Portal: Prelude, as its name implies, is an unofficial prequel to the game Portal. Its story revolves around the pre-GlaDOS epoch way before she was plugged in. Back then, test subjects were still monitored by real Aperture Science employees, a tedious, dull, and repetitive job. One of the reasons why they decided to build a great artificial intelligence that could both replace them for these complex tasks and also take responsibility for many other functions within the complex while competing with Black Mesa's superiority. All employees of the Aperture Science complex are now eagerly awaiting GlaDOS. A little too eagerly maybe, as the unfolding events will tell... This game is totally free. It offers a bit more gameplay hours than the original Portal, with 8 chapters, 19 test chambers, 48 challenges, 6 advanced maps, a brand new storyline and more than 400 lines of English dialogue with dozens of subtitles languages.
This review may contain spoilers
The majority of this review does not contain spoilers, however the last part does.
Portal: Prelude is a mod released in 2008, and over the last 10 years it has not aged in the best way.
To begin, Portal: Prelude is honestly a really fantastic mod to look at, lots of effort has clearly been put in to make sure that this mod looks absolutely amazing and clean; along with a lot of design choices in terms of visuals that look really nice, it's like Portal with an extra tub of bleach scrubbed on the walls.
However, as you begin to play through the mod, you'll begin to realize many flaws with Portal: Prelude which appear to be just game design issues, since this mod was released in 2008, a year after Portal's release, I can somewhat give a bit of leniency to this, but the level design has not aged very well at all, with not much of a sense of Logic in puzzles, but rather really intense tricks that are extremely difficult to perform, two of the most difficult chambers in the mod for me are Chamber 15 and Chamber 18*, which both really dampen the experience for me as this game follows a rule of "everything before Test Chamber 14 is really simple to understand" which hinders the experience as the random difficulty spike really makes the mod feel extremely uncomfortable to play.
* I am not 100% sure if 18 is the correct chamber, but I believe it is the one with the buttons that randomly open a random door.
**SPOILERS**
**DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE SPOILED**
One thing that rises my review by 2 however has definitely got to be the really awesome "final stage" where you are able to walk around Aperture and interact with Scientists and see GLaDOS finally get plugged in for the first time, this section is honestly somewhat of a save to the mod as I found this part really really enjoyable with new things happening to keep you entertained, it even manages to make Half-Life 2 enemies feel at home in Aperture without feeling like too jarring of a connection, which is great.
My biggest problem with this section is the parts where you need to plug cores to GLaDOS or "survive in GLaDOS's room" as these parts are mostly luck based as you are just thrown around the room and have to avoid taking too much damage or getting hit by debris.
**SPOILERS OVER**
**YOU MAY READ ONWARDS**
So that's Portal: Prelude, despite my 6 review though I still will revisit this mod as it is still a very enjoyable experience despite that, similar to that of Super Mario 64 where it has not aged the best, but is still enjoyable; which is really good.