• Polarity
  

  2 hours playtime

  5 of 10 achievements

this definitely has a portal feel, which it seems to recognize with its “companionless cube” achievement. it’s simpler, shorter, and a bit less polished. i ran into a problem with jumping that i eventually decided to look up in steam discussions . . . turns out if the frame rate is above 60 then pressing jump often just makes the sound. worked fine once i set max frame rate to 60. the problem i wasn’t able to solve was the controls. i use dvorak and like many games it defaults to wasd but those keys are actually spread out for me. i remapped what i could in the launcher, but not everything was there. this meant my strafe right key (labeled D but actually types E in dvorak) was also still mapped to switch polarity because that has a nonconfigurable mapping for the E key. i fell through color-coded bridges a LOT due to that. it also needs you to select between keyboard or controller, so when i originally skipped the config options in the launcher and then found i couldn’t change controls in-game, i needed to quit back to the game menu to switch to controller and try that. i’m pretty bad at using a controller for first-person so then quit back to my desktop and changed controls in the launcher.

the puzzles had some interesting components, but most of it was pretty obvious for me. it’s also not very long — i finished it in less than 2 hours even with having to redo a lot of jumping sections before i had limited the frame rate.

i read there’s also a also co-op campaign, which was awesome in portal 2, but here it’s local only which means somebody needs to use a controller. i don’t think i’m going to try the co-op campaign unless they let it work non-locally so we can both use keyboard and mouse. overall i’m glad this is a thing but i could have really recommended it if they had kept going with it, fixed the bugs, and made the map spaces more interesting.