Indie Games: Narbacular Drop

You’ve played Portal, right? Of course you have! Portal is great and if you haven’t played it then you should. Buy it, download it, enjoy it, it’s great.

Why do I bring up Portal? Well, Narbacular Drop is the reason Portal exists. Developed by Nuclear Monkey Software, Narbacular Drop is a game project by a group of students at DigiPen Institute of Technology. From this the developers went on to be hired by Valve to help create Portal.

The gameplay of Narbacular Drop is fairly simple and similar to Portal. You create portals around the environment to solve puzzles and get to the end of the level. Not having a jump ability means that utilising these portals effectively is key to get to the end of a stage. And it's fun.

The gameplay is pretty solid and you can see where Portal came from. The controls are simple to use and solving puzzles is simple enough. From reading around (Wikipedia) it seems this game was to show off what the developers could do and it seems they could do a fair bit. Viewing the game from the standpoint of this being proof of applied concept you can tell a lot of work went into this and that the people who made it had a lot of skill.

There’s not a massive amount to really say about this game other than that it is essentially Portal. There is a story attached, but it is extremely basic and obviously put in only as a framing device, however it does show that the developers were creative outside of the actual gameplay.

If you really enjoyed Portal and want to see its roots then give this game a go. It’s only 6 levels long but really shows off what the developers could do. If you don’t care that much about understanding the humble beginnings of a great game then just play more Portal. It’s a more polished version of this game and fun to boot!