Leakers have pieced together a playable version of the canceled Portal prequel F-Stop. Most of the assets came from the massive 12-terabyte leak that dropped this August. That didn’t include the game’s source code or map data, but those final pieces apparently hit the Valve Cut Content Discord this week, allowing a nearly complete version to be pieced together.
Some dialog and elements of F-Stop eventually found their way into Portal 2. But it differs dramatically from the mainline Portal games in that it’s built around a camera mechanic that basically lets you capture an item by taking its picture and then place it elsewhere using the resulting Polaroid-like photos. It’s not unlike Viewfinder in that way.
The game is short, with videos showing off its full campaign all clocking in at under an hour. That’s not terribly surprising, though. F-Stop was developed as part of the “Directed Design Experiments,” a three-month period in 2007 when Valve broke into five teams to build new video game experiments.
