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Portal

And the science gets done. And you make a neat gun.

The key piece of Portal is the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device - the "gun" used to create portals. Left button opens a blue portal while right button opens an orange portal. Initially, the blue portal could be considered to be an "entry" portal for the orange "exit", but you can travel either way and this fact is one of the first twists of the concept that you must wrap your head around - first of many.

Shoot one portal to a suitable surface...	...and another to somewhere else, and they form a connection.
When you step closer and look into the portal, you see what the second portal sees.	Portals allow you to travel to otherwise inaccessible places, and to move objects through them.

Portal introduces these game concepts gradually and with great care. The game actually feels too easy early on as you zoom past the early test chambers, but if you go back and listen to the Valve's customary commentary track, the reasons become obvious - the game keeps introducing so many concepts and twists along the way, that to keep the game accessible, it has to start from the basics, and slowly work its way up. Don't worry - eventually you start facing problems that twist your brains until it hurts. Then, just as it seems that you have mastered everything, Portal tosses you another curve ball... and there will be cake.

The Cake is a Lie

When I first tried out Portal, I was supposed to just give it a quick spin before slugging it out to finish up a review of Team Fortress 2. Approximately two hours later I found myself still playing Portal while people showed up asking what was taking so long with the other review. After a futile attempt trying to write more about Team Fortress 2, I just couldn't keep myself away from the game. I ended up staying late at the office, failed to deliver the other review on time, skipped my pre-scheduled World of Warcraft raid of the evening, forgot to eat and happily ignored everything else until I had completed the game. Very few games these days have had a similar effect, and that alone is very high praise of Portal.

What makes it such an incredible experience is not the actual puzzles or the gameplay concepts alone. It's the storyline supplementing the gameplay, creating a much more impressive combination than the sum of it's parts. Lots of subtle hints are dropped along the way, as the unseen AI keeps babbling at you, delivering stranger and stranger comments. The story is what keeps you going, and solving the puzzles is just something you do to get further down the rabbit hole that is Aperture Science. Portal gives you a perfect hamster wheel of progress - you have to keep on innovating how to use the portal gun to proceed, and every time you figure how to apply it to the situation, a food pellet drops for the hamster as you are rewarded with another mysterious room, with GLaDOS, the AI, giving you another bizarre lecture or comment.

If I would have to mention one thing that makes Portal what it really is, it would be the audio. Limited music, used only to spice things up where needed, and superb voice work by Ellen McLain. The script is constantly witty and the delivery is just spot-on. She has also done the announcer voices for Team Fortress 2 and some voice work for Half-Life 2 titles, but here her role is very different. And there is a nice little song, "Still Alive", by Jonathan Coulton, that's just icing on the cake.

Aperture Science - for the good of all of us

Once you are done with the storyline, Portal offers you Bonus Maps: six Advanced versions of existing test chambers and six Challenge Maps. These Challenge Maps allow you to play a set of existing levels with new goals. You can play the levels either as a time challenge, getting to the exit as quickly as possible, as "least portals" challenge, demanding you to solve the problem with the least amount of portal openings, or as "least steps" - forcing you to get truly creative with the portal gun to minimize the amount of walking you do.

Each challenge type feels completely different. Least portals is probably the easiest - you have all the time in the world to think, and it feels a bit like playing chess with the Portal gun. Least steps is probably the hardest, as you really have to figure out how to abuse the Portal gun to maximize the distance you can cover without actually taking any steps. Time challenge is a mixture of both with the ticking clock ensuring that you have to execute every move non-stop - it's not enough to figure out how to reach the goal as quickly as possible, you also have to actually pull it off flawlessly - and some of these levels are hideously tricky to master.

In addition to the extra challenges, the Developer Commentary offers a nice excuse to play the whole game again. It also gives you a fresh perspective on many of the levels, and the second run allows you to look for creative ways to solve familiar problems. Portal actually feels unique in this regard - many of the later levels actually have more than one way to skin the cat, and while one of them is the "obvious" way, other solutions are often just as valid.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Visuals and performancePage 4: Final Thoughts & Cake

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