Steam Report

I’m sure that I’m not alone in having killed many a lunch hour at work by booting up Portal: The Flash Version. So it was with enormous excitement and great surprise that I learned that this Flash Version had been made into a 3.5hour Mappack for the full blown version of Portal.

So, last night I sat down to begin my journey back into the world of Aperture Science and the hunt for cake.

The first thing I noticed was how well the flash version’s (TFV) maps translated into full 3D puzzles. I still havent got all the way through the original web browser game, however my memory was jogged at a number of point by faithful reconstructions of what I’d played before.

What has also been done very well is the moving between the maps. It would have been very easy to simply knock up each level individually and then just put them back to back, one room leading to the next. However, in keeping with the original Portal, there are lots of interchanges which seek to expand the player’s immersion and feel for your nameless character’s predicament.

The difficulty curve of the pack has also been handled exceptionally well. Even if you had never played Portal before, you could pick this up from the start and have very little difficulty initially. I think you might struggle with some of the puzzles, since there are a lot of situations where you find youself calling on you previous Portal puzzle solving knowledge, however, overall I think anyone could pick this up and play it.

The story is slightly different to that of Portal (I won’t spoil it here), which keeps the game fresh, and the puzzles in later sections do get pretty challenging, although the end of the level is always in sight.

All in all, TFV Mappack is without a doubt worth the download; for me it added an extra 4.2 hours playtime and gave me an excuse to revisit one of the best games of last year.