Portal: Forbidden Testing Tracks

Portal : Forbidden Testing Tracks combines artificially hard puzzles with barely exploited “new” mechanics.
That much is clear : this mod isn’t great and doesn’t do it right. But is it that terrible?

What I mean by artificial difficulty is that the puzzles are designed to make you overlook an important detail. If you’re stuck, it’s probably just because you missed that important thing, and not because you can’t find the solution.
However, this game never gave me the feeling of being truly unfair (except for the fire escape and the moon gravity jump).

The major problem is that the overall game feels poor, like it hasn’t been playtested before release. The audio mixing is horrible, to the point I couldn’t really grasp what the fuck was all the nonsense the game threw at me, and the absence of subtitles didn’t help either.
The “new” mechanics have their problems: the paint gun vibrates like crazy when you move, the gravity gun doesn’t feel good, the jumping orbs allowed the most infuriating puzzle to exist… only the fizzler gun is good.
None of them last longer than 2 puzzles anyway, but that’s still annoying and could’ve been polished.

The few labyrinths and stairs that serve as walking sections were unnecessarily long; the fire escape sequence is probably impossible and you have to skip it.
How can something like that be in a game baffles me.

Nevertheless, this mod still shows interesting things.
I would’ve loved to see it fully comitting to extremely simple yet precise puzzles. Like how you have to drop a laser cube at the right angle in a tractor beam for example, that’s the kind of original and not tedious puzzles I wanted to see more.
I know obscure puzzles aren’t really popular, but that’s still better than useless ones and would’ve given the mod a far better purpose than just showcasing half-baked mechanics.

That said, Portal : Forbidden Testing Tracks isn’t as bad as the reviews let you think. Sure, the game is awkwardly done and lots of criticism need to be made.
But people are exaggerating a lot, the vast majority of the puzzles are totally fine; they are just not very interesting.

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Developer: Q15
Publisher: Q15
Platforms: Steam – Windows
Release Date: October 10, 2023