MagisterFlopsy
Since: May, 2021
12/07/2022 00:00:00
Puzzle games were never my cup of tea, Portal even less so. I\'m already the type to look up the solution online when it\'s not immediately obvious. So you can imagine how drastically my patience for such things is reduced when I can\'t even get a good look around the room to make an attempt to find the solution on my own because stepping out from behind cover means instant death and thus failure of the puzzle.
That being said, one thing this game absolutely nails is the writing. It very much captures that Team Fortress 2 style of dark humor that managed to make us root for a cast made up of some of the most evil human beings you could imagine.
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The game thinks with portals so you can too.
It's easy to forget how huge this game was. The memes and the pretty revolutionary gameplay were massive, and it can be difficult to appreciate their impact today.
Portal is a first-person physics puzzle game set in a mysterious scientific facility where they have developed a gun that can create paired portals that make doorways between each other, conserve your momentum when passing through, and provide visibility through the space. For such a mind-bending concept, the mechanic is easy to grasp and gets explored in numerous wonderful ways. You have to always be aware where you can place portals and where you'll end up. Some puzzles see you falling into ground portals so you'll be launched out of high wall portals at that speed to cross gaps and land on high platforms. Some puzzles see you placing portals under turret drones to remove them from the space and tip them over when they land so they'll deactivate. Others see energy pellets directed through portals to reach the machines they power up, and you even use portals to hop across a moving conveyor of platforms that's pushing you away from the other end. The mechanic is explored. The way the game ramps up the mechanics and teaches you new application leads to building quite a skill set. In general, I think my favorite challenge was disabling turrets, as it required clever portal aim, shielding, and staying out of sight. The platforming elements felt a bit weak, particularly with the underwhelming jump height that also required momentum, such that puzzles with the player character's normal jumps consistently stalled my progress.
The puzzles that stymied me most were escort or quick-time maneuvers that require you to open portals for an object and shift them around while it passed through to achieve a second step. I clicked with most of the physics stuff, but the "think two steps ahead" timed ones were lost on me. And that might just be me.
The flavor of the game has been imitated a lot, but being alone in a facility with a dispassionate and untrustworthy AI makes for a compelling amusing and threatening setup. Seeing the cracks underneath the facility is definitely creepy, and the comedy and menace balance nicely to make you feel like an unwilling pawn overseen by something without everything firing on all cylinders.
The ending sequence of the game feels brilliantly empowering in a perfect fusion of setting and gameplay as you begin to break out of the facility and navigate through its inaccessible spaces with all the skills you've picked up from the designed tests. It truly feels triumphant as you get confident in your ability to defy this oppressive space and the game feels really successfully improvisational during this sequence, more like you're messing around out-of-bounds in a map with a game-breaking tool than going through a designed series of movements (which, of course, you still are because it's a game).
Portal is iconic for very good reasons.