Shenanigans & Tomfoolery

Sure, this game has been out for a couple years now (over twice as long in internet time) but I wrote a review about it when it first came out and hey, I’m lazy and I’m happy to provide cheap content for my site.

So without further ado, here’s my two year old review of the fantastic Portal (with a few changes here and there).

I would say that, generally speaking, there are three types of great games:

1) Games where no single element is better than another resulting in a cohesive, consistently good whole (Metroid Prime, Ocarina of Time, Ikaruga or Metal Gear Solid);
2) Games where one or more aspects of them, like story, music or aesthetics, take a backseat to great gameplay (Devil May Cry 3, Halo or most fighting games);
3) And then there are games like Ico, Rez or killer7 that are rich and engrossing video games experiences in spite of a faltering element or two. These are the games that really push the boundaries of what can be done with the medium.

Portal is that rare kind of game that fits in two of these categories: it’s an amazing whole but I think it pushes the medium as well.

It’s hard to box Portal into a category like “adventure” or “first person shooter” or “puzzle” so I’ll just go ahead and call it a “first person puzzle” game because that makes the most sense to me. The premise is very simple: You’re a test subject in the Aperture Science Laboratories, you’re issued a Portal gun and your goal is to get to the exit of the room in which you’re dropped in. The Portal gun itself is a device that shoots two different portals (one blue, one orange) creating a warp that allows you to traverse instantly between one and the other when you pass through either one (as shown in the picture below).

Developer Valve, as you may or may not now, puts some rather heavy emphasis on physics in their video games and this is no exception. Place a portal high on the wall and jump from a platform into another portal far beneath you and the momentum from the fall will send you hurtling from the portal on the wall across chasms or other obstacles. It might sound complicated but, thanks to the excellent in-game tutorial, it becomes second nature very quickly and it’s one of the many gameplay elements that gives Portal its unique puzzle solving angle.

It’s not just the gameplay though, Portal has this fantastic atmosphere that effortlessly manages to be funny and very ominous at the same time. There’s a female, robotic voice that guides you through these puzzles whose comments make you smile one second and leave you fully paranoid the next. Case in point, when she tells you that a box you’re carrying might speak and try to give you advice and for you to disregard that advice, I laughed at the preposterous suggestion. I then spent the remainder of the puzzle wondering if this inanimate object was suddenly going to speak to me. It’s quite brilliant and thoroughly entertaining.

The main storyline is challenging to a certain extent but the extra challenges and advanced puzzles in the game is where your puzzle solving skills will be pushed to their limits. There are three types of challenges: Least Portals, Least Steps and Least Time. Least Time is the most frustrating of the three (as time challenges usually are) and Least Steps can be annoying because it’s hard to gauge just how much a “step” is in the game. Least Portals is the best of the bunch and will leave you scratching your head for quite a while. Getting bronze in any of these challenges will be difficult but getting gold will be absolutely devilish. One of the gold medal, Least Portal challenges asks you to complete one of the later puzzles with only 2 Portals (two shots from your Portal gun) and the resulting “eureka!” moment upon completion was unlike any I have had in gaming in quite some time. The advanced puzzles, unfortunately, seem to leave a fair amount of solving to randomness and chance and I found a few of them to be rather unsatisfying. The challenges are the real brain-teasers here.

In the end, Portal is a brilliant piece of software that absolutely no one should go without playing. It’s smart, it’s witty, it’s challenging, it’s engaging and it has a great beginning, middle and end. It’s a really great ride, short as it may be. I’d have no trouble recommending this game on its own but considering that it’s part of The Orange Box, which comes with Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2, there is absolutely no excuse for people to not play this game.

And when you do, just remember to think in Portals.