Portal Reloaded

Portal Reloaded is a 2021 free fan modification for Portal 2 created by German developer Jannis Brinkmann. As in the official Portal games, gameplay involves solving puzzles by manipulating portals which allow the player to move through space. Additionally, the mod allows players to shoot a third "time portal", allowing traversal across two versions of the puzzle chamber in different time periods. Initially envisioned as a smaller project, the game was released as a full-scale mod on April 19, 2021, receiving positive reception by multiple gaming outlets.

Portal Reloaded

As with the official games in the Portal franchise, Portal Reloaded takes place in the Aperture Science facility, where the player character solves a variety of puzzles in test chambers.[2][3] Players are equipped with a "portal gun", allowing them to create holes that connect disparate areas in three-dimensional space.[4] Unique to the mod is a third "time portal", allowing the player to traverse between the same point in two alternate versions of the test chamber, located respectively in the past and the future. The game also involves solving puzzles with other testing elements introduced in the official series, such as buttons, cubes, lasers, and light bridges.[3]

At the end of the game, the main character is sent back to a stasis chamber. The player can either obey this order, or escape through a time portal to the future. If the player does the former, the test subject successfully returns to stasis, with the AI commenting that they will now "change the course of history", possibly causing the events of Portal to never happen. Otherwise, the player escapes via an elevator, and their portal gun is deactivated. Once reaching the surface, they encounter headcrab zombies at the exit (referencing Half-Life).

Portal: Reloaded is a Portal 2 mod that features three portals instead of two, the third being a time portal that jumps time 20 years into the future. The mod features 25 new puzzles into the game, all of which requires the third portal. The mod is free on Steam, but it requires the user to have Portal 2 in the library bought and installed.

This Portal works differently from the blue and orange portals already featured in the game. Whereas those portals are for moving instantly through space, this new, green portal lets you step seamlessly through time. Specifically, it lets you travel between the present and future versions of the exact same space, with a twenty-year gap between them. Present Aperture Science is all clean and gleaming and new, while future Aperture Science is dirty and crumbling and overgrown.

Reloaded uses this concept to create some truly brain-frazzling puzzles. To give a very simple example from the game itself [MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW IN THIS PARAGRAPH], one puzzle requires you to place a cube on a button to bring down an elevator, then place a cube at on a button at the top of the elevator to open a door. Solving this puzzle requires you to place the present cube in a position where you can reach it from the elevator, then take the future cube, bring it through the portal, and place it on the present button. At this point, you must move to stand on the elevator, then pick up the present cube. This causes the future cube to instantly move from the button in the present, to the position in the future where you moved the present cube to. This enables the lift to go back up, and for you to complete the puzzle.

If you feel like having your brain broken a little bit, here's a gameplay trailer for the forthcoming mod Portal Reloaded (opens in new tab). It adds a Triple Portal Device that, as well as the familiar blue and orange portals, also shoots a rectangular green portal that takes you 20 years into the future.

Portal Reloaded is the work of modder Jannis Brinkmann, who has been plugging away at it since 2014. It will contain 25 puzzles and a "small and contained story, which is delivered through more than 100 custom voice lines." A Q&A section on Brinkmann's website (opens in new tab) covers the important information, like the fact that timeportals default to middle-mouse button, and keybindings can be changed. On the subject of cake, the Q&A declares, "This information is confidential."

Portal 2 has just turned ten years old, and what better way to celebrate than by adding some extra head scratchers to Valve's tricky puzzle box? Portal Reloaded is a Portal 2 mod that adds 25 new puzzles and a brand new type of portal. This new, green portal lets expert portalers travel 20 years in the future and solve Aperture Science rooms across both space and time.

"Awoken from stasis by an automated AI, you are expected to complete a very special test course. Within the depths of Aperture Science, secluded from the rest of the facility, lies a previously unknown and long forgotten testing track," says Portal Reloaded's creator. "This mod is targeted at portal veterans, who are familiar with the gameplay of the main series and want to expand their horizons."

If you need a bit of a primer on how time traveling objects work, Portal Reloaded's creator put togther a few other videos to introduce the concepts visually. For instance, a cube in the future timeline can be moved without affecting its past self, but a cube moved in the present will affect the future. Because of that, you can't bring a cube in the present through a portal to the future but you can bring a cube from the future through a portal to the past.

Portal Reloaded is a community made mod for Portal 2. It incorporates the regular game-play of the Portal games but adds an extra green time portal allowing you to travel between the Overgrown Aperture Science Enrichment Center and the current clean Enrichment Center. The game was released on April 19, 2021 and is on Valve's online delivery platform Steam for anyone who owns Portal 2.

This game has 2 endings, one being the normal ending, where the announcer takes the player back to the long term human storage vault, where later on they will be "awoken when the time comes to use their special abilities to save this facility from it's impending doom."[1] In the other ending, when the player decides to avoid being taken to the long term human storage vault and change their direction, the facility loses power, and the player is taken to the elevator to the surface. Their portal gun also loses power, seemingly due to being outside the facility, as 3 zombies approach the player.[2]

In fact, the mod creates an entirely new mechanic. Part of Portal 2's appeal is a simple core mechanic - one it elevates to some lofty heights. Placing two portals around increasingly complicated maps makes for great dynamic puzzles, but Portal Reloaded takes this idea and radically alters it with just one addition - a third portal. However, this is not a simple spatial portal that shifts players across a space. The new mod allows players to rip a hole in the fabric of time itself. Players can hop backwards and forwards across thirty years of time through a green portal. This makes for some devilish puzzles, with cubes and lasers thrown across decades to navigate puzzles in each area.

