DESORDRE : A Puzzle Game Adventure

Introduction

DESORDRE: A Puzzle Game Adventure is a first-person puzzle game built on Unreal Engine by solo developer SHK Interactive, released on Steam on 1 June 2023 at NZ$14.75. It wears its inspiration openly: place two linked portals on checkered surfaces, carry momentum between them, and solve room-by-room puzzles in the vein of Valve's Portal. Its own twist, layered on top, is a dual-universe mechanic — swapping between a red and blue overlapping reality that behave differently — plus a bullet-time ability for trickier sequences. Three years on, its 64 English-language Steam reviews sit at 72% positive, Mostly Positive. This review read all 18 negative reviews in that sample alongside a range of the positive ones.

What both sides agree on

Unusually for a Mixed-adjacent aggregate, the two sides of DESORDRE's review sample don't disagree much about what the game gets right. Even reviewers who ultimately didn't recommend it call out the visuals specifically and often generously: "this game can be a better showcase for Path Tracing than Cyberpunk 2077," one wrote, while another negative review still conceded "great graphics and artstyle aside." The dual-universe idea gets similar cross-aggregate respect — "the addition of the dual dimension puzzles is an amazing idea and it makes the game really fun," reads one positive review, and even a lukewarm three-hour negative review called the concept genuinely original rather than a rehash. For a solo developer working in Unreal Engine, that's a real achievement worth naming plainly.

The momentum problem

Where the two sides split is squarely on movement, and the negative-review sample is unusually consistent about exactly what's wrong. Portal's own portals pull the player toward their centre on approach — "portal funnelling," in the genre's own terminology — and several reviewers say DESORDRE's portals simply don't do this, leaving jumps that demand pixel-precise aim without the forgiveness the format has trained players to expect. "Please implement portal funneling or way bigger portals to be able to reliably keep momentum," one wrote. Another, more pointed: "if you make the surfaces reflective and enable path traced lighting, the graphics look next level. However, this game does have a persistent problem with instability" — reporting crashes after the intro room specifically. A few reviewers frame the issue as a genre mismatch rather than a bug: "the puzzles are not difficult, instead, the clunky control and movement make this game too complicated to play," reads one three-hour review, arguing the challenge comes from fighting the physics rather than solving the intended puzzle.

A smaller cluster of complaints point to specific instability: one reviewer reports being unable to resume a session or pick a different room after leaving one, only able to work around it by toggling shader optimization settings; another calls the room-reset button "terrible" and reports getting stuck on the very first level despite over 100 hours in Portal.

How much game is here

Steam's own achievement data shows a gentler decline than many short indie games in this library — 63.4% of players clear the introductory achievement, tapering steadily down to 16.5% completing the final room, rather than the steep single-digit cliffs seen in more padded, grindier titles. That's broadly consistent with reviewer reports that DESORDRE is short but largely completable for players who stick with it — "under two hours" by one account — rather than a game that loses its audience to frustration partway through. The developer's own support record backs up a complete, finished release rather than an abandoned one: performance and path-tracing patches continued through March 2024, after which the developer publicly announced a new project, "A Silent Desolation." A live concurrent-player check for this review returned zero, unsurprising for a short single-player game well past its launch window.

Verdict

DESORDRE is a genuine solo-developer achievement — visually one of the strongest path-traced indie showcases on Steam, with a dual-universe twist on the Portal formula that reviewers on both sides of the aggregate respect. But a consistent, specific complaint runs through nearly all of its negative reviews: portal momentum without funnelling makes platforming feel like the real obstacle rather than the puzzles themselves, and a smaller group ran into outright instability. Worth a look for Portal fans specifically curious about the concept and tolerant of stricter movement, less so for anyone who wants the puzzle, not the platforming, to be the challenge.