A Portal remake landed at the end of August with almost no warning, and if you own the original on Steam it costs you nothing.
Rhubarb & Rhubarb built Portal: Alive & Kicking, a full remake of the first Portal game inside the Portal 2 engine. Every chamber, rebuilt on newer tech. It’s an ambitious project, and one that brings the original back in a whole new way, with potential additions to the content coming in the future.
The guy who made Portal has notes, and they’re all good ones
Original Portal developer Jeep Barnett played it and came away impressed, which is the endorsement that matters more 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.
Read that middle bit again. The weaker puzzle cues have been improved. That’s not a texture pass. That’s someone going back into a nearly 20-year-old design document and fixing the moments where players got stuck for the wrong reasons.
Remember when Valve just handed you five games at once
Anyone who was gaming in earnest back in the mid-2000s remembers The Orange Box. Valve was churning out great titles like it was going out of fashion, and they bundled the results together.
Half-Life 2 was the headline act. It’s also still the most recent game we’ve had in that series, despite impossibly loud calls for a third from fans. Two decades of shouting into the void.
But the real surprise hit of that five-game package wasn’t the one with Gordon Freeman’s name on it.
The puzzle game nobody saw coming
Portal was a single-player first-person action/puzzle game where you fire a portal gun to get through areas you otherwise can’t cross. Simple premise. Genuinely amazing game.
An official return would be great to see at some point, ideally as a trilogy title. Valve has not said anything about that, and Valve saying nothing about a third entry in something is a familiar shape by now.
So in the meantime, one sterling developer has done the work instead.
How to actually play it
The download went live at the end of August. If you own the original Portal, you can play it entirely for free right now via Steam.
Development is continuing, so expect more updates. Full technical requirements sit at the bottom of the download page, which is worth a look before you commit your evening.
Barnett’s the one who called out the Behind the Scenes areas as the thing he’s watching for. If the developer who helped build the original is curious about what a fan team does with his own game’s back rooms, that’s a decent reason to clear next weekend.
