Portal
Like how Tarantino’s character in Pulp Fiction (the Dead Nigger Storage guy) didn’t need anyone telling him how good his coffee was, I’m guessing most of Varis doesn’t actually need me telling them how good Portal is – the game is a timeless classic, and for good reason. That said, I personally always enjoy hearing fresh perspectives on my own all-time favorite games from new players experiencing them for the first time, so I figure at least some people will appreciate my own newfag take on Portal 1 and 2.
Now, I have to say right away that Portal’s core mechanic is just outrageously cool (literally one of greatest ideas in all of vidya), and perfectly implemented. Like Bugs Bunny drawing a fully functioning door on a random cartoon wall, you can yourself create a portal on any random wall (or ceiling, or floor), and use it to exit through whatever second portal you decide to create. And creating a portal couldn’t be simpler, you just shoot your portal gun at wherever you want to create your portal, and can freely decide whether you want to create a blue or orange portal (both work the exact same way, it’s all up to you how you use them). You’ll need both active at the same time to have an actually functioning portal tho, one to enter and another to exit through. It all feels incredibly intuitive and natural, yet there’s always this sense of mind-bending wonder that is never lost – even the mere act of creating a simple portal for basic level traversal/shortcut purposes never stops feeling tremendously cool and satisfying. And the portal mechanic turns out to have near-limitless applications.
You can however only have a single blue and a single orange portal active at the same time, and this limitation (along with the fact that the portal gun doesn’t work on certain surfaces) is what sets up so many brain-bending puzzles in this game. Perfectly paced (which the Valve developers’ commentary reveals is the result of extensive playtesting), the game introduces new ideas and different ways to utilize your portals at a rapid pace without ever overwhelming you, and the puzzles are tricky enough that they really require you to put your thinking cap on, without ever being so fiendishly hard that you become demotivated and just give up. Unlike modern AAA devs, who openly tailor their games to subhuman retards like DSP and gaming journalists, Valve obviously designed Portal and its puzzles with actual gamers in mind.
Suffice to say, Portal is full of those incredibly satisfying moments of puzzle-solving that make you feel really Big Brained, and all the different uses Valve got out of the Portal mechanic is really impressive (or at least it was until Portal 2, when they REALLY went nuts with new ideas and supplementary mechanics). The momentum-based puzzles that have you fall from great heights through one portal in order be launched out of the other portal at breakneck speeds definitely took me by surprise.
At its core though, Portal does seem quite basic and formulaic – you play the role of a test subject (a nameless, voiceless woman whose name eventually turns out to be Chell), going through a series of test chambers as part of some startlingly unethical portal gun research set up by the shady Aperture Science Enrichment Center. Guiding you through these test chambers is an AI (who is only during the credits revealed to have an actual name, GLaDOS), whose callous disregard for your physical and psychological well-being is only partially offset by her genuine wish for you to successfully solve the test chamber puzzles. GLaDOS provides some unforgettable lines and plenty of black comedy in between the puzzles, but beyond that you’re really just going from one puzzle room to the next – not that this is much of a problem of course, given just how good the puzzles are.
However, later on you do manage to gain access to some out-of-bounds areas in certain puzzle rooms, where you find messages from previous test subjects who seem to have been driven insane by the increasingly dangerous tests and GLaDOS’s constant surveillance. Moreover, GLaDOS herself is revealed to be both crueler and more dangerous than even her coldest lines had previously hinted at, and the final section of the game represents a dramatic break with the established formula, forcing your find a whole bunch of new uses for your portal gun outside of the regular test chambers. It’s a very effective twist, both in terms of story and gameplay, culminating in an excellent puzzle-like boss battle.
Beyond the gameplay itself being pretty much perfect, a big part of what makes Portal so special is GLaDOS. I guess that nowadays, some people might dismiss this amoral AI as a typical ZOMG SO RANDOM Big Chungus Reddit Maymay character, which I’d say is deeply unfair – GLaDOS is the type of character that Redditards and current Western writers *wish* they could create, the same way Samus is the kind of Action Girl they repeatedly try and fail to replicate. Not only does GLaDOS boast genuinely great dialogue (pretty much everything she says is memorable and quotable), but there are multiple layers to this character, which makes her work so well – for starters, while she’s in one sense very intelligent, boasting a supercomputer brain and keeping the whole testing facility running smoothly by herself, she’s also quite petty, childish and hypocritical. And while she’s very manipulative, most of her manipulation attempts tend to fall flat due to her incomplete understanding of humans (I suspect that her seeming obsession with cake is actually due to her believing that *humans* find cake irresistible).
Between the gameplay and the dialogue, Portal proves to be an absolutely delightful experience, but also a VERY short one, just 2-3 hours for even a first-time player. Additionally, it’s for the most part visually bland, there isn’t much music to speak of, and most of the game is just spent going from puzzle room to puzzle room. That said, criticizing a game like this for such shortcomings kinda comes across as missing the point, it’s like bashing Tetris for its lack of story. What Portal sets out to do, it does exceptionally well, delivering a thoroughly unique, enjoyable experience with zero fat in the process. This is hardly a full-price game (at one point Valve even gave it away for free), and even on the Switch it’s sold together with the much meatier Portal 2 in a collection that itself is sold for a reduced price, AND has gone on some very generous sales (I’d been initially holding out hope for a physical release, but one of the eShop sales was so good I just had to pull the trigger). As such, I can’t really go along with complaints about its length.
Additionally, even on the Switch the game comes with a bunch of bonus levels, various special challenges, as well as remixed versions of 6 test chambers from the story mode. These last levels are a bit of a mixed bag tho, some of them being quite frustrating, especially the 6th Advanced level, which is a real prick – it feels like Kaizo Portal, but not the fun and well-designed Kaizo levels you often see in Mario Maker – I’m talking old-school 6 gorillion hidden blocks, 12 consecutive Fuck You jumps-types of Kaizo levels, practically designed around save state abuse. Fuck the Advanced version of Chamber 18, seriously….
A much more welcome addition is the Developer Commentary mode, which provides a lot of insight about everything that went into creating Portal, and game design as a whole. Easily made a second playthrough of Portal 1 worth it on its own, especially given how short AND how fun the game is. On the whole, this really is a genuine gem of game, worthy of its exalted status in the gaming industry.