“Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any contact with the chamber floor will result in an ‘unsatisfactory’ mark on your official testing record, followed by death. Good luck!”
If only there were more games like Portal. Games built around creative mechanics and simple rules that allow wildly invigorating gameplay to emerge. That excel as games prior to any consideration of story, atmosphere, or graphics, but which shine in those areas as well. That provide an experience unavailable in any other medium.
Portal is designed around a brilliant but utterly simple idea. The player can shoot a space-warping hole into one wall/floor/ceiling/platform; then shoot another somewhere else. Go in one, and you’ll come out the other. That’s it. Everything else stems from that single concept. Aside from placing the two portals, the only additional controls are standard movement and the abilities to jump, pick-up and drop. It seems so plain when explained in this way, and yet, once you intuit the rules of the game, you begin to comprehend the exceeding cleverness of Valve’s system.
At first, you’ll experiment with the simple stuff. Place the portals—one blue, one orange—right next to one another and you’ll come out in more or less the same spot. Put one on the floor and the other directly above it on the ceiling, and you can freefall at terminal velocity in an endless loop. But then you’ll get creative—you must get creative, or stay trapped inside the sterile test chambers of Aperture Labs, never to be rewarded with the delicious cake offered to all successful test subjects.
Momentum, a function of mass and velocity, is conserved between portals. In layman’s terms: speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.
Consider, for instance, jumping from a high platform in order to pick up speed, then falling through a rift on the floor below. That rift spits you out of its counterpart located high up on a wall. Thus, you emerge from the latter portal with your momentum intact, moving laterally at an incredible clip. Or, as the above graphic from the game’s Wikipedia page deftly illustrates, doing that multiple times in succession to perform incredible maneuvers.
Like Super Mario Bros., the gold standard when it comes to introducing mechanics within the flow of the game, Portal thrusts the player right into the action with challenges that exemplify the rules. You actually start the game without the splendid portal device. However, within the few short levels it takes to get your hands on it, you’ll have intuitively grasped how to play the game. And though you may not be a smooth operator at this point, you’ll be well equipped to tackle more test chambers. From that point the limiting factor in your progress is how quickly you can determine solutions to physics puzzles and execute those solutions in real-time. And there are often multiple solutions to each level—some elegant, some crude. The difficulty and complexity ramp up in perfect alignment with the player’s growing understanding of the game’s concepts, and the puzzles offer a logical progression such that the player is never totally stumped but also never let down by a lack of challenge. Before you know it, you’ll be a seasoned veteran with a repertoire of crafty tricks, able to maneuver your way around turret fire, pools of acid, floor switches, particle barriers, moving platforms, and timed doorways.
Even more exciting is the increasingly gymnastic solutions that the puzzles require—opening new portals while airborne or plunging back through a floor-portal after launching up through it along the z-axis. But by the time these situations are presented to the player, he’s built up the requisite skill set to handle them with minimal consternation. While I could drone on for quite a while futilely attempting to explain the intricacies of the physics system and the fascinating gameplay that emerges from such a small set of constraints, I will digress and simply implore the reader to play the game.
But so okay. Excellent gameplay is the core of almost every great game. Portal undeniably succeeds on that front. The problem is that players aren’t satisfied with just gameplay. You need to dress it up a little bit. Add a story. Give it some ambiance, some style, some character. Valve takes the John Carmack approach to narrative, throwing the player into the aseptic test facilities of Aperture Labs without explanation. No cinematic cutscene, no text-based intro. Just the player-character awakening in a glass cube. In fact, the only interaction that the player has with another human comes in the form of blood-red scrawls that are found when the player forays outside of the monitored chambers. While this narrative is rudimentary and marked by only a few story beats, it is tied together most impressively by GlaDOS, a superintelligent AI test monitor (voiced by Ellen McClain) who guides and antagonizes the player throughout the game. It’s actually quite surprising how much narrative ground is covered by GlaDOS’ bleakly comic omnipresence. While initially helpful and nurturing toward the player, GlaDOS’ increasingly hostile comments cast doubt on the true nature of Aperture Labs’ legitimacy and GlaDOS’ own mysterious motivations. It’s this evolving relationship with GlaDOS, her dark sense of humor, and the slow revelation of her weird complexities that give the game a remarkable sense of depth that disguises the game’s lack of plot, limited environments, and absence of human characters. This magnificent performance is capped off by a credits song sung by McClain-as-GlaDOS.
This is your fault. It didn’t have to be like this. I’m not kidding now. Turn back or I will kill you. I’m going to kill you, and all the cake is gone. You don’t even care. Do you? This is your last chance.
Initially viewed as a fun little add-on to The Orange Box, a Valve compilation dominated by Half-Life 2 and its expansions, the unassuming Portal, with its cerebral gameplay, pitch black humor, hands-off approach, and short-but-sweet story mode, quickly took on a life of its own and established a reputation as a landmark puzzle game. A spiritual successor to a free-to-play student game called Narbacular Drop, Portal was developed by a Valve team comprised of many of those same students who were hired on after a Valve employee saw the game at DigiPen’s annual career fair. In a way, the game plays like a student project, and I would posit that its excellence lies in that very fact. Simple and elegant, devoid of the usual pretenses and extraneous trappings, the entire game is built around its single gimmick and it’s all the better for it. It may be limited in many ways, but those very constraints gave the team bandwidth to polish their precious little gem to a brilliant sheen.