Portal 2 turned 10 years old this week, giving us the perfect excuse to return to its timeless (and arguable unsurpassed) puzzle-platforming gameplay. But for those who know the game’s levels like the back of their Companion Cubes, you should check out the recently released free mod, Portal Reloaded, which adds an all new time-travel mechanic for you to master. It includes 25 levels “targeted at Portal 2 veterans,” full english voice acting, and subtitle support for 11 languages.


We played through Portal Reloaded’s first few levels and it might as well be a fully-fledged sequel. The opening puzzles introduce you to the time travel mechanics, and should get you back into the puzzle-solving headspace Portal games require if it’s been a few years since you last played.

You receive the iconic portal gun shortly after the intro. You’ll take on a few more puzzles with pre-placed time warps in the levels, then your portal gun unlocks the ability to shoot green portals that let you hop between the game’s time periods at your discretion. From then on, the puzzles are absolute mind-benders.

As Portal Reloaded’s unnamed AI companion explains early on, adding time into the mix “forces you to think in four dimensions” and to consider “not just where to place portals, but when.” The extra dimension comes with its own rules, too. Some are obvious—moving an object in the present affects its location in the future—while others take more getting used to, like how objects can be brought from the future into the present, but not the other way around. These new rules add an extra layer of complexity that will likely challenge even the most seasoned Portal 2 players.

I came away from my brief hands-on time with Portal Reloaded feeling excited to play more. The mod’s new time-travel mechanics, puzzle design, and overall production values are nearly on-par with Valve’s—but it’s definitely made for Portal experts.

(Mercifully, the developers created an official walkthrough you can use if you get stumped.) You can download Portal Reloaded for free on Steam if you already own a copy of Portal 2. The mod will run on any PC that can run Portal 2.

[Rock Paper Shotgun]

Source: Lifehacker.com

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