Portal

[Image: portal]

There are spoilers in this post. They’re behind the jump, but that only matters if you’re reading this on the front page. The warning is in bold so you’ll feel really really dumb if you read this anyway, and get mad because there are spoilers

Very few games in recent memory have grabbed me as completely as Portal. Even before The Orange Box became available, I was more excited for Portal than Episode 2 (and TF2 doesn’t really factor in for me, I always sucked at CTF, which is the basis of TF). Also, all it takes is twenty seconds in Google to find out that I am not alone in singing Portal’s praises.

I’m the odd FPS player who generally enjoys solving things more than combat, and so Portal immediately caught my attention. The atmosphere is amazing, flawless, and quite creepy. For those of you who don’t know, you are a test subject for an experimental “portal gun,” from Aperture Technologies. They make you jump through various hoops (literally) to prove, theoretically, that you can jump through said hoops.

If for some reason you haven’t played this game yet, play it now. Valve made an incredibly smart move when they picked this mod up.

There’s not much that I can say that hasn’t been said already and better by Julian Murdoch at the Gamers with Jobs review (linked above), but I feel compelled to throw my admiration into the mix.

Gamers are fond of saying that they want story. For the most part, Developers are happy to oblige, filling new games with cut scenes, trying-to-be-witty dialogue, and expansive musical scores. This can be fun, sure, but it’s not really what we want. We’re just too busy slobbering over pretty graphics to realize it.

Gamers don’t want to be told stories. We want to discover them.

Portal manages this with such subtle excellence that by the time you realize this game isn’t just 3-D Chips Challenge, you’re hopelessly hooked.

The last time I saw such a perfect marriage of atmosphere, narrative suggestion, and pure awe-inspiring level design was the original Half-Life itself.

But enough about the story. Here’s the bottom line on Portal:

The Portal Gun + Source opens up a really ridiculous amount of physics in-game. The scripting is perfect. The puzzles are just hard enough, but not too hard. The credits music is probably The Best Thing Ever. The level design is amazing. The atmosphere is engrossing. Trust the auto-save. Play this game.