I'm in love with these truly cursed Portal 2 maps

(Image credit: Valve, modded by Kryzhau)

Aperture Laboratories is already a bad disorganised place in Portal 2. Walls and floors chemise at bequeath, pipes ferrying humans and crates around an impossibly large cavern out as deranged robots cackle.

It's a brilliant, unworkable science factory. Simply for YouTuber Krzyhau, Valve could've gone a mint further in making a true physics nightmare. After completely, Portal 2 ne'er let you pick heavenward the entire exam chamber while standing inside it.

While I only discovered his work this week, Kryzhau has been making these wiped out joke chambers for a fewer long time directly. The first, from April 2019, is still among the best, completely subverting all aspect of Test Chamber 20. Redirection cubes directly send away lasers themselves, non-portal surfaces are now portal site surfaces, and Kryzhau pulls apart the wall itself to move an objective to a more convenient spot.

On that point are nowadays three "seasons" of these busted chambers. Some are recursive, Escher-like labyrinths. Some are dramatic tragedies played out to sad piano accompaniments. Extraordinary feature the Scatman, with bombs.

I quietly love that they all lead off from the same, simple jump off point. Chamber 20 ISN't the just about careful puzzle in Portal 2, but Kryzhau has spun information technology off into dozens of absurd new directions—apiece named like a beginner mapmaker asking a forum why their first map doesn't work.

Unlike Portal 2's glorious time-travel mod, Kryzhau's maps aren't properly playable—designed as gags for YouTube more fully downright Portal site puzzles. But they do echo the first-person puzzlers that came in Portal's Wake, calling to mind the recursive worlds of Maquette surgery Superliminal's playfully inconsistent perspectives.

Portal site 2 is 10 days old this workweek, and it stillness much holds up. But the way Kryzhau reconceptualises a single elbow room offers up tantalising ideas for how a hypothetical Portal 3 could recreate verboten. The last game already played fast and informal with physical science—it's sentence to throw IT out the window entirely.

20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time—and she's non stopped thinking about games since. Connection PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of independent reporting at Rock Newspaper publisher Scattergun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European independent scene and having herself developed critically acclaimed small games like Tush Androids Implore, Nat is forever looking for a new curiosity to scream more or less—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Sinister Mesa. She's too played for a contending Splatoon team, and unofficially appears in Apex of the sun's way Legends below the pseudonym Horizon.