Portal has been out on Nintendo Switch for less than 24 hours and already one dedicated modder has managed to tweak it so they can run Half-Life 2, showing off two different chapters complete with gravity gun physics and combat.
This isn't too surprising given that Portal builds from Half-Life 2 and the same Source engine. On PC, you can even use cheats like Impulse 101 to get all the weapons from Half-Life and load Half-Life's levels in Portal.
Interestingly, OatmealDome managed to tweak their Portal game to load up Half-Life 2 on launch, with the video embedded below showing off the Highway 17 chapter. You get a drivable car, antlions to fight, a crane to toy with, and Combine outposts to barge through. But it doesn't run perfectly on Switch.
As OatmealDome noted, "The game occasionally crashes, some maps are impossible to progress in, NPC animations are bugged, saves don't work, and world cameras don't spawn correctly. Load times have been edited out. FPS counter was enabled. Large amounts of stuttering probably caused by shader compilation and node graph rebuilds. Some issues might be caused by a patch I made to bypass a crash."
Regardless, it's an interesting insight into what Half-Life 2 could look like on Switch, giving fans yet more hope for an eventual port in the wake of Portal and Portal 2's own. Each of those games runs at 60fps and are native 720p handheld. Portal is 2.6GB in size while Portal 2 is 7.3GB. You can download them separately and there are achievements, the developer commentary, and the Still Alive content, as well as all bonus maps, with added gyro controls. If Half-Life 2 does end up getting ported, we could see similar specs.
For now, OatmealDome's insight is all we have, but they didn't stop with Highway 17. They also showed off some of Ravenholm, launching sawblades into zombies and cutting them in half, all running at a smooth 60fps. But the zombies have bugged animations, gliding along the floor awkwardly.