"This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction."
It's not often I sit down to play a game that completely burns new neural pathways into my brain before I grasp the mechanics ... but that's exactly what I went through when I began playing Portal, Valve's truly amazing first-person puzzle game. Sure, every science fiction fan has toyed with the idea of being able to create a gateway that bends or tunnels through space. We've all thought, "Man, that would be so COOL!" Finally, thanks to the people at Valve, we get a glimpse of what that kind of power is like.
You, as the player, wake up in a sealed room with clear walls, a tube-like bed, a checklist and a radio. It's not long until you are addressed by GLaDOS, your guide through the Portal experience, who begins instructing you and will continue to do so as you progress through the game.
Each "level" in Portal is a puzzle in which the goal is simply to make it to the elevator without dying. The ultimate goal of making it through the levels is to get some cake. Mmm ... cake. All of your goals can be accomplished by using a portal gun to create gateways to walk, run and fall through. You also have to use your problem-solving skills to get around a few obstacles.
To be honest, the concept of portaling is hard to grasp at first. Until you've played with it, there's no way to understand the head-trip that comes while learning to work the portals. The game tries to make it easier on you by introducing the portals first, and eventually, you get the guns to create the portals.
The portal concept sounds simple enough: You have the ability to fire two types of portals: blue and orange. Go through the orange portal, and come out the blue portal. Go through the blue portal, and come out the orange portal. Transporters have been done before in plenty of games, but these portals can affix themselves to virtually any surface, and you can actually SEE through the portals to your destination. It's a bit trippy when you look through a portal and first see yourself looking through a portal. It's the whole mirror-in-mirror-in-mirror effect.
The puzzles themselves are really a teaching tool for the player. You learn how the basic mechanic works. Then you begin to use portals to transport objects, remove cameras, or deflect energy or bullets. You can also "fling" yourself by falling into a portal on the floor and exiting through another portal high on the wall (at the speed you were originally falling from). This can get a bit dizzying if you fall through the portal on the floor, exit the portal on the wall, fall through the portal on the floor, exit the portal on the wall ... you get the idea. Each puzzle builds on skills you learned in the last, so the puzzles get progressively more difficult.
The first play through can be tough, but it's relatively simple once you get the hang of the portals. The advanced levels and bonus trials opened once you beat the game are a bit more difficult. The advanced levels take a few of the levels at which you've already succeeded and add more danger or take away something that was useful — like portal space (surfaces on which you can create portals). The bonus levels take the original level and give you a goal to beat, such as a best time, fewest steps or least portals. These definitely have stumped me some but add to the replayability of the game.
The experience of Portal is one that no gamer should miss. It has an amazing and truly new gameplay mechanic, a storyline that will grip you from the moment you sit down to play and the best voice acting that I have ever heard. The GLaDOS character is an hilarious narrator and couldn't be voiced any better. In my opinion, she is reason enough to give Portal a try. Her commentary is witty, humorous and quite unexpected for an artificial intelligence that is supposed to be monitoring science laboratories. I'd go into more detail, but the game is so short that saying much more about this character and the storyline might lessen the experience.
Honestly, there's no way I can say enough good things about this game. If there is anything, it's that I wish there were more of it to play. Do yourself a favor ... go buy this game, or download it from Steam. If you have an NVidia card, you can get the first slice for free. However you choose to do it, just get this game and play it.
