The hell's a "narbacular", anyway? It's very rare to find a word this unique which hasn't received some definition in Urban Dictionary or somewhere else. Even more bizarre since we're talking about one of the most important 2000s indie titles. Project co-lead Jeep Barnett says they invented the term to improve SEO and online virality, which is good enough for me. One wonders if "Portacular Drop" would have been more appropriate in hindsight. As the tech demo for the seminal puzzler Portal, which this team later made at Valve, Narbacular Drop mostly gets written off as an unfinished curiosity. I think it's got a bit more going on, though, once you figure community levels into the picture. This had a small but active fanbase prior to the funny fake cake game obsoleting it, which counts for something. You can still play this (and other notables borne from the DigiPen Institute's student body) for free today, albeit with some troubleshooting.

Compared to its successor, the story and content on offer is a lot more slim. You play Princess No-Knees, a brave young lady who's cursed with an inability to jump. An ill-fated walk in the woods leads to a demon kidnapping and imprisoning her in an active volcano. Rather than dealing with the devil, she meets the mountain spirit Wally, who can manipulate space via portals, and they must work together to free themselves from this evil. So we've got a neat premise which tells players this isn't your average puzzle platformer. But there's basically no story past the opening narration, and the game itself ends with a largely unfinished boss fight arena. After all, developers Nuclear Monkey Software had been hired by Valve before they could ever finish this parting gift to their DigiPen audience. Their new employers moved fast.

Narbacular Drop uses once innovative DirectX 9 features to carve up its confined worlds through portals and multiple view options. There's always a blue and red portal active, either of which you can plant on dirt surfaces to solve puzzle steps and/or peek around corners. Anyone who's ever beaten a test chamber, hugged a Companion Cube, or regaled GLaDOS' dulcet damnations will recognize the game loop here: use your basic movement options to move through dimensions and manipulate the environment to proceed through levels. No jumping or use key for holding items means these verbs are more limited than you'd expect, though. The focus rests almost entirely on Portal basics like slingshot-ing and activating switches to open up progression. Your only "companion" here is the occasional lava turtle who can ferry you across the instakill depths, even if that means dropping them through rifts into the drink first.

This simpler-than-simple approach made sense at a time when players expected hall-of-mirrors effects when blowing holes in maps this compact. Just the revelation that you can experience seemingly large spaces despite their size was enough. Economy of design allows Narbacular Drop to remain somewhat as enjoyable as its spiritual sequel, at least if there's enough puzzles to play. Only five levels of note, with the first few suffering from tutorializing, meant the onus fell upon fans to explore the game's possibilities. As fun as this brief playthrough was, I totally get why these former DigiPen students wanted to move beyond thesis project roots and do an entirely new product using the key mechanics. It's just a shame that Princess No-Knees, Wally, and the big bad never got a resolution. As these programmers, designers, and artists later note in Portal's commentary nodes, the lack of a strong plot, cast, and world-building means no disguise for what's a solid but underdeveloped set of brain-twisters.

…And that's where community packs came in. Perhaps presaging their involvement with Valve not long after, Narbacular Drop uses the Hammer editor for map making and compiling, which let folks like Hank Warkentin design and release level packs very soon after official release. I'd argue the Portal mapping community really got started as far back as this, and it's just as likely that Nuclear Monkey devs like Kim Swift kept an eye on the ideas and tropes these creators explored in this prototype. Hank's own maps recreate the main campaign with extra challenges and an actual conclusion, much to my amusement. A young yet talented Robert Yang released one of, if not the earliest custom maps back in 2005; it's not even mentioned on his portfolio page, oddly enough. Enough of a scene developed that someone had to collect all these maps under one set! There's more history here if you know where to dig, which is a shame since it's almost like everything working on this fantastic journey has moved on in more ways than one.

Playing this formative work today can be frustrating, of course. I had to slap dgVoodoo 2.8 and its DLLs into the install directory just to get the portal effect working properly, let alone setup graphical enhancements. Nor does the program document its console commands, including those you'll need to skip or load any levels. Our princess' physics and controls definitely aren't as polished as Portal, among other obviously janky elements. But I still had a lot of fun bending reality throughout original and external stages, zooming across gaps and navigating vertical limbos. Turning obstacles that normally end your run into puzzle solutions, or even speedrunning tricks, all feels natural here. Compared to most other early DigiPen projects from the mid-2000s, this had more of a hook and potential to evolve, which it certainly did.

As mentioned earlier, Narbacular Drop is freeware and can run well on Windows 10 today if you've got the right drivers. Barnett's site still archives a lot of behind-the-scenes materials, too, including that sick trip-hop groove soundtrack. I haven't touched a whole lot on the audiovisuals, but they're quite charming, from the earthy industrial environments, clashing against cute characters, to the aforementioned tunes which compensate for the middling sound design. So much love went into this that seeing it reduced to a footnote today—just that odd thing that led to Portal and endless other physics-based 3D puzzle platformers on the market—feels wrong to me. I'd love to see ex-Nuclear Monkey people do a reunion tour and playthrough of this now that they've had lengthy careers and time to process the aftermath. It's a brief but enlightening chapter in the complex history of what we call indie games, well worth a try.

ENG: Everyone knows Narbacular Drop for one reason: it was the final project of some students at a university, Valve was interested in the game, hired the developers, and the rest is history with Portal.

The plot is witty to say the least. We control a princess who was trapped by a demon in a cave, or something like that. Oh, and this princess has no knees, ergo, she can't jump. Funny. Sadly it looks like they ran out of time for the ending. You can tell this game lacks quite a bit of polish. And not only for the plot, which is half-baked. But by the fact of being able to shoot portals through other portals. That's when you realize how broken it is.

It doesn't have the same magic, the same essence, but the truth is that this is the basis of Portal.

ESP: Todo el mundo conoce Narbacular Drop por una razón: fue el proyecto final de unos estudiantes de una universidad, a Valve le interesó el juego, contrató a los desarrolladores, y el resto es historia con Portal.

La trama es ocurrente cuanto menos. Controlamos a una princesa que fue atrapada por un demonio en una cueva, o algo así. Ah, y esta princesa no tiene rodillas, ergo, no puede saltar. Gracioso. Lamentablemente parece que se quedaron sin tiempo para el final. Se nota que a este juego le falta bastante pulido. Y no solo por la historia que se queda a medias. Sino por el hecho de poder disparar portales a través de otros portales. Ahí es cuando uno se da cuenta de lo roto que está.

No tiene la misma magia, la misma esencia, pero lo cierto es que acá están las bases de Portal.