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I would still count Portal as one of my favourite games, but truth be told I haven’t been back to it for a while. Having played it countless times since it launched, I feel like I’ve simply wrung it dry. Sure, it’s fun to drop back in to hear GLaDOS’ withering putdowns or just enjoy its general atmosphere. But I know most of its beats off by heart, and I could solve its chambers with the lights turned out.
Or at least, that’s what I thought.
Portal Randomized is, by Valve modding community standards, incredibly simple. It takes Valve’s classic puzzler and adds a bunch of different variables that can occur in its test chambers. For example, it might fill the room with deadly neurotoxin, giving you just seconds to solve it. Or it might transform the chamber floor into a roiling lava pit that you have to cross by hopping between rocks. The one that really threw me is arguably the simplest of all, a randomiser that blinks the lights on and off every few seconds. Simply trying to get through the second chamber, which changes the exit of a fixed portal every few seconds, is incredibly difficult with this added disorienting effect.
Given Portal’s famously meticulous craft, throwing in a bunch of randomisers like this might seem like sacrilege. But I think the specificity of Portal’s design is precisely why it works. Much like Grand Theft Auto 5’s chaos mod, adding these goofy random effects to a game that is so intensely authored and equally familiar can help you perceive it in a whole new light. I still enjoy vanilla Portal, but it doesn’t excite me any more. With this though, I found myself enjoying the challenge of its puzzles all over again.
Currently, Portal Randomized is only playable as a demo, which provides the first two chambers to experiment with. But this is enough to communicate the potential in the idea. What it needs now, apart from to be finished, is two things. First, it needs a lot more variables. There are quite a few already, but maximising the number of effects is what will transform it from a fun novelty into something more essential. Second, it needs some general tightening up. One round I played spawned a zombie outside of Chell’s sleeping enclosure, and the zombie managed to damage me through the glass, which wasn’t ideal.
In any case, I think Portal Randomized is an excellent idea. Valve’s puzzler has seen plenty of fantastic mods in its time, such as a recent mod that turns it into a psychological horror. My favourite, however, remains Portal Reloaded, which adds time-travel to its spatial shenanigans, and is the closest we’ve come yet to a bona-fide Portal 3. Unfortunately, an actual Portal 3 seems unlikely to happen, even though the game’s writer Erik Wolpaw still wants to make it.
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Kurt Indovina
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