As I was playing this very short game, my girlfriend was watching "Nailed it", which is a show based on the internet meme of people trying to copy pastries and failing miserably (if there was any doubt, yes, we are living in a dystopian future, folks).

Of course, this is relevant for reviewing "Red Trigger"because this game is the "nailed it" for portal. It tries to copy every aspect of the game beat for beat and the result is a bizarre and disfigured version of the beloved Valve masterpiece.

You start empty-handed and quickly come up to a pedestal with a gun on it (sounds familiar?). This gun can activate up to three red cubes that when shoot at, they can extend to cover deadly traps, shoot up to propel you to great heights and interrupt lasers. The aesthetics are based on simple white structures with few colours. After some puzzles, a female robotic voice calls you a "virus" and starts to change your environments against you. After some more levels you get to some sort of climax with fast music and a change of the level design as you escape the tumbling building. Déjà vu, someone?

The mechanics are fine as far as they go, and there are some clever puzzles, but the whole implementation is awful and filled with bugs and usability problems. In the half hour it took me to "get" to the final level, I find at least 3 obvious bugs. In one puzzle, lasers suddenly wouldn't kill me, in other, I started with my back to the puzzle after respawning, finally, I could choose any level after the one I was in, but not before. So that meant that I accidentally started the final level skipping 3 or 4 stages. In spite of the extremely basic graphics, my PC was struggling to keep up the framerate and had to play it on the lowest setting, that made some structures invisible from some angles.

The only saving grace is that Red Trigger is free on Steam and can be completed in less than one sitting. So, glowing recommendation, I guess?