The cake may be a lie, but I promise you, this is not! After a decade of waiting for a new Portal game, some fans took it upon themselves to give the masses what they wanted, and they absolutely did not disappoint.

Let's start off by talking about the Portal series. Portal is a game franchise developed and published by Valve Corporation where the main premise is, you are a test subject in the labs of Aperture Science testing new technology and seeing how effective they are. The piece of tech that the game focuses on is the titular portal gun. This gun allows you to place two connected portals in two different places, allowing you to pass through them as if it was just a hole in the wall. 

The game is very well written with its dry humor from the artificial intelligence running the tests named GLaDOS. GLaDOS leads you along through the test chambers filling you in on why you are doing this and what Aperture Science is all about. Similar to a lot of games from around this time, a lot of the lore of the world can be found throughout Aperture Science headquarters with notes and hidden rooms revealing something more sinister. 

Fast forward to 2021, after a decade since the last Portal game was released, we receive Portal Reloaded! Portal Reloaded was developed by a German modder called PORTANIS. PORTANIS, otherwise known as Jannis Brinkmann, started development on Portal Reloaded in 2014. He had no real intention of fully releasing the MOD, but lucky for fans, it was released for free (if you own a copy of Portal 2) on Steam April 19, 2021! He built the whole MOD himself including the soundtrack which is a banger!

Portal Reloaded expands on the mechanics of the original games by adding a third portal to solve puzzles with, the time portal. This does exactly what you would think, sends you forward and back through time for some mind-melting fun! I have found, in my playthrough, this takes a lot of extra thinking and keeping track of where you leave pieces in time because if you move something in the past, it is there when you get to the future, but you can't do it the other way around because that messes with the whole space-time thing. The reason for the difficulty is because, in Brinkmann's words, "This mod is  targeted at portal veterans, who are familiar with the concepts of the main series and want to expand their horizons." I think it succeeds at this for sure!

I'm so happy that this game was released, and I would love to see more passion projects like this come out! It goes to show that a franchise that hasn't released a mainline entry in over ten years isn't dead. The fan base is the ones that keep it alive and well! I highly recommend checking this game out. If you want to learn more about the project or about Jannis Brinkmann, go check out Portal Reloaded. Stay safe out there and keep gaming!