The fact that Valve hasn’t created official VR ports of Portal and Portal 2 is one of the greatest travesties of modern virtual reality technology. If any existing IP would be a perfect fit, it would be Portal. There is a Portal 2 mod called Portal Stories: VR that does a decent job of replicating environments and the overall tongue-in-cheek tone, but it lacks one important thing: portals. That’s a pretty glaring missing feature.
Thankfully the intrepid modding community is doing their part to help keep dreams alive. Over the weekend Reddit user Tesseract-Cat posted in the HTC Vive subreddit that they were “working on a Portal clone in Unity for VR” with GIFs and images to show off the work so far. In the footage you can see the developer is using a Windows VR headset and it’s stated to be running in Unity.
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As of now all that’s there are the core gameplay mechanics, but they look incredibly polished so far. There’s a portal gun that shoots portals that can actually be walked through just like in the Portal games as well as the beginnings of a Level Editor (shown in the image above) that would allow players to create their own levels from inside the game itself by laying out blocks and puzzles.
There is still a lot of work left to put in all of the features that you’d expect from a Portal game, but the developer said that once all of that is done, “I’m planning on making it available through Github, or something similar.”
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Fingers crossed that the modding community turns this into something fun for people to play around with — at the very least this proves the mechanic can work well in VR, as long as zooming through the air like that doesn’t get you motion sick. And fingers double-crossed that Portal VR is an official thing in the works right now. Maybe it’s one of the unannounced VR games that Valve is work shopping behind the scenes?
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
