This article contains Portal spoilers.
Portal transcends the typical socially acceptable time limits normally imposed on videogames; the internet memes still played out today might have grown a little tired now but if you were there, when nobody knew, even your Granny politely informing you that the damned cake is a lie can fire off enough synapses to invoke special, personal memories of one of this generation’s most memorable titles.
And if you weren’t around at the beginning, if you hadn’t seen the embryonic seeds laid down by Narbacular Drop – if you played through Portal knowing what was to come, then you’d managed to spoil one of the biggest and yet most secretive parties this industry has ever had by pre-empting everything that was so powerful about Portal. The gradual yet spectacular decline of GlaDOS, the escapable fate of the player, that ending – all surprises worth experiencing first hand.
Remarkably, there’s a third group of gamer – one that hasn’t actually played Portal at all, and really, there’s literally no excuse: you can pick up The Orange Box for next to nothing, or you can buy Still Alive on XBLA if you’re scared of going outside. You might have spoiled the ending, but that doesn’t really matter – Portal’s last act might be where the game shows its true colours but the rest of it is gaming gold anyway.
It’s a powerful concept, Portal’s central premise, but it’s one introduced to the player in a series of baby steps designed to ensure familiarity with the ideas of Portal in the early stages before letting him loose on the remainder. At first, the Portals (both blue and orange entrances) are pre-determined and fixed, and even when the player gets the wonderfully named Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device in his hands it’s only one colour he can fire at first.
This isn’t restricting for the sake of it – the very notion of Portals was a tough one to explain. By limiting the Portal Gun’s abilities and smoothly building up the ways in which the player can use gravity, velocity and direction to progress through the game the player never feels like there’s too much going on, and by the time he’s left to his own devices as the game kicks up a gear or two the training wheels are off and, hopefully, the puzzles can take care of themselves.
Portal completely changed the way we think about first person shooters. For one, there were no bullets fired by the player beyond the thwap of the Portal Gun as it propelled the harmless but utterly crucial orange and blue energy balls towards the nearest suitable wall. Secondly, walls were no longer a physical boundary – assuming you can see beyond your current obstruction you could fire one portal into the wall ahead and another where you’d want to emerge once you stepped through the first.
But then Portal was never really a first person shooter and although it was bundled alongside Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 Portal was every bit its own game, its own genre. From the very first screen, with the player making their own baby steps out of the glass case and into their first portal, the game manages to both captivate and divert at every single junction. You never really know what’s coming next even when you think you do.
Towards the end of the game, once Portal has removed the stabilisers and notched up the difficulty, Valve’s delicious puzzles take over, wrapping GlaDOS’s spiraling paranoia and some utterly wonderful gameplay mechanics into one hell of a freefall. The pacing’s perfect, the ingenuity a constantly controlled stream and some of the cleverest moments – like the delightful Weighted Companion Cube – providing key stand out moments you’ll think (and talk) about for weeks.
Of course, then there’s the twist. You might have seen it coming – the ajar sections of the lab, the hastily scrawled comments and the overwhelming sense that something’s not quite right – and then there’s the fire. I’ll admit, it caught me out a couple of times and really, at one point, I thought this was the end. Why had I been asked to invest a good six or so hours on something so abruptly concluded without any real closure?
Naturally, curiosity got the better of me, and a far flung portal opened up what is the game’s defining moment, the realisation that now it’s you against the machine and that last chapter, utterly unsignposted on a first run through, proving to be the best in the entire story. Ramping up to furious levels of adrenaline inducing excitement, the ultimate face off with GlaDOS an anticlimax only on the grounds that this is the true end of the game.
A second admission – the end song hit me right in the chest. A beautifully poised love letter to Portal’s latest contestant, and one that too managed to find its way into videogaming legend. Lucious vocals and some great lyrics are married with some geektastic terminal graphics that found their target perfectly. It’s all over, Portal is done and finished, and there’s only the teasing final shot – outside, finally – that lingers in our minds.
Oh, and the cake, of course.
Daywalker
Don’t get me and Er_Nut started on Portal. Good god its 100% pure awesomeness. I cried at Portal 2’s announcement. That’s how good it is.
tonycawley
I’ve never played it, or anything else in the orange box for that matter. The lack of trophies puts me off unfortunately. Sad but true. My Damn brother and my never ending trophy war with him. Having said that, i’ve been playing quite a bit of mw2 online recently, and that doesn’t have trophies, so perhaps i could give it a shot.
nofi
“The lack of trophies puts me off unfortunately”
That’s shocking. Literally.
