Portal Reloaded is the closest we’re likely to get to Portal 3 | PC Gamer - kincaidnorted

Portal Reloaded is the nearest we're likely to get to Portal 3

(Effigy citation: Valve)

It's been slimly over a decade since Vena portae 2 surprised everybody by beingness an impossibly brilliant sequel to a game considered close to perfect. While normally at this indicate I'd lament how Valve hasn't made a third, frankly I was superfine with it. Unlike the Half life series, the story of which Valve has left frustratingly incomplete, Portal felt smooth after the second game. You could argue it felt finished after the first-year game, only Valve got away with making a second.

Leaving the serial at deuce seemed like a politic decision, and one I was joyful with. But my contentment has been obliterated by Vena portae Reloaded, a mod that blows public Portal's puzzling potential in some respects that almost matches the wow factor of the original. IT's so satisfactory that it makes Portal 2 depend like information technology was troubled for ideas, featuring a mechanic that could easily form the core of a third Portal spirited.

Now, to glucinium clear, Vena portae Reloaded isn't a Valve-dismantle yield. Reloaded doesn't wealthy person the indistinguishable visual splendor arsenic Portal 2, and there's no Wheatley or Cave Johnson and definitely no GLaDOS. IT does sport a convincing facsimile of the robotic announcer heard at the start of Portal 2, simply more often than not the story is kept lamplit, closer in spirit to the original game.

To briefly explicate how this works, there are two versions of all test sleeping room in Portal Reloaded, single in the present, and indefinite twenty years in the time to come. The present versions of these chambers correspond Aperture Skill at its about pristine, all sleek white panels and bright red buttons. The future versions, by comparison, are falling asunder and overgrown with vegetation, much like the early stages of Portal 2. The chambers are also mirror-images of one another. Stepping into the time portal will see you tread out the some other terminate at the exact unvaried point in space, only in the flip-flop timeline.

What makes Portal Reloaded special is how it expands upon the series' premise. Alongside the familiar blue and orange portals that create passages between deuce points in space, Vena portae Reloaded adds a third, park portal that connects cardinal points in time.

Visually it's a neat whatchamacallit, although considered on its own isn't that awing. It's how Portal Reloaded uses this gimmick where its cleverness becomes apparent. Time travel in Reloaded functions according to a handful of discover rules. The start rule is that any object moved in the present will act upon to the Lapp spy in the future. If you pick up a third power in the present and put it on a clitoris, when you travel into the future, you'll find the future translation of that cube waiting for you in the same place. All the same, an object in the future lav be moved independently of its present equivalent, thanks to the logic of lawsuit and effect.

This ties into the second important pattern. An object from the ubiquitous cannot be affected into the future, information technology'll just fizzle out of existence the moment you step through the portal vein. But an object from the future can be brought back with you into the present. This agency you buttocks double on cubes in the confront, so long as you don't move the present cube while the proximo regular hexahedron occupies the same timeline.

A orbiculate Portal Reloaded puzzle might involve two buttons in the present that penury to be pressed to open a door, but only one dice. The solution is to come in the prospective, grab the early version of the cube, and bring it into the present to place it precise. However, you essential ensure you move the deliver regular hexahedron into place first of all, otherwise when you move it, the future cube wish disappear because you altered its timeline in the award.

If at this point your wi is starting to feel a minute stretched, that's exactly the sensation Hepatic portal vein Reloaded strives to elicit. Portals follow the same rules, meaning you backside have two spatial portals in the present, and two otherwise placed spatial portals in the future. Including the time Portal, you're transaction over twice the number of puzzling elements in any given situation.

Over the course of 25 chambers, the puzzles slowly germinate in complexity, introducing the confusing elements from Vena portae 2, lasers, faith-plates, sick-bridges. One of my favourite puzzles involves using redirection cubes to manipulate a single laser through two different timelines and quaternary different spacial portals. Teasing out the solution, experimenting with different layouts atomic number 3 my brainpower wrapped itself around thought in four dimensions was unbelievably satisfying.

This is what I think of when I say Reloaded recaptures the "thigh-slapper" component of the original game, something which Vena portae 2, sly and hilarious as IT was, didn't quite a make out to achieve. It feels like something I've never toughened in front, and my mind has to constantly adapt to accept Reloaded's way of looking at the world. It shares other commonalities with the original as well, such as its deft sprinkling of mystery and dark humour. At one gunpoint, when the puzzles become more challenging, the robotic announcer states "Think more or less this, if you assume't see your possess remains lying in the prospective, it is safe to take up you solved the chamber sometime during the go 20 age."

Revelatory though Reloaded is, there are a few flaws. The added complexness of the puzzles can result in thwarting, especially if you make a mistake. It's very easy to accidentally neuter the timeline of the future cube by bumping into the present regular hexahedron, which can require you to repeat the entire operation of solving a puzzle. It's a fleeting affair too, between 2 and four hours depending on how big your puzzling brain is. While it's unfair to visit this a problem—the mod is free, after all, I could with happiness have played another 25 chambers of Reloaded's brain-expanding puzzling.

Indeed, Portal vein Reloaded is probably the best get game that I've played since Return of the Obra Dinn. Information technology stands on Hepatic portal vein's shoulders to extradite a mind-meltingly clever series of puzzles, and one of the smartest implementations of time move out that I've seen in a game. I doubt that Valve leave ever make a Portal 3, but if they do, Reloaded's creator Jannis Brinkmann should cost the first soul the company hires.