Revelatory though Reloaded is, there are a few flaws. At one point, when the puzzles become more challenging, the robotic announcer states “Think about this, if you don’t see your own corpse lying in the future, it is safe to assume you solved the chamber sometime during the last 20 years.” It shares other commonalities with the original too, such as its deft sprinkling of mystery and dark humour. It feels like something I’ve never experienced before, and my mind has to constantly adapt to accept Reloaded’s way of looking at the world. This is what I mean when I say Reloaded recaptures the “wow” factor of the original game, something which Portal 2, sly and hilarious as it was, didn’t quite manage to achieve. Teasing out the solution, experimenting with different layouts as my brain wrapped itself around thinking in four dimensions was incredibly satisfying. One of my favourite puzzles involves using redirection cubes to manipulate a single laser through two different timelines and four different spatial portals. Over the course of 25 chambers, the puzzles slowly evolve in complexity, introducing the puzzling elements from Portal 2, lasers, faith-plates, light-bridges. Including the time Portal, you’re dealing over twice the number of puzzling elements in any given situation. Portals follow the same rules, meaning you can have two spatial portals in the present, and two differently placed spatial portals in the future. If at this point your brain is starting to feel a bit stretched, that’s exactly the sensation Portal Reloaded strives to evoke. However, you must ensure you move the present cube into place first, otherwise when you move it, the future cube will disappear because you altered its timeline in the present. The solution is to go into the future, grab the future version of the cube, and bring it into the present to place it on the button. This means you can double up on cubes in the present, so long as you don’t move the present cube while the future cube occupies the same timeline.Ī simple Portal Reloaded puzzle might involve two buttons in the present that need to be pressed to open a door, but only one cube. But an object from the future can be brought back with you into the present. An object from the present cannot be taken into the future, it’ll just fizzle out of existence the moment you step through the portal. This ties into the second important rule.

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