The Best Puzzle Game Has Been Surprisingly Released On The Nintendo Switch
Can you beat it again?
This article is more than 2 years old
For whatever reason, the new gaming releases on Nintendo’s popular handheld console are always met with some sort of delay, usually to allow the game’s developers more time to polish the end result. Admittedly, this is a good thing, but Switch owners tend to be a bit disgruntled at the fact that most of their peers have somewhat earlier access to titles on other platforms. But then, there’s the opposite side of that coin: plenty of games are being surprisingly released on Switch, and Valve’s Portal and Portal 2 are now among those games.
According to Polygon, Valve announced the coming of the Portal Collection to Nintendo Switch back in February this year during a Nintendo Direct event, and Nintendo has now confirmed that the collection is available for purchase through their Switch eShop. Besides adding some of the best puzzle games in gaming history, Nintendo also released a demo for Square Enix’s Live A Live, a remake of the 1994 original, and revealed Little Noah: Scion of Paradise, an action game from Cygames, is also being launched today.
Switch owners are excited for the Portal Collection’s arrival on Nintendo Switch; the game series has earned a hundred awards for its groundbreaking gameplay elements, dark humor, and exploration. So far, it has allowed PC gamers to solve mind-bending puzzles and face off against lethally inventive and power-mad AI named GLaDOS (now there’s an interesting pun). Now, the exciting world of Portal has finally become available on Switch, allowing Switch gamers to enjoy some of the best titles in gaming, meet Portal’s interesting cast of characters, and solve a variety of portal puzzles.
Portal 2 for Switch also includes a co-op gaming mode with local, split-screen, and online multiplayer, so Switch gamers can think and act cooperatively throughout the gameplay. The original Portal was released by Valve as part of their massively popular 2007’s The Orange Box — which was a gaming bundle package for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. For the newer generations of gamers, before Steam became a massively popular digital storefront, Valve used to develop and publish some of the best games in the history of gaming.
Besides including Portal, The Orange Box release also included Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 gaming titles. Portal 2 was released a few years later, in 2011, and went on to become an instantaneous hit among gamers, which only made their surprising appearance on Switch a matter of time. Both games will retain their respective features from the original releases, including the aforementioned co-op mode for Portal 2, which also happens to contain an entirely separate story mode starring two robots as well.
Besides all the aforementioned features, the Portal Collection will run at 60 frames per second up to full HD resolutions on Switch — an admittedly odd way of saying that some resolution scaling might be involved. Whether or not there’s a reason for that on decade-old games, we wouldn’t know at this point, but considering the current state of Nintendo and the fact that gaming remakes are being released with subpar optimization, we wouldn’t be surprised with a few stutters.