A central difference between Portal Reloaded and the other games mentioned above is its pace. The mod does not confront its players with fast and frantic temporal shifts. Instead, it keeps the slow, considered gameplay speed of its base game. The time portal, and the dilapidated future that lies behind it, is something players need to choose to enter. As such, the nature and narrative weight of this time travel is much heavier. Players have time to contemplate the enormity of the broken future, knowing that the compound they play through is doomed to destruction. It is a similar feeling to the late game of Portal 2, where Chell comes across the abandoned expanse of the old Aperture science laboratories.

The time loop here is not under 15 minutes, or even the three days of Majora's Mask, but 30 years. Choices in the "present" day ripple over several decades through a square emerald portal. Players can watch a solution to a puzzle fizzle away because the wrong thing moved in one time period. These moments playing out over 30 years reinforce Portal 2's themes of hubris, decay, and the dangers of unregulated science even more. Interestingly, the standalone Forgotten City game does exactly this. It originally made waves as a Skyrim mod incorporating a time loop, but emphasized slow, considerate gameplay and a multifaceted approach to puzzle solving.

Portal Reloaded is a free, community made modification for Portal 2. The mod builds on the concepts of the main game by allowing you to place a third portal, which enables traveling between two different timelines. Thinking in four dimensions is vital to solving 25 brand new mind and time-bending puzzles.

The most notable change is of course the addition of a third type of portal to our usual arsenal. This one is a rectangular green-edged portal which apparently lets you play around with different timelines. So on top of using your standard physics-altering blue and orange portals, you are now expected to bend time itself in order to solve puzzles? What's the worst that could happen?

Portal Reloaded is a fan-made Game Mod of Portal 2 by Portanis. The mod includes a new storyline taking place after the events of Portal 2 and a brand new game mechanic: the ability to open portals through time, fired with the mouse wheel button. The player can use these portals to travel to and from 20 years in the future. What's done in the present affects the future, but not the other way around. This rule is exploited and expanded upon in the new 25 puzzle chambers. As always, the player is guided by an A.I. that speaks from above.

• Portal Reloaded can be installed for free in Steam if you have a copy of Portal 2.This game includes examples of the following tropes: A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The A.I. that speaks to you isn't hostile initially, but if you refuse to complete his mission, he will try to kill you so he can put you back together later on so you'll be able to comply.

• Bad Future: Aperture Science is decayed 20 years in the future, apparently because the entity in charge of the facility has been unresponsive for that period due to the actions of an unnamed rogue test subject.

• Bolivian Army Ending: In the "true" ending, the protagonist escapes before returning to cold storage and manages to exit the facility twenty years in the future. As soon as she steps outside into a wooded area, her portal device deactivates... and several headcrab zombies shamble out of the brush toward her.

• Can't Take Anything with You: You can bring cubes from the future to the present, but you can't bring present cubes to the future. If you try, the cube disintegrates.

• Causality Mechanic: This is the primary new mechanic this Game Mod adds. The player can place a portal allowing them to move between the present version of a test chamber and its counterpart 20 years into the future at will. If you move a box or place a portal in the present, this will be reflected in the future.

• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: At the beginning, the A.I. urges the player to travel through the time portal if they don't do it immediately. The final urging is noting that it's the only non-lethal option, since the other option is dying of thirst.

• Developer's Foresight: Puzzles are designed to be solvable in only one timeline, but clever or skillful players can manage to exit the puzzle chambers in the "wrong" timeline. The A.I. acknowledges your creativity and provides a time portal to get you back on rails.

• Dual-World Gameplay: Puzzles revolve around traveling between present and future. Some devices like light bridges and fizzlers will only work in the present, while structures such as stairs, glass panes or portalable walls may be destroyed in the future. In addition, actions in the present affect the future but not the other way around.

• Emergency Temporal Shift: The player character uses the time portal to escape the crushers near the end.

• Foreshadowing: At the end of Test 12, the A.I. once mentions that they can't make infinite clones due to the "(stupid?) rules of quantum mechanics", and the only way to create a new you is if you die first. Come the finale, if you disobey him, he wants to kill you to force you into complying with his plan.

• Hologram: Used to show the location of portals and cubes in the future or past, when in the other. Can be toggled on and off with the press of a button.

• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Kind of. Future cubes can touch present cubes, but as soon as the present one moves an inch, the future one will disintegrate.

• No Name Given: We never find out the name of the A.I., just that it's male.

• No Ontological Inertia: If you change the present in any way, even so far as to just tap a storage cube once, everything in the future is instantly corrected to where it should be. This can be a bit annoying, especially if you try to make a tower using a present and future cube.

• Portal to the Past: The central mechanic of this mod, the ability to shoot time portals. There's a difference of 20 years between both sides. The future is dirty and worn out due to decay.

• Resurrective Immortality: The player character can't die because Aperture Science uses their Teleportation technology to respawn them if they do.

• Ret-Gone: Cubes from the future disappear instantly if their present version is moved. Exploited in some of the puzzles to remotely manipulate mechanisms.

• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: According to the A.I., Aperture Science falls in disrepair in the future due to a certain rogue test subject. Your mission is to stop them. Of course, you can refuse the mission and escape the facility.

• The Slow Path: The A.I. notes in the first chamber that you can wait 20 years until the door opens, or you can travel into the future instantly through the green portal. If you don't cross the portal immediately, he insists you do it because otherwise you'll die from thirst before 20 years pass.

• Temporal Paradox: Apparently, bringing a cube from the present to the future violates the law of causality and creates a paradox, so when you try it, the cube simply disintegrates.

• Unknown Character: If the A.I. is to be believed, a rogue test subject is behind the decay of Aperture 20 years from now. We never see them, hear them or even get their name, though it is implied to be Chell, and said destruction being the events of Portal.

• The Voice: The A.I. that talks to you throughout the game is never seen.

• You Are Number 6: You play as Test Subject 4509.

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