A new Portal-inspired puzzle game is coming to Steam

Solo developer Gustavo Braga showcased a playable build of his new first-person puzzle game, Paradoxical, at the GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco. The game is a surreal adventure built around manipulating space with mirror-like portals, and it is officially headed to PC.

When I first saw the footage out of the Brazil booth, I had to check if this was a brand new announcement. It turns out Braga has been quietly working on the game for about 11 months. He started development around April 2025. Now, Brazilian publisher Venn Studios has picked it up for a full release on Steam, and a refined demo is currently in the works.

It is not exactly plug and play

The game is very obviously inspired by Valve's work. Braga is an assistant professor of computer graphics who specializes in shaders, and he built Paradoxical as a mechanical spin on the Portal concept. Instead of shooting blue and orange ovals onto flat surfaces, you physically move mirror-like portals around the environment to bridge different areas.

The core mechanic involves fixing the image inside a portal like a photograph. Once the image is locked, you can walk straight through the frame to instantly traverse into that space. It shares a lot of mechanical DNA with Viewfinder, mixed with the quiet, isolated atmosphere of The Witness. According to 4Gamer's report from the show floor, Braga noted that fans of the puzzle genre have been highly supportive of the concept so far. He specifically mentioned that he hasn't seen much pushback from people dismissing it as a simple clone.

Changing the scale of objects

The puzzles get weird quickly. You can use different sized portals to alter the physical scale of objects in the environment. By framing an object through a smaller or larger portal, you can shrink or enlarge items to solve spatial problems. The game is set in a dying desert world full of surreal, impossible architecture.

The 4Gamer hands-on impressions noted that the peaceful desert ruins eventually give way to geometric, alternate dimensions. As the puzzles become more complex, the environments become increasingly hostile and abstract. The fields are divided by electromagnetic barriers. This setup forces players to use the mirrors to bypass physical obstacles rather than just walking around them.

A polished demo is next

The GDC Festival of Gaming ran from March 9 to 13 at the Moscone Center. The event was rebranded this year to celebrate its four-decade legacy, and the Abragames-hosted Brazil booth highlighted several upcoming indie projects. The playable floor build of Paradoxical was just a preview of what is coming.

Braga is currently developing a more polished version of that convention build, which will eventually be released as a public demo. Venn Studios has not announced a final release date or price yet. The publisher has confirmed that the game will include Japanese language support for its interface and text at launch, alongside English and Portuguese. Paradoxical is currently available to wishlist on Steam, and I am curious to see how far the portal mechanics can be pushed before the engine breaks.