VideoGame Short, simple, but satisfying
While many games boast single-player modes that last dozens of hours, deep and complex gameplay, or rich and engaging storylines, Portal has none of these, but ends up being surprising entertaining nevertheless.
There isn't much of a plot in the game. You play as Chell, a woman trapped in a high-tech experimental facility run by an insane AI called GLaDOS, and you must use a portal gun to solve various puzzles and survive. That said, GLaDOS is a memorable character and the game is well-written, featuring subtle and dark humor.
The basis of the game involves using a portal gun that creates blue and orange portals that are linked to each other. The portals have a wide variety of uses, from allowing Chell to reach places she couldn't on foot to allowing Chell to fall into one portal and shoot out the other at high speed. Additional mechanics like pressure plates, turrets and other such things add variety to the puzzles, even if the sequel has more to offer in this area.
The controls are simple, since there are only a few things you need to know about- walking around, turning, shooting blue and orange portals, jumping, crouching and using buttons. As such, the game is both easy to learn and play.
One notable downside is that the game is relatively short- I was able to complete it in just over two hours the second time- and relatively easy. If you're someone who wants a lot of value for your purchases, I suggest waiting until the game goes on sale; I was able to buy this game and the sequel(which I also recommend) together for $3 during Steam's autumn sale.
All in all, Portal is well worth your time, even if it isn't quite as good as the second game.
VideoGame I guess there are worse ways to spend 3 hours.
I played Portal long after the Orange Box originally debuted. I originally bought the Orange Box for one reason, and one reason only: Team Fortress 2. So on the eve of Portal 2's release, I finally gave this little game a shot, having heard it's completely amazing from start to finish.
Eh. It was all right. I'm not terribly fond of physics puzzles, but the pacing is gradual enough that the game tends to build up slowly, adding a new fold to each puzzle, and that's pretty good. However, the humor was mostly lost on me. That's what happens when people repeat memes over 9,000 times and then you view the original work. The humor doesn't seem half as clever if you've heard it before. And while I liked that story largely wasn't forced upon you, the story itself is nothing you haven't seen before. Mad AI, sure. We've seen it in 2001, Marathon, System Shock, etc. The only thing that separates this one is that it's an excessively petty Rogue AI. I can't explain why people like the Companion Cube so much. It's just a box with a heart on it.
I think the people that initially played it went in with no expectations, but I went in with the expectations of this "perfect" game, and was disappointed. So I had sort of the reverse experience of others. I think Portal is one of those games you had to be there for to get the full effect- you're not going to appreciate it near as much as the people that bought it in 2007 and still rave about it because there were no expectations then. It's a decent game, but it's worth waiting for one of those days when Valve gives it away.
I don't regret playing it, but it's not special to me.
VideoGame Portal is great and you should play it.
Portal is something different. At its core, it's a puzzle game where you have to use portals to reach a goal. The concept is pretty original, and the portal mechanic has surprisingly deep gameplay. At first you're just placing a portal on the other side of a chasm to cross a gap, but before you know it you're firing multiple new portals in mid-leap and doing all sorts of shenanigans with gravity and momentum and timing and layering everything together and let's just say it gets crazy and it's a lot of fun. The controls are great, the difficulty is curved well, the puzzles are well-designed, and the audio and visuals complement everything else perfectly; in fact, I'm having a lot of trouble finding something to complain about.
The game is short. That's not really a bad thing, though—the pacing is superb, and if it were any longer, it would risk feeling padded. This segues me nicely into the story, which is a perfect example of why we like Show Dont Tell. Some games pack a lot of epic drama into dialogue and cutscenes and whatnot. Portal does none of that, and yet it has one of the most compelling narratives of any game I've ever played. The story is in the scenery and in the gameplay itself. The story is the gameplay, really. The test chambers grow increasingly intense as the game progresses, and you start to see scraps of something strange. It all culminates in the Off The Rails final sequence and, eventually, spoiler, a climactic showdown with GLaDOS herself. (That counts as It Was His Sled, right?)
The puzzles (with some Brutal Bonus Levels) are the whole game, so it's pretty cerebral. If you do get stuck, there's not much you can do besides sit down and think it out...but that just makes it even more satisfying when you eventually figure it out. Still, as innovative as Portal is, it is that sort of game, and if you're not interested in that sort of game...well...you might still like it, actually. There are enough fast-paced combat sequences and platforming-esque timed segments sprinkled around to get your adrenaline flowing, especially in the later levels, where it gets pretty hectic with lots of moving platforms and turrets and whatnot.
Bottom line, a great game, and it deserves its hype.
And if you were wondering, the cake is definitely not a lie.
...Or Is It?
VideoGame 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.