Portal - Game Review

Introduction

Portal is a first-person puzzle game developed by Valve and released in 2007. The game is primarily focused on maneuvering through a series of artificial-looking levels in a laboratory using the “portal gun” a device that creates portals for the player to travel through.

The game is relatively short when compared to other games, but that’s really a product of its very linear narrative. When I last played it, it took me around an hour and a half, and new players might have to spend double that time solving the various puzzles.

It’s really an immersive game, and it’s very easy for the time to fly by and for players to finish it in a single sitting. Portal is generally considered a masterpiece, with a 90% on Metacritic, and many critics considering it the greatest game of all time. I don’t personally concur with this, but there are several good reasons for that title being up for consideration.

Gameplay

As the name suggests, Portal is all about portals. At the beginning of the game, you start by waking up in a bare, glass-walled cell. A futuristic cot and a radio playing some extremely invigorating funk music are the only furniture, besides a toilet. As you wake up you are greeted by an enthusiastic, if not very human, -sounding voiceover.

Artificial intelligence appears to be managing your stay in the Aperture Science Laboratory, where you will be doing some “testing” for them, whatever that means. An orange-ringed portal appears in the wall of the cell, and upon walking out, you appear in a blue-ringed portal on the outside of the cell. And here begins the rest of the game.

The power of portals quickly reaches your hands and you have to complete the twenty or so challenges the AI has set up for you. The idea is an incredible one for a puzzle game since it forces you to change your perception of space pretty drastically to complete most of the puzzles, a lot of which involve maneuvering boxes or laser beams to power the door to the puzzle chamber so you can advance.

The puzzles are very different, a lot of the time actually “testing” the player, forcing the player to be creative in creating the two available portals to them, placing in different places for example, or requiring the player to be meticulous in timing the placement of the portals to finish the puzzles.

But, no, that’s not the end of the game. As the player progresses, a series of bewildering events occur, as the AI occasionally garbles its speech (creating extremely comical puns and jokes along the way), and strange messages appear scrawled in hidden alcoves behind testing equipment.

This is actually the source of the famous line “the cake is a lie,” and I still remember the growing sense of horror I was getting as I saw the various creepy messages written on the walls in a color that looked terribly similar to blood. But I digress.

The puzzles get harder and harder in difficulty as the game progresses until the player gets a wonderful surprise at the end of the puzzles. To cut a long story short, it turns out that there is no cake, and that the player is being driven via mechanized platform into an incinerator. And then, the chase begins, as the player uses their newfound portal skills to escape the lab.