It's almost impossible to give a fair rating to this game. Merely a student project, "Narbacular Drop" is less than a half hour long, probably reuses assets from other games, has no sound effects and only one song that plays over and over and, to top it all up, has a game-breaking bug that prevented me to play the last level. But this unassuming title introduced a basic mechanic that was going to be the cornerstone of one of the most influential games of all time. (... ejem.. yes, I'm talking about Portal... you on the back, pay attention!).

The story here is completely meaningless. In fact, the two screens that introduce the premise of the plot skip too quickly for me to read. Apparently you are some kind of princess who's... imprisoned? by some... demon? But somehow you gain the ability to create portals and so you begin your scape. Clearly, the genius of GLaDOS and the Aperture Lab is nowhere to be found, but surprisingly the first level starts very similar to Portal

You begin trapped in a cell and after escaping through a portal, you need to use a box to press a button in order to open a door. Seems familiar? While the second puzzle will also be easily solved by anyone who played Portal, there's where the similarities end. The game makes extensive use of rolling boulders and the awesome 'fling' mechanic is nowhere to be found.

As I've said at the beginning, there's some technical issues with the game. Some puzzle elements only materialise if your character dies and respawns, making them unbeatable without suicide. Unfortunately that seems to apply to the last level boss so the text "You win" appears immediately after entering a room with a text announcing that the level was called "Fire with fire".

I can only asume that this was meant to be a boss level because it's a big room with a lava pit and a lava turtle. The model for a big demon can be seen in a "Showcase".

Narbacular Drop is more interesting for it's place in gaming history than it's actual gameplay or story. It's free and probably any computer can run it, so I would recommend to anyone who liked Portal and is interested in it's development to play it.

It seems that the made-up world "narbacular" was used in the title to make the game easily googlable.