Portal 1 Reivew : Late To The Party As Usual

  Now I like puzzle games just as much as the next gamer who loves to be frustrated, but surprisingly I haven't finished many of them. I started to think I wasn't good at puzzles since when I get stumped, I give up. But this time was different. Portal has been played, laughed at, cursed at, completed, cheered at, played again, cried at, and played even more. Do you get my gist? Yes, I had trouble with some puzzles, but I learned that if I just put the game down for a day or even a few hours and come back to it, I would find the solution! What is it about Portal that kept me entertained? Well, for one, GlaDOS. GlaDOS is the robot's voice the player hears when entering the game, but let me tell you a few things before this.

Portal's main menu is simplistic, but gives off a slight ominous vibe which intrigued the mystery-lover in me. The mechanics of the menu screen rotates the viewer halfway around the room. A toilet, sleep-chamber, conspicuous IV-rack, and clock radio reside in a glass room in the center of the outer room. The glass room is situated above what appears to be a fiery, presumably lava pit. Little can be seen of it, but much can be assumed. The overall room's white balance is skewed to look a soft blue from the florescent light emissions, as well as a few glowing cyan wall strips and buttons. There is an eerie white cylindrical camera above the main door with a peering red eye which one can only imagine that one's every move is being observed in this facility.

Upon entering the game you find yourself in that glass room with an unstably tuned robot voice welcoming you “again” to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. She speaks briefly about beginning a series of tests and then suddenly an orange portal opens in your room and a blue one can be seen in the hall. Through the glass wall, as you stand in front of the orange portal, you can see the image of yourself in the blue portal, and may be alarmed as I was to discover you're wearing an orange outfit much like an inmate or citizen of a possibly-gone-horribly-wrong medical ward.

 The hallway was dark....

 The first few levels is much like a tutorial before you are able to use the portal gun, and then also just using 1 portal instead of both. I was thankful for these few levels before the puzzles started getting a little more complicated because quite frankly when I began this game I knew three things: Robot named GLaDOS is amazingly witty but dry, its a puzzle game, everyone is still talking about the game. Now you aren't killing anything with this gun. It is what it says it is: a portal gun. You make portals, in case that wasn't clear. This is another reason I enjoy puzzle games because you aren't shooting everything to a bloody pulp. The only creatures you replicate death to are the Turrets which you are more like "disabling." They are also sentient robots, or so is hinted at as they make comments like "Please put me down," or "Hello, target acquired  :) Dispensing product," "Would you come over here? Hello? Hello? There you are." Their immensely cute, sincere voices would make any person happy, and you almost feel bad having to take the out in order to finish the level. Once you experience all the "type of" tutorials, the challenges begin. Mind bending, thought-wrenching, fist-slamming puzzles await you! The variety of challenges are good, I never felt like I was just doing "one more of this kind, ugh". You have to come up with new ways to "think with portals" in several different environments, some involving insta-death (also known as toxic sludge), some have barely any walls that can have portals applied to them, sometimes you have to vault yourself across the room, or drop cubes (an item Portal also focuses on) onto floor buttons, or turrets, or anything you can think of.

But let me say, the game felt really short. If I had played it all in one day, it might have only taken me 3-4 hours.  Even so, it is a game that can be played over and over, and once you reach the end you can go back to the test chambers where you can play similar puzzles to the ones you already experienced but they'll have specific new challenges, like how many steps you can take to complete it or how many new portals you can open. Cool stuff like that.

So, although I was late to the party of Portal 1, I believe in retrospective, it's held up pretty well as a game. I've honestly never spoken to anyone who didn't like the game. If you buy through  Steam, it's only $9.99, but don't run off yet, you can buy The Orange Box for only $19.99 (and it includes 5 Valve games: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode One, Half-Life 2 Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress - which are also all fun games). 

Happy Portaling!

Do I recommend this? Oh, yes. Yes, I do.