F-Stop is the Portal prequel Valve never shipped. For fifteen years it was a name in a book and not much else: Geoff Keighley’s The Final Hours of Portal 2, from 2011. A camera instead of the portal gun, no Chell, no GLaDOS, concept art of a 1940s Aperture Science. Enough to know the shape of the thing and nowhere near enough to know how it played. We Portal fans have been theorizing about it ever since.
It’s playable now. I’m not going to spoil how the camera works, but the intro will, so mind that before you click: five minutes and change is enough to hand you the whole trick. I haven’t played past it.
It came out of the three months Valve spent on what it called the Directed Design Experiments, when the studio stopped and split into five teams and each one built something. Gabe Newell loved this one. Playtesters did not. So it got shelved and parted out: dialogue, characters and mechanics went into Portal 2. How much of the writing survived that trip is the part I keep stopping on. Cave Johnson is already in there, ear tubes and all.
What leaked is three leaks taped together. The assets came from the Steam2 dump in August, roughly 13TB of old Steam depot data covering 2003 to 2013. The source code and then mapsrc, Valve’s folder of map sources, turned up in the Valve Cut Content Discord, where the maps were going for $1,000 until somebody gave them away. Stack all three and you get a build people are calling 99% done, give or take some missing textures and lines. The playthroughs going up run under an hour.
Strange to see it in high resolution. I still remember those palm trees, flat textures and no lighting, in a VNN episode forever ago.