Valve's Canceled Portal Prequel Revealed

With Half-Life: Alyx officially made public, Valve seems to be getting more comfortable with reveals. The company has given permission to an indie studio to show a behind-the-scenes look at F-Stop, the Portal prequel that never saw the light of day.

F-Stop was a nonviolent puzzle game with DNA similar to Portal. The entire game–led by a Valve producer named Joshua Weier who worked on Portal and Portal 2–was centered around the “Aperture Camera,” an item that could copy, paste, and rescale items in the game’s world. Unfortunately, as revealed in a 2011 interactive book titled The Final Hours of Portal 2, Valve put an indefinite hold on the project after workshopping it for a while.

LunchHouse Software, an indie studio currently working on its own physics-based puzzler titled Punt, is only now, almost a decade later, giving us a look inside what Valve had been planning. With Valve’s permission and access to the F-Stop’s official source code, Lunch House has peeled back F-Stop’s curtain through a brand-new docuseries called Exposure. The first episode, while short, can be seen below. LunchHouse said more episodes are to come.

The studio said Exposure, which will document F-Stop’s various mechanics as Valve developed via the original source code, is “not based on speculation or hearsay.” The first episode only shows the “base mechanics” of F-Stop, but the team at LunchHouse is excited to “[share] more with you all in the near future.”