Portal: Prelude Review

Portal: Prelude is a mappack that takes place before the events of Portal, and attempts to explain Aperture Science pre-GLaDOS. To effectively understand how much of an impact Prelude should have, imagine it as a long distance runner. At the start, it trips over its own shoelaces, and falls face first in the mud. Instead of giving up, it continues to stumble around, seemingly randomly, but still manages to reach the finish line.

The problems with Prelude can be attributed at the start to the storyline. As with most Portal mappacks, you wake up in an enclosed container while someone explains you the rules. In contrast to other mappacks which use the excellent GLaDOS voice, Prelude replaces her with two lifeless text to speech dummies reading translated french. The dialogue is incredibly heavy and manages to even ruin many jokes that made the original Portal great. This could have easily been solved by recruiting someone who spoke english to the development team. The announcer's themselves do not add anything at all to the storyline and insist on holding your hand through an already incredibly linear game. There are two examples where the game hijacks your view to show you sequences, when letting the player look around would have been more effective. The story itself is nothing to write home about. In fact it reads like a 13 year old's cool idea of what Aperture Science should have been, right down to the random "fuck"s placed in the dialogue.

Unfortunately, to beat on a dying horse, the level design is less than stellar. To quote a friend, "Specifically, a Portal puzzle should be like a good riddle: when the answer is known, it should seem obvious. Almost none of his are like this." Every puzzle included with Portal: Prelude contains no innovative elements; the difficulty stems from taking existing concepts from Portal and layering them on top of each other until they form an tangled mess reminiscent of Christmas lights in July. The only new elements were taken directly from the excellent Portal Flash Pack levels. Speaking of elements, throughout the entire game the level designers each decided certain elements would work a different way. In one level a particle field will disintegrate a cube, yet in another it will not.

Do you like hidden turrets? Then you'll love Portal: Prelude. Nearly every blind corner hides two or three turrets, which require superhuman reflexes to survive. There is even a spot where you must take out 4 turrets within an enclosed room to continue.

For specific examples of terrible level design, Test 9 and 13 come to mind. Test 9's opening portal jump consists of looping through portals four or five times to gain enough height to clear the glass wall. Once you reach the other side and turn towards you came from, a portal able wall appears on the ceiling, and curiously appears/disappears depending upon the side of the room you're on. Test 13 contains a dead end, a death knell in level design. To be fair, this happens in the original portal, but only when you have access to one portal. Several puzzles can be broken entirely using level geometry and models. An entire test can be skipped due to clever portal placement. Several instances of terrible brushwork can be seen in addition to the previous problems, nodraw textures pop up in quite a few detail areas, and where the author was too lazy to create a small section of brush for the floor of a doorway.

The final boss fight also leaves much to be desired. The charm of the original GLaDOS fight in Portal is that they taught the concepts to you earlier within the tests with the companion cube incineration and the rocket turrets. This new GLaDOS fight contains elements that have never been presented before and provide a very big frustration for the player, dying several times to invisible trigger kills.

Another iffy section of the mappack is the use of licensed materials. A quick check through the sound directory shows some CC licenses linked, but nothing for Chemical Brothers or The Scorpions. The mappack also re-distributes quite a few Valve assets, which I doubt they will be happy about.

In the end, Prelude promises big and ends up failing to deliver. The idea is sound, but the execution is very flawed. The problem with the flaws is that playtesting SHOULD HAVE CAUGHT THEM. One has to wonder if this mappack was even playtested at all.