Dexter17
Portal is an unparalleled experience, and by not playing it just because of the lack of trophies you are missing out on an absolutely amazing game.
Daywalker
Lack of trophies? -_-“
3shirts
What did you do before this generation of gaming? My SNES never had trophies!
jikomanzoku
Valve gave away the PC version free a month or two back :D
hazelam
talking of portal, i just have to post this, i expect most of you have already seen it but it’s till funny what the hell.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L-rrkyvApU
Tuffcub
I played Portal for a few hours when I got Orange Box on release day and I thought it was a bit.. dull. Never played it since.
3shirts
You are wrong. Most games come down to personal opinion but Portal is FACTUALLY amazing
bunimomike
I found Portal to be great fun but shockingly repetitive at times. It stopped me progressing on first play through but I came back to it not two weeks ago. The ending was good, GLaDOS funny, the idea sublime. I don’t feel that it deserves the accolades it garners but equally it deserves mentioning for how different it is to everything out there.
GodDarnKat
“the player never feels like there’s too much going on, and by the time he’s left to his own devices as the game kicks up a gear or two”
The player in Portal was actually female. I remember being quite
surprised by this – as most gaming protagonists are usually male or a robot or a heavily armoured combination of the two. This
game, perhaps because it was a “hello marketting, yeah hi, well we’ve got this game called Portal, what do you think… (pause) aim it at the girls because they like puzzles… I like your thinking” difficult sell… should be appauded for its slow burn
success. Will Portal2 continue to use a female character…?
It would be nice to see the echo of Ripley and Mother Alien continue on and expand this already smart concept.
nofi
‘His’ refers to the player, not the protagonist. I’m well aware Chell was female. :)
Kronik76
But you’re assuming the player is male! ;-)
nofi
Yep. A reasonably safe assumption and the normal case when writing, I think. :)
GodDarnKat
I was just pointing out that in your review (it was great by the way) you neglected to mention this ‘female protagonist’ detail. Which may have been, though I have no real idea, a contributing factor as to why a number of people hadn’t played it. I remember at the time being pretty enthused by the female character ‘Chell’. Though mentioning it to a number of male gamer type friends simply resulted in some ‘meh sounds’ before they returned once again to suckling upon a derivative of Medal of Duty Front 2097.
*though to be fair that may say more about the sort of guys I know than gaming views in general.
Kronik76
You could have written ‘by the time they’re left to their own devices’! But I have to agree it is a reasonably, if not very, safe assumption! What is it with us boys and our toys? Long live male dominated gaming! :-P
nofi
If people don’t play Portal because the lead is a woman then, well, that’s worse than not playing it because there’s no trophies… Wait.
GodDarnKat
You know, I read somewhere (may even have been 6a) that some guys chose to play ‘Lilith’ in Borderlands just so they had something nicer to look at while she ran about on screen. I mean, for sure fair play but ‘Roland’ was pretty cute and I’m sure once you got past his hard outer shell, even ‘Brick’ became easy on the eye. Although the guy with the parrot… meh, he looked way too creepy.
*just as a heads up [grin] not everyone on here is male,
although for sure… the industry and consumers are still pretty strongly smelling of testosterone.
**crap its going to sound like I’m trying to make a point here, which… oh wait, you’re right, I probably am.
seedaripper1973
Well hellllo…*brushes moustache*
I kid, i kid ;-)
Spotter5
I’ve never played it :Scared: Portal 2 looks semi interesting though.
Daywalker
Semi-interesting? By semi you mean BEST GAME EVER MADE IN THE WORLD EVER. Yeah, thought so.
seedaripper1973
I’m one of the few that havnen’t played it either (Fo shame), but after seeing some of the portal2 vids after E3, i thought sod it, i’ll get the orange box…cannae find it for love nor money :(
p.s no point in mentioning ‘teh interwebz’ either, as i’m a cash man through and through.
3shirts
Why? Everything is cheaper on the internet.
seedaripper1973
I know, but i’m an ex student and..er…er…
aerobes
I remember buying the orange box quite some time ago and I was really looking forward to it after the rave reviews Half-Life 2 had been getting.
After all that waiting and anticipation I couldn’t even force myself to finish Half-Life 2 or its accompanying episodes.
Then there was obviously Portal which was/is pleasant enough I guess, it’s an odd game which I have no love nor disdain for, when I think or read about I just find myself performing an internal shrug.
Funny how we have games deemed to be classics, genre leading, game changing and whatever other cliches people use and in the end it’s really just down to personal taste, although I suppose that can be attributed to anything.
Portal? *shrugs* Blow the dust off the Amstrad and give me a few hours on Rockstar ate my Hamster instead.