The Aperture Institute is already a pretty broken place in Portal 2. Walls and floors move freely, pipes carry people and crates, and crazy robots cackle and move around in impossibly large caverns.

It's an amazing, impossible science factory. But for YouTuber Krzyhau, Valve could have gone much further in creating a true physics nightmare. After all, in "Portal 2," you couldn't hold the entire test chamber in your hand while standing inside it.

I only became aware of his work this week, but Kryzhau has been making these broken joke chambers for several years; the first one, released in April 2019, completely destroyed every aspect of Test Chamber 20 and remains one of the best. The Redirection Cube now fires its own lasers, non-portal surfaces become portal surfaces, and Kryzhau pulls apart the walls themselves to move objects to more convenient locations.

These broken rooms have three "seasons." Some are recursive, Escher-like labyrinths. Some are dramatic tragedies played out with sad piano accompaniment. Some feature a scatman with a bomb.

I quiet like that they all begin with the same, simple leap point. Chamber 20 is not the most elaborate puzzle in Portal 2, but Kryzhau spins it in dozens of absurd new directions.

Unlike Portal 2's impressive time travel mod, Kryzhau's map is not properly playable, designed more as a YouTube gag than a complete Portal puzzle. However, they do influence the first-person puzzle games that came after Portal, recalling the recursive world of Maquette and the playfully inconsistent perspective of Superliminal.

"Portal 2" celebrates its 10th anniversary this week and is still more than adequate. But the way Kryzhau reconceptualizes a single room provides an intriguing idea of how a hypothetical Portal 3 might unfold. The previous film already had physics at its disposal.