-I can see now why Valve didn’t include many hazards in the main game, it turns the entire experience into a quicksaving slog. Get the timing of that jump right! Make sure you do it PERFECTLY or you won’t get the distance to beat that deadly electrical field! I see why the makers of this put these hazards in, to add a sense of urgency to the game, but I don’t think it works very well.

-Playtesting is important. Many of these puzzles aren’t very intuitive, and require some rather obtuse thinking to get past. Or worse, requires you to notice rather minute details in the area you’re in, while a wall is about to crush you. Although I’m sure many gamers enjoy that, so I’ll chalk that one up to personal preference.

Cheats have to be on, though, so you can’t use it to try for better run times.

Is it hard for you to understand that i have too many games to play?

However, a comment on the Portal mechanic just ’cause I can:

I’d like to see an ‘andrenaline’ button so we can slow down time temporarily to make shots that would otherwise be very difficult. Personally, I can often ’see’ the solution but I can’t do it because I’m too much of a spaz – can’t hit the target in time as I bounce up and down.

I’m stuck on the room where you are sitting on the button to open the door in front of you, after the victory elevator…

I played the flash game after and this is definitely very faithful, however, the best part is that it greatly expands on that game and adds a ton of new content and puzzles, along with some story twists (which takes some liberties with the Portal canon). If you play this then you’ve already seen pretty much everything the flash version has (playing it after I found it a bit annoying at times, with some of the bugs and general clunkiness that comes with being a flash game). The only things I found kind of annoying is that one part temporily disables your gun, which resulted in me looking for a bunch of convoluted solutions to the situation I was in when all you had to do is wait for it to activate again, and a couple of parts where surfaces were harder to portal than they were apparently supposed to be.

Edit: I don’t really agree with it being harder than the flash version. The only level I thought was harder than in the flash version was the final maze level (since it’s completely different when you don’t have the full picture). Despite knowing what to do I still found most of the flash version much harder than the “3D” version, namely because the mechanics of the “real” portal are far more robust, so executing things is mostly relatively easy after you know what to do (along with being able to save anywhere as a bonus), while half my problems in the flash version came from getting around some of the slightly dodgy mechanics.

Despite all that, it’s good quality puzzling and well worth a go if you want more portal. Try the ren_test maps first though.