I loved the idea of this mod. And I think the voice actors were great and sounded pretty good for not being the originals.

My issue is with the puzzles.

I finished both Portal games by myself. I think I used a walkthrough for the first one towards the ending because I was getting lost in the backrooms and just did not know where to go. But that was just one point, and it wasn't a puzzle so much as trying to find the right direction.

There's no direction here. I can't solve the puzzles because I don't even know where I'm trying to get to.

The first real puzzle I got to, I spotted a button after lots of looking around, developed a strategy to get to the button, executed my strategy ... and then the button did nothing because the rest of the wall it was attached to had rotted away. I stood there, looking around for some alternate goal I had missed, and saw ... nothing.

I could see other things to put portals on, but nothing that indicated a way out. Everything else was back the way I came. Without a clear goal, there's no puzzle to solve, so I'm out. I'm not a "throw random crap around until something happens because I'm bored" kind of person. I'm a "I need to accomplish this task, so I should experiment with things that look like they will move me forward on accomplishing this task" kind of person. This set up isn't working for me.

I absolutely love Portal. I have completed the original games several times, and during my first playthroughs I almost never encountered puzzles where I didn’t understand what to do or got stuck. That is not the case with Portal Stories: Mel.

The test chambers in this mod are not so much difficult as they are extremely unintuitive, and sometimes even illogical. I spent dozens of minutes not looking for the exit, but trying to understand what the game actually wanted from me. The developers designed these tests based solely on their own way of thinking, so most of the solutions are obvious only to them, while everyone else has to waste time finding that exact chain of actions.

Even though the mod was released in 2015, it has poor optimization despite its mediocre graphics, which are worse than in the original games. The mod sometimes starts freezing when fields inside the test chambers are turned on or off.

I decided to play this mod because it had many positive reviews, but in reality it is just an ordinary modification created by fans of difficult puzzles who lack sufficient competence for proper implementation.
4 out of 10.

classic mod