Put on your orange pants and your thinking cap and grab your portal gun, because you’re about to return to Aperture Science and the villain GLaDOS, but perhaps not in the way you were expecting. Bridge Constructor Portal is a mashup of Valve’s puzzle-adventure game and the Bridge Constructor civil engineering simulator, and it’s the game we never knew we wanted until now.
Created by ClockStone Software — the same studio behind the original Bridge Constructor — Bridge Constructor Portal tasks players with thinking outside the traditional bounds of physics to complete hazardous puzzles. In the announcement trailer, we see an Aperture truck blocked by a series of turrets on the other side of a gap. Rather than attempt to cross the gap directly, the truck drops down into a portal and gains enough momentum to destroy the turrets before they can fire.
Of course, as it is a Bridge Constructor game, Bridge Constructor Portal will still force you to manage your resources in order to create a stable bridge. As the trailer shows, failure to do so will result in your truck plummeting into a pit for a one-on-on meeting with GLaDOS, and no one wants that.
“Bridge Constructor Portal” will blend the laws of structural engineering and technology straight from Aperture Laboratories into an exciting new game experience, all under the demanding gaze of GLaDOS,” publisher Headup Games said.
If you’re itching to get your hands on the game and solve puzzles for the sake of science, you won’t have to wait very long. The game will be available on December 20 for PC, Linux, and Mac, as well as iOS and Android. Early next year, the game will also come to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The Switch seems like the perfect (structurally stable) platform for the game, but it would be the first time a Portal title appeared on a Nintendo platform — perhaps Valve could fix that with a few ports!
The last full-length game in the Portal series was Portal 2, released in 2011. We’re still holding out for a third game, though it looks increasingly unlikely that Valve is interested in developing it.
