"Do you like fun? Do you laugh at funny jokes? If so, you should play Portal."

Videogames are often immersive experiences, but usually with a pronounced hitch in said immersion: the stories in videogames, while occasionally worthy of the word “story”, are more often laughable, incoherent, or distracting to the point of eliminating the chance for a player to have true empathy. We've probably all played videogames that surprised us with stellar storylines and real emotional tension, but I think most of us would agree that those are the exceptions. As a general rule, puzzle games have some of the worst stories of any genre, built in as a vague jumpstart or shallow excuse for the true meat of the puzzle game: gameplay. How strange then that one of the best stories ever in a videogame has arrived in developer Valve's “first-person puzzle” offering: Portal.

Before we get to the story, however, let us examine how incredible (if incredibly short) the rest of the game is. The gameplay is really unlike anything you've ever played before. Valve, since its initial offering in Half-Life, has often focused on physics as an important and fun aspect of gameplay, and Portal takes this idea to new heights, stretching a) the laws of physics and b) the player's ability to reason, with a new kind of gameplay mechanic.

This mechanic is fairly simple. The player, after a bit of warm-up training to adjust to the core concept, is able to put a kind of wormhole on almost any surface, be it a wall, ceiling, or floor. They may have two such wormholes, or “portals”, in existence at any time (one whose rim is framed with an orange halo, the other a blue halo). By entering one portal, they will come out through the other, no matter the distance between these two portals. So if they put one portal on a wall and another portal on the wall directly across the room, they can traverse the distance of the room in a single step. This, of course, leads to some fun experimenting such as putting one portal on the floor and another on the ceiling directly above and thereby falling an infinite distance. Add in that you can see multiple copies of “yourself” (“yourself” being in this case a woman whose character, background, motives, and even name are unknown--at least until you consult the internet) falling by looking down through a seemingly infinite number of portals, and you have the potential for some heady, dizzying gameplay.

Now on top of that, add one more concept: the momentum with which you enter one portal carries over to your exit from the other portal. So, if one portal is high up on a wall and another on the floor a fair distance below, you can fall down into the portal on the floor and you sail out the portal high up on the wall and across the room. There is sheer, euphoric joy—at least for this reviewer—in seeing this in action.

So, the player utilizes this incredible (and incredibly fun) ability to make progress through a series of chambers featuring moving platforms, buttons that need depressing, and vats of acid (among other things). But why is your character in this series of chambers? What is her purpose? It is here that Portal sets itself apart from most videogames by offering not only an awesome series of puzzles, but an awesome story to go with them.






(SPOILERS NOTE: if you have not played this game and think you may ever play it, stop reading here as I'm basically planning to blow the plot wide open in discussing why I think this game is so very, very good.)






At the beginning of the game, your character wakes up in a small chamber with a countdown running outside this chamber; just as you are beginning to consider whether this countdown is ominous, a computerized, female voice with no visible source suddenly speaks, welcoming you and giving you some advice and instruction on what is about to happen (though interestingly, the most important bit of advice is lost to an apparent computer glitch). Then your first set of portals is opened for you, as you do not possess the ability to create them yet. Exiting the chamber (and seeing yourself doing so through the miracle of portals), you see a small, translucent observation window high above, though no people are visible through it. You make your way the only way you can to an elevator. The elevator's padding is very grimy and the elevator shudders and whines unpleasantly as it goes up. Then you step out of the elevator and into the next antiseptic test chamber numbered “01”, noting that there are 19 test chambers to progress through, and the computer voice begins speaking again.

As you make your way through the game, the computer voice is your only company. It offers advice, sterile encouragement, sarcastic commentary, and ominous warnings. Any glances into the observation windows scattered throughout the game reveal no people, and after awhile, you wonder why. The computer voice speaks always in the first-person plural as “we” or “Aperture Science”, but there is no visible “we” in the series of test chambers.

The computer voice's commentary is often hilarious in its understatement or quiet sarcasm, even as it is foreboding. For instance: "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!"

Players seeking out everything in the game will find disturbing remnants of people who went through the test chambers before you: cryptic messages on the wall, empty water jugs, and sometimes simply the one word “help”.

Eventually, you may begin to distrust the computer voice and even hate it.

At the end of the 19th and final test chamber, a moving platform guides you toward a fire, the computer voice speaking of your “victory candescence” and cheerfully saying goodbye. You manage to get to a safe spot and suddenly the computer voice is irate and speaks in the first-person singular (using the term “I” for the first time) before going back to the first-person plural and attempting to get you to cooperate and not move. You, of course, do not, and escape into the bowels of the facility, making progress however you can with the use of portals, track down the source of the voice, and, of course, have a climactic showdown.

The genius of the game is in the seemingly harmless computer voice gradually becoming a threatening, hostile personality, the ultimate “Big Sister” watching your every move and hoping for your death. The antagonist of the story is with you from the beginning, but only eventually do you discover that it IS your antagonist. The backstory is for you to fill in: how did this rogue A.I. take over the facility? How many people has it killed before it attempted to kill you?

GLaDOS (or Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) is one of the best villains (one of the best characters, really) in videogame history: funny, disturbing, threatening, and present at all times. Killing your would-be killer has rarely been so satisfying.

In short, the reason that Portal is not merely a very good game but a great one, is in the developers creating a nicely self-contained plot with a grand total of two characters (unless you count the talking turrets and the silent metal cube with hearts on it) on top of creating a series of satisfying puzzles. There is atmosphere to spare, the jokes are hilarious, the core game mechanic is extremely fun to see in action, and there is an amazingly catchy, in-character song for our villain to close the action. For me, it ranks as a top 10 all-time videogame experience (and I had absolutely no knowledge of the hype before playing it), and the only bad thing about it is that it is so short.

If that means they saved a lot of good ideas for the already-announced Portal 2, then I'll have nothing to complain about soon.

Play this game. Today.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 04/28/08