Portal: Prelude Review

About a year ago I can remember waking up at 6:00 in the morning glee with anticipation, it was October the 9th 2007, the day valve's "Orange Box" was released on steam, and more importantly, the day portal came out to the public. Like any good fan boy would I turned on my lumbering old computer (now replaced but not forgotten), logged into steam, and began the long (& painful) wait for the games to finish downloading... Fast Forward 5-10 hours ...I was finally playing portal, & after 5 or so hours I was done (and a new member of the church of portal). I can remember that one of the first things that came into my head after landing in that godforsaken parking lot at the end of the game was, "Wow, would it not be great if someone were to make a game that tells of this amazing world before the rise of GLaDOS?", Portal: Prelude (a new mod by the Portal: Prelude Team) is just that, a prelude to Portal (and a good one at that).

- Dialogue -

One of the best parts of the original portal was the dialogue, everything from GLaDOS's constant menacing, to the turret's child like forgiveness, to the lack of dialogue that made the companion cube so special. Dialogue's major role in Portal was created by the large narrative gaps the more "observant" story telling method left behind (as opposed to games like Half-Life, or Crysis where the player's "actions" have a direct affect on the overall plot).

One of the most obvious gripes in Prelude's dialogue department is actually one that really should belong in audio department--the voice acting or to be exact, the lack of voice acting. In order to record the extreme amount of dialogue in the game (devs are only human), they decided to go with high quality (but still very artificial) synthesized voice acting. Synthesized voice acting detracts from 2 main things in the game, the first is and most obvious one is the tone and comedic factor, that's very simply lost to toneless and humor less synthetic voices. The second and much more important one is clarity - Names and even certain sentences will often sound sketchy or emphasis the wrong part, causing confusion and lack of direction. My suggestion to anyone who plans playing Prelude - turn on captioning.

From the very beginning  Portal: Prelude's dialogue does a great job of introducing the human factor that differentiates it from the original Portal

The next and last fault that can be attributed to the dialogue department is the scripts state as translated a translated one (fed to a synthesizer). The problem with this script is that it seriously lacking in any sort of editing, grammatical errors are common, jokes are misplaced. Most importantly directions and commands are sometimes not understandable which can really be annoying when words are made intentionally garbled for the sake of effect.

Somehow though, synthesized and not so spectacularly translated, the script is still funny, under the piles of lost jokes, misplaced tones, and grammar that could make and English teacher cry, you are still getting something i'd say is very entertaining (about 70% Portal). Jokes sound real, most of the in-references are intact, and your guides to the facility truly seem to truly come to life.

- Gameplay -

Being a Portal mod, set as a direct prequel to Portal's events, Portal: Prelude does a great job at recreating some of the many elements portal made famous, and expanding on them further and further. Portal: Prelude is hard, it sets out to be hard to begin with, and the many new elements it introduces to portal make it even harder then you could of had original imagined. Being a relatively hard game is not a bad thing, it is actually a good thing for people like me who have recently replayed portal, but very sadly (specifically in the earlier levels) the game relies on a type of puzzle like to call an accuracy puzzle.

Believe it or not, this is the first thing Prelude throws at you after getting the Portal Gun

Accuracy puzzles are puzzles where you have to do something in exactly the right way (a process which once took me 15 tries) even though you get the overall idea of what to do. This is akin to lets say... knowing that you have to fall on a button from a very tall height, but missing it slightly every time you jump to it, you know that you have to fall on the button but can never quite get it right, only to learn 2 years later when you finally get back to the game after all those frustrations that there was a directing tube or something of that sort that you missed, this is mostly problematic in Prelude's very open puzzles, where it's hard to tell between inaccurate movement, and bad solutions.

Once you get over the initial accuracy based puzzles (or shamelessly noclip them) your introduced into a more complex world of what is truly evolved portal puzzle solving, the many new tricks and tips the game teaches you are but natural steps away from what Valves creation had already set down, and you can truly feel as an "evolved" as a portal gunner towards the more advanced levels. If you really want to succeed here, I do have a small suggestion, play (or download the mappack of) Portal: The Flash Version, while it is 2D, the overall methodology is very similar to the one found in Prelude.

- Audio -

One of the best features I see in Portal: Prelude is the addition of the commentary track to the game, this feature is what gives many valve games great replay value, and its pleasing to see this sort of thing coming into mods, while the commentary track ('s audio) is in french, the closed captioning allows all of us whom decided to opt for a different class then french at school (and whom can't afford the whole Rosetta stone set) to get in on the action and better understand the secrets of this great game.

Aside from the aforementioned Synthesized VA nothing much has changed in the "Other then Soundtrack Department" (other then the talking toilet...) but if anything was added I'm gonna have to give the developers credit for seamlessly adding it in to the main game since since I've yet to find it.

The sound effects created (or chosen) for Prelude's new traps do a remarkable job at blending them in with already familiar Aperture Science death machines that teased us throught Portal

The last (and arguably very important) part of any game's audio, is the soundtrack. First things first, (if the commentary track is to be believed) most of the soundtrack is taken from CC licensed soundtracks, so it's important to focus mostly on the music choices, and how they were used and less on the music itself, which I must say was a job well done, the soundtracks don't stand out specifically, and the real world song reference at the start of the game is a nice little throwback to reality that is kinda lacking in many commercial games.

- Summary -

One of the hardest aspects of being a portal mod is having to live up to portals very high expectations, something, that is made tougher when your one of (or) the only mods for it out there with no other competitors. While Portal: Prelude does have its faults It is still a must have for any (none beginner) portal fans out there, this mod has great potential, and with a bit of script editing, and real voice acting, I think this mod could be considered a great addition to the portal family.

Pros:

- Something new to play with portal (that has a plot)
- Some real funny moments, and sufficiently entertaining dialogue
- Challenging and efficient level design
- A good starting point for Portal single player mods as a whole
- Full commentary track, could use voice actor commentary once they hopefully join in

Cons:

- Synthesized voice acting lacks tone and ruins many jokes
- Level design to accuracy based
- Less "secret" rooms than portal...
- Complicated difficulty curve

Final Score: 8.5/10

(should be 8.4 minus the talking toilet)