2.5/5 ★ – daneh's review of Portal Stories: Mel.

When I first played Portal 2 around 6 years ago, I always thought how fun it would be if there was a potential third entry to the franchise – after all both Portal games are still, to this day, some of my favorite games ever. For some reason it took me this long to get into Portal Stories: Mel, but I finally played it, and… frankly, it kind of proved to me that there really shouldn’t be a Portal 3. Now don’t get me wrong, I still got some enjoyment out of this, and credit where it’s due; for a fangame made entirely by another team outside of Valve released for free, the effort that went into this is out of this world. New assets, new mechanics, new characters, new settings, voice acted lines, just a huge scope in general. Of course, not everything will be up to par to the standards set by the main two games (voice acting gets old sort of quickly), but I don’t really want to criticize this game by comparing it to the Valve games since I don’t think that’s very fair. Instead, I’ll just talk about what I liked and disliked of it while disregarding the other entries. The setting as a whole is spectacular. Not only is the time period very interesting, but the game also constantly shows new parts of aperture that feel gigantic and add so much more depth to this world. The introduction of the game is great, and it leaves a good first impression. But the characters as a whole are mixed for me. There’s only really Virgil and AEGIS, because Mel is obviously a silent protagonist. Virgil is… nice I suppose. Frankly there’s not much to say about him, like he’s cool I guess but pretty unremarkable, I just beat the game and I’m already struggling to remember anything he’s ever said. Then there’s AEGIS which is also a very *nothing* character. Yeah, big bad robot guy wants to kill you, isn’t that crazy? Not like it has a personality though. It just wants to kill you, just because. Like sure I guess, what a villain you have there. Guess I shouldn’t be complaining much because I didn’t really hop in this fangame hoping for a compelling story, but I wish the game didn’t spend so much effort pretending it had interesting characters and story. Now for the puzzles, the beating heart of Portal! They’re good for the most part, I think. But I feel like a lot of the puzzle design feels kind of cheap, and especially repetitive. I swear I literally cannot remember a single puzzle where the fizzlers weren’t placed inconveniently just for the sake of difficulty, I get they’re a useful mechanic that can be used in smart ways to build good puzzles, but they should definitely be used more sparingly, everything in this game revolved around them and it got old very quickly. For many chambers I got that cool dopamine hit when I solved them, for others the solution felt pretty dumb, and I’d just roll my eyes before moving on to the next level. Outside of the normal chambers, there’s also parts where you need to explore behind the scenes of the destroyed Aperture Laboratories, through catwalks and hidden corridors and underground areas. These are definitely not very enjoyable, usually they just relied on randomly stumbling around until you found a door or object you needed to get to, and sometimes you just had to somehow find a white wall you could place a portal in far off a long distance away and that felt very cheap and boring. Not much interesting happening here honestly. The final boss was alright though. A bit of a mixed experience overall, maybe you’ll enjoy it more than I did. As a whole I would say I had more of a good time than a bad time, the game is definitely far from awful, the effort placed into this is still something that blows my mind. But if this game went on for longer than it did, I would’ve probably dropped it and I would feel more negatively about it, because as interesting as Portal Stories: Mel is, there’s not really much that could be done with Portal’s formula at this point, and to be honest I feel a bit burned out on this series for a while which is kind of sad. Huge props to the team for pulling this off, but it maybe could’ve gone a bit better 6/10