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Valve announced a brand new game that is neither the long-awaited Portal 3 nor Half-Life 3. The title, Aperture Desk Job, is a free playable short tailor-made for Steam Deck.
Along with the announcement that it has started sending out the first batch of orders to customers with paid Steam Deck reservations, Valve revealed that Aperture Desk Job will be released on March 1.
Like the Steam VR tech demo, 'The Lab,' the game has been introduced to showcase the mighty Steam Deck that launched today. To make players familiar with Steam Deck, the game acts as a walkthrough of all the controls and features, while making the process not as boring as it sounds.
Aperture Desk Job not a sequel to Portal, as per Valve
Aperture Desk Job falls under the "Walking simulator" genre and is in favor of “the lightning-spanked, endorphin-gorged world of sitting still behind things”, as per Valve. Users take on the role of an employee in Aperture Science, the research organization of Portal and Half-Life.
Valve explained the game on Steam, which said:
“Aperture Desk Job reimagines the been-there-done-that genre of walking simulators and puts them in the lightning-spanked, endorphin-gorged world of sitting still behind things. You play as an entry-level nobody on their first day at work - your heart full of hope and your legs full of dreams, eager to climb that corporate ladder. But life's got other plans, and they all involve chairs.”
Valve is already known to avoid releasing games with '3' in them as none of its previous titles have three on the title. Previously, a music video called “Count of three” focused on Valve’s trend of abandoning games with three in their title.
The head of Valve, Gabe Newell, was also featured in the video, where he admits that he can’t count to three and after two comes four. So following this trend, chances are quite low for Valve to release Portal 3 or Half-life 3 in the upcoming days.
Valve has advised gamers to lower their expectations as Aperture Desk Job is not a Portal 3 in disguise. In the Steam description, the company added:
“Not Portal 3! Lower your expectations. This is not a sequel to Portal. Now get ready to raise them slightly, because it is in the expanded universe of those games. Desk Job puts you squarely in the driver's seat at Aperture Science. Then quickly removes the driving part and adds a desk in front of the seat.”
Aperture Desk Job will also be available on PC, but users can only play it with a controller, as the game doesn’t support keyboard and mouse inputs. It will be interesting to see how Valve implements the expanded universe of Portal in the game.
