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What a marvellous election we had here last weekend.

Say it together with me, ladies and gentlemen…

Well, it looks as though we’re about to devolve into games journalism…

I decided to write a review of Portal after realising that I’d written 2 unreasonably long emails about it to people, and that I was contemplating a 3rd. So I present my portal impressions here instead. (Note that the following review not only contains spoilers, it is little more than a pasting together of such spoilers with the sparest scraping of narrative glue.)

Portal, if you’ve somehow missed the fanfare online so far, is a first-person puzzle-solving game. It uses the Half-Life 2 engine, so its dripping with pretty, and has a well-integrated physics system, but you won’t find your usual array of BFGs in this particular title. Instead, you have an ‘Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device’. This gizmo allows you to shoot flat, non-metallic surfaces, and have them become one side of a portal. Once you have placed both sides of a portal, you (or other game-objects) can move through it, from either side to the other. The existence of this bit of sci-fi tech within a working physics system is itself a great source of fun. I probably spent nearly as much time playing with the portals and physics as a sandbox as I did actually solving puzzles.

(This may have been for the best, as the only criticism I can muster about this game is that it is short. But then, given you can buy the game on Steam for about $20, I won’t be complaining too loudly.)

Being able to use these portals allows the creation of some impossible fun. The first trick I suspect most folks try (I was no exception) is to place a portal in the ceiling, and its matching portal directly under it on the floor. This means that looking into one of the portals gives a view of an endless tunnel, much like the old ‘holding a mirror up to a mirror’ thing. If you leap into the bottom portal, you re-emerge from the top one. Now momentum is not lost going through these portals (a major puzzle solving element later) so you fall endlessly, getting faster and faster until terminal velocity is reached.

So, its pretty, its got a novel bit of tech which makes for interesting puzzles, but the real draw is the writing. I like to get involved in the world of the game I’m playing, and all-too-often the backstory for games is barely adequate (RPGs may be an exception here), so I was rather glad to finally find one with a good plot and dialogue. Not to mention a wickedly black sense of humour. Perhaps not surprising given the dialogue was written by the guys who used to run Old Man Murray (no longer updated) - an hilarious old gaming criticism site, and creators of the game “Alien versus Child Predator“.

The game plays out in a series of 19 test chambers, scrubbed and clinical looking, with the technology all looking like it was designed by Apple; all white plastic & translucent things. Your only companion (except the cube; more in a moment) throughout the game is the voice of the Artificial Intelligence who is running the lab, GLaDOS. She starts out by directing you through the game. A bit further on, she has lied to you. By the end of the game you are actively trying to destroy one another. This progression is an absolute joy to behold, and the digital warped voice-acting for GLaDOS is spot on. I suppose that the correct word is that it is awesomely well directed.

The companion cube… I must mention him. Cubes are a common element in the game. They are most often used to hold down buttons, or allow you to climb to a higher ledge. You can carry them around. On one of the levels, you are given a cube which GLaDOS describes as a ‘companion cube’. It is identical to other cubes except for a small pink ‘love heart’ on the side. On this level, you must take the cube with you everywhere, as it helps you solve a number of puzzles, and deflect nasty laser things etc. Throughout this level GLaDOS repeatedly warns you against forming an emotional attachment to the cube, and that it cannot speak. eg. “The enrichment centre reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.” You are forced to ‘euthenise’ the cube to get through to the end of the level. Later, GLaDOS accuses you of having murdered ‘him’. Such is the popularity of the cube that Valve are releasing a plush toy companion-cube.

In a few places, GLaDOS tries to motivate you by mentioning that there is cake as reward at the end of the testing. There are a few places in the game where you can get into semi-hidden rooms which contain evidence of a prior test-subject. (Food scraps, water bottles and graffiti). Again, the writing here is flawless. The walls contain messages like “The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie…” over and over, and warnings about GLaDOS. The companion cube level has a particularly heartbreaking variation on this, with a poem in memory of the cube this prior subject had to destroy, and a few photographs with the cube stuck over the faces of the people.

Once you grok the way portals work, the puzzles are not terribly challenging. Once you finish the game, however, you can go back to do chambers with extra challenges applying. Doing a room the fastest, for example, or with least use of portals, or least steps taken. There are also ‘challenge map’ versions of chambers with different conditions to make things harder.

And the game ends with a song written by the inimitable JoCo! (And sung by GLaDOS…)

In short, its just friggin’ awesome. Go play it.