Shacknews Best Mod of 2021 - Portal Reloaded

While it may sound strange to kids or other folks who have not been heavily involved in the video game industry, the good folks over at Valve Software produced games. The games the company produced were almost always outstanding achievements in their genre or even helped to push the art of game design forward. One such product was Portal, first released in 2007. Portal was a full-fledged retail version of the previously available Narbacular Drop, originally developed by students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology.

Portal married rock-solid first-person mechanics (being produced on Half-Life 2’s Source Engine) with inventive puzzle design, leading to one of the biggest surprises of the year. For the follow-up Portal 2 in 2011, Valve pulled out all the stops, producing one of the finest releases in the history of the art form. In celebration of Portal 2’s tenth anniversary, developer Jannis Brinkmann has produced an all-new expansion that takes the mind-bending action of the original game into a new dimension, time.

Portal Reloaded offers owners of Portal 2 a full-blown campaign, complete with more than twenty levels, voice acting, and music. It also comes with an upgraded portal gun that can now shoot green time portals in addition to the traditional orange and blue space portals. We hope you have been training your mind in the decade since Portal 2 because you’re gonna need all the focus you can muster to clear this outstanding community-produced experience.

Watch the Shacknews Awards 2021 YouTube playlist or read our Year of the Games: 2021 article for all of the awards in one place. We will be announcing our Shacknews GOTY 2021 on December 31.

Chris Jarrard

Contributing Tech Editor

Chris Jarrard likes playing games, crankin' tunes, and looking for fights on obscure online message boards. He understands that breakfast food is the only true food. Don't @ him.