
“I’m often nit-picky, but even with my intimate familiarity of Portal I can see that nothing has been overlooked. Every tile on every panel has been revisited with loving detail. Not only have the visuals been updated to match Portal 2, but the weaker puzzle cues have been improved. I’m really looking forward to what they’ll do with the Behind the Scenes areas,” Barnett said.
Go back over that middle sentence. The weaker puzzle cues have been improved. That isn’t a texture pass. That’s a team reopening a design document pushing 20 years old and repairing the spots where players stalled out for the wrong reasons.
Remember when Valve just handed you five games at once
If you were gaming seriously in the mid-2000s, The Orange Box is burned into your memory. Valve was pumping out excellent titles like the practice was about to be outlawed, then packaged the results into one box.
Half-Life 2 was the marquee name on it. It also remains the newest entry in that series to this day, no matter how deafening the demand for a third has become. Twenty years of yelling into empty space.
Yet the genuine breakout from that five-game bundle wasn’t the one carrying Gordon Freeman’s name.
The puzzle game nobody saw coming
Portal was a single-player first-person action/puzzle title built around a portal gun you fire to reach places you otherwise couldn’t. A straightforward concept. A truly amazing game.
Seeing an official comeback eventually, preferably as a trilogy entry, would be welcome. Valve hasn’t commented on any such thing, and Valve staying silent about a third installment is a pattern we all recognise by now.
So for the time being, one excellent developer has taken the job on instead.
How to actually play it
The download went live at the end of August. Own the original Portal and you can play this completely for free right now via Steam.
Work on it is ongoing, so further updates are expected. The complete technical requirements are listed at the foot of the download page, worth checking before you sign away an evening.
It was Barnett who singled out the Behind the Scenes areas as what he’s keeping an eye on. When a developer who helped build the original wants to see what a fan team does with his own game’s back rooms, that’s reason enough to keep next weekend free.