Portal Alive Kicking walkthrough
Test Chambers 00–19, without turning every joke into a flowchart.
This walkthrough is for Portal: Alive & Kicking’s story campaign: Test Chambers 00 through 19, then a pointer to the escape. It assumes you can fire both portals and fling. If you cannot, go back to how to play and the controls table. Solutions describe intent, not every pixel, because the remake’s lighting and panel cues are clearer than 2007 even when the layout is the same.
Spoiler rule: chamber tricks are here. GLaDOS’s last ten minutes are on how to beat GLaDOS. Advanced remixes are on advanced chambers.
Chambers 00–05: the gun and the cube
00. Walk, portal through the wall the game opens, put the Weighted Storage Cube on the button, leave through the grill. The grill will eat the cube. That is the lesson.
01. Two linked portals. Walk the pair until you believe they are one tunnel.
02. You receive the handheld portal device. Place your own blue, use the orange the room provides, collect the cube, button, exit. Do not stare into the barrel.
03–04. Height and pits. Put an exit high, an entry at your feet, walk through. If you fall, the cube respawns. Save anyway; launch-week saves were finicky.
05. Fizzler plus cube routing. Carry the cube around the grill, not through it. If you emancipate the cube, wait for the dropper.
The video on this page is an old demo playthrough. Treat it as Chambers 00–03 footage, not as a spoiler for 2026’s escape.
Chambers 06–10: flings and platforms
06. First real fling. Portal on the floor of the pit, portal on the wall that faces the ledge. Fall in. Do not jump from the rim and hope.
07–08. Same idea with extra cubes or a second landing. If you overshoot, your exit is aimed too high or you fell from too far. Adjust the floor portal, not your jump key. Chamber 08 in this remake is one of the Steam screenshots for a reason: the room reads better, the trick is still a fling.
09. Momentum chained. You will leave one portal, fly, and place the next while airborne. This is the skill Chamber 13+ assumes you have.
10. Unstationary scaffolds and moving floors. Ride, shoot the far portalable wall, step through before the platform dumps you into acid. Zoom (F) if the panel is a speck. Full binds are on controls.
Chambers 11–16: two colours and turrets
11. Dual portal gun if the campaign has not already given you both colours — Alive & Kicking follows the original beat. You now own blue and orange. Park one colour as a permanent exit and recycle the other.
12–14. Buttons that need a cube you are not holding, which means a portal sandwich: cube through a wall onto a plate you cannot reach. If a door closes when you leave the button, the cube was never on it.
15. Timing. Moving panels, delayed doors, pellets starting to appear. Watch the catcher. If a pellet dies in a wall, your pair is rotating it into illegal geometry.
16. Turrets. Cube as shield, portal behind, or pick up and tip. Do not sprint down the open lane. A Steam screenshot of this remake’s Chamber 16 is on the tier list page because the lighting makes the sightlines meaner even when the AI is the same.
Chambers 17–19: the nasty ones
17. Energy pellets plus the companion cube. The intended line is: cube as a tool, pellet into a catcher, cube as a friend you will be asked to murder. Launch-week testers reported a softlock tied to energy pellet catcher placement. If the pellet has no legal path into the socket, or the catcher sits in a pose that never completes the circuit, do not grind for an hour. Check known issues, reload an earlier save, and avoid leaving the cube in the pellet’s lane.
18. The exam. Multiple flings, cubes, and at least one moment where you think the room is infinite. Testers reported a Chamber 18 softlock on day one. If you trap a cube behind a door you cannot reopen, or park portals in a state that blocks the dropper, reload. The troubleshooting page will not help a logic lock; a save from the previous grill will.
19. Victory lift, last official test, then the elevator that is not a reward. When GLaDOS’s script turns, stop using this walkthrough and open how to beat GLaDOS. The escape in Alive & Kicking was called out as new in Steam discussions. Old Portal muscle memory still helps, but do not follow a 2007 elevator clip blindly.
Survival habits for the remake
- Manual save at every chamberlock. Autosaves were called unreliable at launch.
- Do not console-load
achieve.bsp. - If a map starts and the process closes, that is a launch-options problem (
-threads 1, multithreaded rendering off), not a failed fling. See troubleshooting. - If you are ranking rooms instead of solving them, the chamber tier list is the opinion page. This walkthrough is the intended-line page.
After 19
Beat the boss, then decide whether advanced chambers are for this weekend. The developers also mentioned elite-difficulty bonus maps as future free content on the release notes. They are not required for the nine Steam achievements if those achievements follow the story, but count on at least one of them wanting a clean advanced clear once the community finishes datamining.
If a chamber in this remake diverges from the original more than lighting — a moved catcher, a new cue, a blocked cheese — prefer the geometry in front of you over a YouTube video filmed in 2012. The demo on this page is history. Your save file is the campaign that shipped 28 August 2026.
Stuck before you even reach 00? You do not need a walkthrough. You need the install guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Quick answers for testers stuck in Aperture.
Which chambers have launch-week softlocks?
Testers flagged Chamber 17 (pellet catcher placement) and Chamber 18. Reload an earlier save rather than forcing a broken state. Details are on known issues.
Does this cover the ending?
No. Use how to beat GLaDOS for the escape and the boss. This page stops at Chamber 19.
Can I skip chambers?
The campaign is sequential. Sequence breaks exist in original Portal; treat any skip in this remake as unstable until the community maps them.
Why does the video not show the full game?
Public footage of Alive & Kicking was demo-length for years. The 2026 escape is new, so late chambers are documented in text first.
Where do achievements sit on this course?
Steam lists nine unlocks. Story ticks likely fire on the dual gun, the companion cube, turrets, and GLaDOS. Map them on achievements after a clean run, not by loading achieve.bsp.