Portal with RTX review: Ray tracing makes Valve’s puzzle FPS spooky

Can a remaster change a online game’s style? After a few hours with Portal’s free ray-tracing replace, I’m tempted to say sure.

The unique Portal is on the brief listing for “funniest video video games ever made.” Launched in 2007 as a by-product of Half-Life, this bite-sized first-person puzzle sport grabbed the humor from its guardian collection and yanked it from the periphery into the highlight. You play as Chell, a human lab rat, who steadily outsmarts a malevolent synthetic intelligence named GLaDOS who talks like Siri by means of Mitch Hedberg. You employ little greater than your wits, Chell’s bodily health, and a nonlethal “gun” that, as an alternative of bullets, shoots a pair of interconnected portals. It’s as thrilling as it’s cartoonish, finest remembered for a cake meme and its closing credit pop tune written by humorist musician Jonathan Coulton.

Portal with RTX is, in all the pieces however the visuals, the identical sport. The identical puzzles, the identical script and voice performing, the identical dessert reference and endgame ditty. Besides it seems to be totally different. To take advantage of the most recent high-end graphics playing cards, GPU maker Nvidia has partnered with Portal’s writer, Valve, to create an up to date variant transmogrified by the graphical wizardry of the second: ray tracing.

Picture: Lightspeed Studios/Nvidia through Polygon

What’s ray tracing? Effectively, how a lot time do you might have? In case you have 20 minutes, I strongly encourage you to look at this breakdown from the consultants at Digital Foundry. Nonetheless, when you solely have a couple of seconds, right here’s the elevator pitch. Ray tracing is a significantly extra real looking methodology for simulating gentle in video video games. With ray tracing, you will notice reflections and shadows, together with representations of the tiny ways in which gentle can bounce off, bend via, and take up into supplies.

Ray tracing is especially noticeable in environments the place gentle itself is most noticeable: moist surfaces, reflective metals, glass, and mirrors. Portal’s labyrinth of business check chambers is a pure match.

By way of making an exceptionally real looking laboratory, the inventive staff for Portal with RTX has created a model of Portal that prioritizes realism above all else. Assuming you may get the factor to run — it took an Nvidia RTX 3090 with Deep Studying Tremendous Sampling enabled to get one thing near dependable efficiency on a 4K TV — you will notice a frighteningly plausible model of GLaDOS’ laboratory. And I do imply horrifying.

Picture: Lightspeed Studios/Nvidia through Polygon

To emphasise the dynamic lighting, Portal’s laboratory with RTX is darker and moodier; inky shadows fill each nook. Many surfaces now seem moist and icky, like when you scraped your knee you’d contract some uncommon bacterial an infection. Balls of electrical energy bounce about, casting a delicate, ghostly gentle. The partitions don’t simply appear to be steel paneling; they appear to be heavy, immovable blocks of metal. The result’s much more claustrophobic.

We’ve seen an identical impact in different traditional video games which have obtained ray-tracing updates. With pure gentle rather than synthetic gentle, issues are inclined to get a bit darkish and spooky. However the addition of ray tracing has by no means skewed so intently towards horror as in Portal with RTX. On this case, it’s not simply that the sport is darker — there are nonetheless loads of rooms with sickly workplace fluorescent lighting. By emphasizing realism within the visuals, Portal’s total vibe has shifted from cartoonish to one thing far more sinister.

Valve’s video video games from the 2000s have an iconic blocky, dirty, and muted aesthetic, which finally ends up flattering the corpo-fascist artwork course of its first-person shooters. Whereas different AAA shooters of the period like Crysis and Name of Obligation served as technical showpieces that prioritized uncooked horsepower, the Half-Life collection emphasised artwork course. Valve’s worlds weren’t as technically spectacular, however they have been extra thought-about. The look served a operate.

Picture: Lightspeed Studios/Nvidia through Polygon

Within the case of Portal, that operate was enjoyable and humor. Sure, you play as a human lab rat, however success by no means actually feels out of the query. It was the closest Valve had come to creating a family-friendly sport, with no deadly weapons or human targets. And Valve’s blocky aesthetic set a transparent divide between the true world and the online game. GLaDOS’ more and more heightened, malevolent monologue popped completely in opposition to the background of bland, deserted labs.

However in these eerie chambers of Portal with RTX, GLaDOS instantly sounds extra menacing. The large pink glass buttons, the Companion Cubes, and the looming viewing chambers used to really feel relatively foolish — however not a lot anymore. Now, they’re set-pieces in a company haunted home. The result’s a distinct expertise from enjoying Portal 15 years in the past.

Portal with RTX isn’t Portal, not actually. It’s one thing else, an alternate imaginative and prescient that feels a bit nearer to Half-Life 2’s Ravenholm. You may discover the visible improve unsettling, particularly when you’re extra of an originalist who likes issues as they have been “meant to be.” Or, you may be excited by revisiting Portal via a extra menacing lens.

Picture: Lightspeed Studios/Nvidia through Polygon

Or, when you’re the kind of particular person obsessive about the way forward for online game visuals, you’ll admire Portal’s RTX replace for what it does finest: Show that ray tracing issues. Ray tracing’s means to considerably alter the sport’s temper captures one thing highly effective in regards to the expertise that may’t be seen in screenshots or a tech demo video on YouTube.

If ray tracing can have this kind of affect on a sport that was by no means meant to have it, think about what artists will do when incorporating the function from the very starting.

Portal with RTX launches on Dec. eight on Home windows PC and requires high-end system specs. The sport was reviewed on PC utilizing a pre-release obtain code offered by Nvidia. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t affect editorial content material, although Vox Media might earn commissions for merchandise bought through affiliate hyperlinks. You’ll find further details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.