Though Portal is only one-fifth of the Half-Life 2 collection The Orange Box, it’s arguably the best part of the package, and certainly one of the most memorable gaming experiences of its year.
As Portal begins you wake up in a sterile cell, surrounded by surveillance cameras and bullet-proof glass. Feeling much akin to a lab rat, you are greeted by a female synthetic voice that politely starts giving you instructions and informs you that a portal will be opening shortly.
Said and done, an orange-rimmed, flickering oval appears out of the blue on the wall in front of you. Not having a great many options, you step through the portal out into a hallway, and take an elevator to the first testing chamber.
The first few testing floors mainly serve as an introduction to portal technology, and after passing through a few of them, you will be rewarded with the very premise of the game: the portal gun. With this handy tool you can create your own pair of portals that will let you bypass large distances.
In through one portal and out through the other, no matter where it is. With you becoming better equipped to navigate the chambers, they become increasingly complex and dangerous as you go on; all while the computerized voice gives you occasional advice and cheers you on.
Though it may share the first-person perspective and the graphics engine (and even the actual game world) with Half-Life 2, Portal is not a shooter – it’s actually tricky to label by traditional means, but we would call it a puzzle/adventure game. The portal technology itself is a lot of fun to use.
Not only do objects move through portals, they also retain whatever physical properties, such as velocity, that they had when going in. If you place one in the ceiling above you and one on the floor right below your feet, you will be falling forever, or until you decide to move one of the portals.
If you place them on walls opposite of each other, you can look through one and get an illusion of endless distance, seeing yourself from behind, looking through a never-ending series of smaller and smaller portals. Fun as the portals are though, this wouldn’t amount to much more than a gimmicky and well-done puzzle game if there weren’t more to it.
After awhile, the dryly humorous synthetic voice that guides you along develops into a great character of its own right, and as you make your way through the chambers, the game will take on a more psychological and slightly disturbing nature.
You will come to notice cracks in the polished façade of the sterile, science-lab like rooms you pass through – signs that others have been there before you, and that some things may not be what they seem.
If there is a downside to Portal, it is that it’s short. At 5-6 hours or less depending on your puzzle familiarity, you can readily complete the game in one sitting. However, brilliant writing and design make it feel just right, and it seems to come to and end just about when it’s supposed to. Adding on more hours wouldn’t really have served to make the game any better.
It should say something about the quality of Portal though, that even with its modest length, it would make the Orange Box worthy of purchase by itself.
Half-Life? You’ve played other games like it.
Team Fortress? Been there.
But we dare say that you have never played a game quite like Portal before. It may only be a couple of hours long, but they will rank among the most refreshing and witty hours you have invested in gaming for a long time.
So do yourself a favour and give it a shot. If you’re anything like us, you will find that trigger-happy little robots who attempt to kill you on sight, as well as weighted metallic cubes with pink hearts printed on them; are both eminently lovable.
