I finished Portal Reloaded, and I can safely say it ruled. The writing was extremely tepid and forgettable, which obviously means it wasn’t as good as Portal, but I didn’t go into it expecting good writing.
Instead, it is an extremely good followup to the logic of Portal. By adding a third portal that goes between the future and past, it opens up a whole new set of weird possibilities. I was especially impressed how it didn’t just use this as a light world/dark world mechanic, and instead incorporated momentum and timing into using the time portal quite often.
I also dug the sort of fucked up logic you have to internalize RE: what impact the past has on the future, and vice versa. My favorite thing it has you do a few times is shooting portals in the past to do shit in the future and vice versa. It’s really thoughtful about this, and forces you to truly understand the slightly bizarre interactions at play.
My criticisms are, of course, that the writing is fairly tepid, and it overtutorializes things with voice over. There was also 1 puzzle that I’m convinced I brute forced a solution for because whatever the true solution was, I could not figure it out. Specifically, I ended up doing this dumb-ass loop through past and future 3 times so I could move a box up two ledges, one ledge at a time.
It is not a masterwork like Portal is, but I think it’s a cozy inbetween from Portal’s small-stakes polished gem and Portal 2’s bombastic hollywood blockbuster energy. The fact that it has voice acting at all is impressive, and it’s so tightly designed that I never lost trust that a puzzle was solvable or that I’d put it in some unwinnable state.
I think it really excels in the same way that the first Portal does, which is the full exploration of its mechanics, and the very consistent feeling of “Oh, shit, that hadn’t occurred to me!” It definitely pushes at the edges of making me feel like I broke the game at times.
There’s even an early puzzle that I accidentally solved in a different way than expected, and they fully accounted for that with extra voice lines and a bit of extra level geometry so you can go back to the correct timeline. I thought that was really cool! Let me break more games, plz
Contrast Aperture Tag; The Paint Gun Testing Initiative, which is much, much messier in every way. I enjoyed it as well! But Reloaded is a much tighter experience. I think both are worth playing if you dig Portal.
REally dope that there are two high quality fan games like this. Mods have come a long way!!