‘Portal’ is back (sort of) with a fun new puzzle game

There hasn’t been any word from developer Valve on Portal 3 (or Half Life 3, or even Dota 3 or Left 4 Dead 3 for that matter), but the Portal universe isn’t completely closed for business.

Bridge Constructor Portal mashes together the fun bridge-building puzzle game Bridge Constructor with the witty writing and space-bending portals of Portal, out now on iOS, Google Play, PC, Mac, and Linux.

The game starts off with a short job interview, and if you answer any of the questions wrong the interviewee will be dropped into an incinerator, and the next job candidate will come forward. Classic Portal humor to start things off.

After that, the game is all about building bridges to get (rather expendable) Aperture Science drivers from one point to another. With your expertise, the employees are able to move over pits of deadly green liquid and avoid other deadly obstacles like lasers and turrets.

Portals come into the picture pretty quickly, allowing drivers to teleport to different preset areas of the stage while maintaining their momentum. Sometimes they need a lot of speed to launch toward the objective, similar to how Portal would require players to build up their own speed to reach the end of a stage.

Meanwhile, GLaDOS (the main narrator and mastermind of the Portal games) speaks about each level with the cutting sarcasm Portal players have come to know and love.

Make no mistake, although this is a small, inexpensive game, Bridge Constructor Portal ramps up in difficulty pretty quickly. You can’t just breeze through the 60 levels on your phone or computer, especially if you want to get convoys (multiple vehicles going through the level one after the other) through, which can run into each other and cause massive pileups if you aren’t careful with your criss-crossing bridge designs.