Alive & Kicking Finally Lets the First Portal Run on Sequel Hardware

Fifteen years after a small fan team started rebuilding Valve’s 2007 puzzle game inside its sequel’s engine, Portal: Alive & Kicking is on Steam. Rhubarb & Rhubarb shipped the project on August 28, 2026 as a free download that only works if you already own Portal 2 and keep both titles in the same Steam library folder.

Chell is still waking up at Aperture Science’s test chambers, where she must endure and outsmart GLaDOS. Rhubarb went back to the drawing board and rebuilt the original chambers using Portal 2’s Source engine, allowing the original campaign to share the sequel’s lighting, textures, and general vibe. According to the official blurb on the store page, this is a complete remake and re-imagining, updated to reflect the retcons and fancy visual effects introduced four years after the first game.

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The majority of the puzzles will still feel recognizable, but several of the chambers have been tweaked to feel a little less rough around the edges than they did back then. One example described during production was Chamber 17, a space where the Companion Cube was just sort of… there, despite the fact that it didn’t accomplish much. A Valve employee basically pestered the team to figure it out. Aside from that, the puzzle clues have been improved, making surfaces, buttons, and pellet pathways much easier to follow than they were previously.

They went back to the drawing board with the visuals, tile by tile. Jeep Barnett, one person who helped get the portal gun operating in the first place, said that everything looks incredibly sharp and that every single tile has been examined. He also remarked that the original game’s ambiguous directional hints have been cleaned up a bit. As a result, the game’s appearance is much closer to that of Portal 2, with a clean and minimalist design, as opposed to the older, more fragile approach. In a patch released a few days after debut, they improved the illumination in the escape locations and added some additional navigation signs.

The music is entirely new, rather than simply a carry over from the original. It’s a dynamic score that combines the first game’s slow, lonely drones with some of the more reactive cues found in Portal 2, as well as “Still Alive.” Everything else was written specifically for this remake, though. If you want to listen to the entire soundtrack, you can purchase it from Steam for $4.49 or for free on Bandcamp.

Valve’s involvement explains why we were left in the dark for several months, wondering what was going on. Apparently, the company offered the team access to Portal 2’s source code after they signed an NDA, but then required them to obtain a non-commercial license before they could release the game on Steam. That’s when all contact came to a halt, and everything just sort of… hung there until the paperwork was completed and everything was resolved. Dot Operator stated that the game had been completed a long time ago, but they had not received permission to publish it until now.

The remake includes all of the original content, as well as the entire Advanced chamber run. Rhubarb also says that they may offer some extra maps for free in the future, as long as they are ready. Like the original, this version includes Steam achievements, captions, full controller support, and the Source SDK. The game is technically for Windows, but Linux gamers have been enjoying it through Proton. However, there was some confusion on launch day because some store issues obscured the ‘play now’ option for some users, but a little playing with your wishlist and/or a SteamDB link should have resolved that.
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