A fan-made, 7-hour Portal 2 prequel just hit Steam for free and it's so good that I'm sad Valve stopped making Portal all over again
Remember when Valve made an ingenious pair of puzzle games about portals and then failed to count to three? Nothing new there, but it's a shame Portal remains one of Valve's forgotten children while the company aims to keep exploring Half-Life. These days, the hallowed halls of Aperture Labs only make an appearance when Valve needs a quick and quirky tutorial for its latest VR hardware or PC handheld. But the Portal community never stopped testing. They've been at it for years uploading new test chambers, original stories, and entire fan campaigns to the Steam Workshop.
This weekend, a big one dropped.
It's called Portal: Revolution. It's a completely original seven-hour campaign with new characters, mechanics, and a story that takes place between Portals 1 and 2. It's a huge mod—so big that developer Second Face Software published it with its own standalone Steam page and thumbs up from Valve. Revolution was built on Strata Source, a «community-made branch of Source engine» officially licensed from Valve. Revolution is still very much Portal 2, you even need to own it first, but Second Face says the upgraded engine means it can do things that «would be impossible in Portal 2.» I've put almost two hours in so far, and I'm starting to see what they mean. Revolution isn't just «more Portal.»
Though the beginning is. In a strange echo of Portal 2's opening, you play as an unnamed Aperture test subject awoken by an AI core named Stirling decades before Chell is unearthed by Wheatley. Stirling is a beaming, cartoonish maintenance core trying to put Aperture back together again after some «monster» destroyed it all, but he needs a human to help.
Props to the modders behind this: Revolution doesn't immediately throw you into
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