Mel's Portal

If you have Portal 2, there's a free mod/game for it called Portal Stories: Mel.

We are Mel, an Olympian that goes into Aperture Science for some testing in the early 1950s. The first test is a sleep chamber, and wouldn't you guess it, when we wake up, something bad has happened. We need to work our way up to the surface, with the help of clearly not Cave Johnson and... well, I don't actually know what happens at the end because I gave up halfway through.

Because this isn't Valve, this isn't finely polished to within an inch of its life. It looks nice, but that's the Source Engine for you. The problem I found was that for half the puzzles, I couldn't work out what to do and usually had to sleep on it. Fine, my problem, I'm dumb. However,the other problem I found was that with the other half of the puzzles, it wasn't at all clear what anyone had to do, and even where to go. One thing Valve was very clear about was where to go, and here I often wondered around trying to find anywhere I could do anything. (It didn't help that some sound clips were triggered when I wasn't in the right spot, so got confused that way.)

And the recent patch caused some corruption. For me, it caused the game to crash when I loaded the save up. Fortunately, I was right at the start of Chapter 3 so could jump there from the main menu. Others were not so fortunate.

I'll leave it on my computer for now, but I'm not keen on jumping back in... but I do want to play normal Portal 2 again though...

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