Portal – Review
Shoot two portals onto a flat surface and walk through one to appear out the other. This reasonably straightforward game premise is destined to go down alongside "form horizontal lines to make blocks disappear" and "avoid missing ball for high score" as one of the most deviously, deceptively simple in the medium's history.
But unlike Tetris and Pong, where the simplicity of the game rules ensured instant mastery, Portal's richest puzzling gameplay only really begins at those brick wall, progression-stopper moments where most other games grind to a halt, which is itself a bit of a perspective paradox. A shame, then, that those moments only begin to appear about three quarters of the way through the game's 19 training tests. But there is plenty to admire before you get there.
Although a science testing facility is hardly the most imaginative setting for a game like Portal, the drab labs and white-tiled walls of Aperture Science belie an engaging and entertaining atmosphere, ensured primarily by the robotic female narrator, GLaDOS, who guides you through the tests. Through her hopeless attempts to inject humour and humanity into the testing despite her dense corporate-speak and exaggeratedly broken photo-booth voice, the show-stealing GLaDOS (already achieving a notoriety that threatens to overshadow the portal mechanic) ironically does succeed in injecting humour and humanity into Portal. Skilfully appropriating the ‘robot with logical emotions' archetype, she soon becomes the deadpan conduit for just about any kind of humour Valve wish to throw into the mix, be it a boorish reference to organ donation, a sly gaming euphemism ("unstationary scaffold" gets my vote) or a totally incongruous Smash TV sample.
The tests themselves are for the most part of the satisfying and smart, but not very challenging mould. There are even instructions prior to each test giving the player a pretty good idea of what lies ahead and how it ought to be tackled (although once you know this they're pretty easy to ignore). Tests are designed as much with visual flair in mind as puzzle ingenuity, but it's a symbiotic relationship for the most part; when you find yourself falling into the floor and launching out of the wall across a chasm, the fun factor is hard to dispel just because the puzzle solution was a little too quick in coming.
But the remarkable extended coda demonstrates the possibilities of the portal gun in a more traditional Half-Life level design, and redeems the game's underwhelming length and difficulty with a fascinating glimpse of what could be. Not only does it show just how completely the player has adopted the portal logic from the training sections, but it's a fluid, narrativized final level that, as one may have expected with hindsight, exploits Valve's design prowess much better than the lab tests. And it all winds up with a memorable, funny and oddly touching resolution that manages to achieve satisfying narrative closure in a game with the most threadbare of narratives.
Flaws? Well for starters it breaks the first rule of first-person platform gameplay (that is, ‘For the love of God do not try first-person platform gameplay') and compounds this potential for frustration with moving platforms, deadly floors, time-based beam puzzles and, obviously, the disorienting portal conceit itself. Also, the 'rusty innards' visual design of the final stretch feels a little misjudged and ugly, which is a shame seeing as that is when the game really kicks into gear.
Perhaps we can forgive the aforementioned soft difficulty curve, however, as I think it helps make Portal absolutely the kind of game you'll want your non-gaming friends to try. Intelligent. Non-violent. A reasonably accessible setting. Genuinely humorous. You have to hand it to Valve for adopting and adapting Narbacular Drop (the student project on which Portal is based) into something that not only adds a new dimension to their ‘kill bad guys' Half-Life gameplay, but at the same time makes their work feel more cutting edge than ever. It's Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun all over again.
So Portal does its job within the Orange Box compilation, taking a brilliant left-field idea and successfully merging it with Valve's universe over an entertaining few hours of gaming. And in its own right the game lives on a little longer in the taxing Bonus Maps and the Achievement targets that will no doubt prove furiously addictive to those with the requisite gaming genes. Disappointment that the puzzles are not as labyrinthine and mind-bending as the original trailer suggested they might be, and that this is perhaps not the definitive exploitation of such a wonderful game mechanic, should be tempered with the knowledge that once the experiment is complete, there actually looks to be more life (or should that be half-life?) in Portal than we might ever have imagined.
Disclaimer: This review is based on the PC version of the game.