Bridge Constructor Portal
I was in high school when the original Portal came out. I played it on a bus on my way back from a field trip, friends watching over my shoulder, commenting the entire time. I can sing the entirety of “Still Alive” from memory without blinking, and I will still loudly assert at every opportune and inopportune moment that the cake is a lie. I have many, many fond memories of Portal.
Since the original Portal, I have played the Portal board game (many times), played Portal 2, memorised “Want You Gone” and sung it at multiple instances, both appropriate and otherwise, put chalk portals on tunnels to make them more exciting, and I believe I own a companion cube somewhere. For me to say that I enjoy the world of Portal is an understatement. I delight in it, even as I see myself milking it well beyond its capacity.
Anyway, Bridge Constructor Portal.
It speaks to me on a fundamental level.
Bridge Constructor Portal takes a standard bridge-building game like Polybridge and throws it into the Portal universe. You are bridge technician, constructing bridges for other technicians to ride their carts down. There are all the elements of a traditional portal game - portals, goo, turrets, death - but with an entirely different style of physics puzzle - engineering! GLADoS comments throughout, and the vibe is very much aspiring to be Portal.
GLADoS is her usual, helpful self.
I commented above on my love of the original Portal, and playing through Bridge Constructor Portal got me thinking a lot about why that is. In many ways, I think Portal represents a sort of millennial id, our fundamental humour and self-destruction distilled into a three hour game. A faceless, computer voice descends from above to berate us while we try to escape using the brains we were told in the outset would liberate us from exactly these sorts of prisons. We feel like we get closer and closer to understanding the truth of where we are, and, in turn, find the way out, only to discover that, no matter what villains we defeat, we are and always were trapped in an endless cycle of tests we will inevitably fail until we die.
I love it very much.
When in doubt, add more supports.
Bridge Constructor Portal is not Portal, nor did I go into it having any expectation that it would be. Part of what makes Portal Portal is its first person nature, where you are thrown into this world with no distance or character separating you from the reality of where you now are. Bridge Constructor Portal, on the other hand, very much offers that distance, and so the violence and despair so inherent to Portal are missing. This isn’t a bad thing. Bridge Constructor Portal, as I’ve said, is a different game trying a different approach to this world, and plays far more into the parody angle of Portal 2 than the nihilism of Portal.
As a Portal game, it feels as though it’s a window on the world without actually being in the world. That distance, while a clear side-effect of being a different genre, also means Bridge Constructor Portal feels like it’s told more from the perspective of GLADoS than a test subject. It is a bridge game before it is a Portal game.
As a bridge builder, though, it is fantastic. The puzzles are fun and unique, and the portals and other elements add fun extra challenges that do a lot to make the player remember the fun parts of the Portal world. While this may not feel like a Portal game, as a standalone bridge builder, it’s very fun. It’s challenging, and satisfying once the carts do eventually rocket through all of the various physics puzzles.
Developer: Clockstone
Genre: Puzzle
Year: 2017
Country: United States
Language: English
Play Time: 15 Hours