Portal Review
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Posted October 15th, 2007 at 12:34pm
by Kit Pierce
On the surface, Portal looks like a game you may have played before — perhaps like several of those games, but appearances are deceiving. It doesn’t take long to see that Portal is a rare game, one that eases you into familiarity before turning you upside down headlong into a completely new experience.
Look familiar?Even though it’s produced by a team on the inside at Valve, Portal is an indie game at heart. It derives a direct lineage from the Senior project of several students at DigiPen, Narbacular Drop. Narbacular Drop won lots of honors in indie game competitions you’ve probably never heard of unless you follow the indie dev circles. That’s okay if you’ve never heard of Narbacular Drop or its awards, but you need to know this: Indie games are important to the game industry. While the big studios are sill turning out multi-million dollar riffs of the same old FPS, the real ideas are being developed by these indie teams. The games that are changing the face of the industry are ones you may never see, but lucky for you the ideas eventually filter up. Sometimes, like in the case of Portal, the small teams make good and get absorbed into the big guys. Valve clearly knew a good thing when they saw it: the original Narbacular Drop team stayed intact for the development of Portal, and still remains a team at the time of Portal’s release.
(Narbacular Drop is still available for download, and if you’re interested in checking out the mother of Portal.)
First Look at Yourself.
That spirit and fire of the indie dev team is alive and well in Portal, and that’s why we love games like this. Portal has one of the most fundamentally original gameplay mechanics available today.
I’m not saying that you’ve never seen portals in games before. Fans of Prey have cried foul at the concept behind Portal, for instance, but the comparison between the two games is not apt. Portal is a non-violent game — a mainstream non-violent game — with portal play central to the entire game. You have no weapons per se, just a device that can open one or two local dimensional gates through which you and objects can pass. You are a test subject in a lab, and you have to use this portal gun to manipulate your environment and the objects in it to advance through levels. The only offense you have is to set up chains of causalities that will knock over the occasional machine gun turret before it can pepper you with lead. While your character can be the subject of violence, you never perform that violence. This is important. Think about all the non-casual games you enjoy playing and then count how many are non-violent. I come up with one: Portal.
Brainy puzzles.Just talking about the mechanic doesn’t do justice to this game. Portal has a quality that I can only attribute to its indie roots. The attitude of the game, the wit, its focus are unlike any I’ve seen in a long time. Some critics decry the length of the game, but I disagree totally. The length of the story is perfect. Portal is a dazzling short story in a sea of mediocre novels — fast paced, intense, and full of surprises, the story kept me going straight through until I hit bed, then I woke up the next morning and played it through again. If Jean Paul Sartre wrote stories for video games, this would be a good candidate for him. In it, two characters face off: you and one of the most engaging NPCs I haven’t encountered since Leela (and eventually Durandal) of Marathon. The voice acting in the game is incredible, engaging, and some of the best I’ve ever heard. The atmosphere established by the art and sound direction helps draw you through an extremely satisfying story arc, and the reward for getting to the end is an enchanting credits song written by Johnathon Coulton. The song alone is worth playing Portal through at least once.
Laws of PhysicsBeyond the story, Portal has achievements and challenge modes. When you’re given a time limit, a limit to the number of portals you can open, or a limit to the number of steps you can take, you start thinking in wildly different ways about the same puzzles. Other achievements invite the player to experiment with wide-scale vandalism or bending the rules of physics. Figure out how to drop 30,000 feet in one fall and you’ll get the Terminal Velocity achievement, for example. Portal’s mechanic begs to be exploited in-game. On youtube, there’s a speed run for one of the levels that involves bypassing the puzzle elements almost entirely and going straight to stacking up various lab equipment in a precarious tower you can climb straight to the exit. Thinking in unconventional ways as I approached the puzzles quickly became second nature and extremely satisfying, and I’m still working at speed solutions to several of the puzzles.
Turret, denied!If that wasn’t enough of a reason to keep coming back, Portal is built on Valve’s Source engine, and the modders out there who have been hacking on Half-Life 2 are already releasing new maps and challenges for Portal mere days after the game’s official release. I expect to see many more maps as the weeks go on.
I have two one criticism of Portal — a criticism of the Source engine. I found the occasional loading screen a minor nuisance. I wish the smarty-guys at Valve would figure out a decent system of level streaming. The second is with marketing. I would gladly pay $20-$30 for Portal, but it’s not available as a stand-alone game right now. The only way to get it is in the Orange Box. Now, the Orange Box is brimming with gaming value, so it’s a small matter, but selling Portal only as a bundle will lose some audience for this fantastic game. Wait, $20 direct from Steam, Thanks Aaron! How did I miss that?
I unreservedly recommend Portal. With its exceedingly tight story and phenominal execution of the central mechanic of the title, Portal is one of the best games I’ve played in years.
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Aaron Denney
October 15th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
It’s available separately through steam, isn’t it?
Kit Pierce
October 15th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Thanks, Aaron. Fixed the article. Seriously, how did I miss that?
Adam Black
October 15th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
I think my favorite part of Portal (on top of everything you’ve already mentioned) was how you discover Aperture Laboratories to be a dumbed-down, neurotic version of Black Mesa.
Where do you, as a budding scientist, get hired when Black Mesa turns you down? Aperture Laboratories, of course! We do what we must, because we can! For the good of all of us (except the ones who are dead)! I can only imagine the 401K plan for the poor employees of this place.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into the end song, the overall dialogue of the computer, and that true-to-life eye-gougingly bad powerpoint slideshow you run across towards the end. But it sure seemed that way to me.
Kit Pierce
October 15th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Adam, have you visited http://www.aperturescience.com ?
You can find the login credentials in-game. Probably on google, too. I’ll pretend to be spoiler free and not add it here.
Anyway, the Aperture Science website will tell you quite a bit about the depth and breadth of Aperture’s corporate neuroses.
Justin George
October 16th, 2007 at 1:19 am
I have to say, I immediately thought of five games I play routinely that don’t involve violence, in general. That’s not to say that you can’t be violent in them, merely that they don’t revolve centrally around it.
Sim City series, The Sims, Tropico, and the Railroad Tycoon series.
There are more like them, of course, but those I don’t play as regularly.
Justin George
October 16th, 2007 at 1:20 am
Oops, forgot to add flight simulators, which you can argue whether that’s a game or not, but still.
Kit Pierce
October 16th, 2007 at 1:26 am
I’d put the sims firmly into the casual category, myself. Though the flight sims take a certain kind of hardcore player, don’t they?
Cevius
November 6th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
The sims as being not violent? I guess its how you play it…
Personally i think trapping an entire family in a room with no doors, nothing but wooden furniture and a fireplace on every free space on the walls is paramount to true evil and violent to boot. All those burning people!
Good times.
Throughmyshadow
December 19th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
I totally agree with everything you said. Portal is a true gem.
It makes you think in a radically different way when you play it, and any game that can do that, is awsoume in my book.