We're so desperately alone in the world that we form an emotional attachment to a metal box with hearts on it.
This loneliness is further compounded by the Companion Cube. There is no comfort to be had from GLaDOS. She voyeuristically watches over us, putting us deliberately in harm's way, and ultimately trying to kill us directly. She calls it science, but she's no more a scientist than Josef Mengele. The closest thing we get to companionship is GLaDOS, the murderous experimentalist forcing us to perform these tests. No scientists, no research assistants, no secretaries, no janitors, no maintenance men-not even any other test subjects. Even when we break out of test chambers, there's nothing.
The lights are all on, but there's literally no one at home. The test chambers are equipped with observation rooms-plainly there should be people up there-this should be a busy, bustling science lab. The Aperture Science Enrichment Center is incomprehensibly enormous, and yet moving through it we meet not a single living thing. The game has this pervasive, soul-destroying feeling of solitude. But the result is what matters, and the result had me gripped. I realize that this is as much by accident as by design the game was designed as little more than a tech demo, and the reason there isn't a huge back story, or any real exposition, or many different characters is as much due to budgetary and timing constraints as any deliberate effort on the part of developers. It created a game that was rich in atmosphere. A journey into the darkest reaches of my psycheīut Valve didn't just create a game with a highly compelling core gameplay mechanic. The game was not just fascinating: it was deeply rewarding, too. The game had this rich sense of discovery: we were not merely following the script, we could put our own unique stamp on the puzzles. I'm not going to pretend that this was an open-ended sandbox game or anything like that, but we could solve many of the problems in our own way. Though each puzzle clearly had a "right way" to solve it, the environment was malleable enough that many times we could devise our own solutions to the problems. A game worth playing, at least to try it out. That alone made Portal a fascinating game. They were real, contiguous links between distant points in space, and they worked and felt exactly as they should. These were not dumb teleports of the kind we had in Quake. It may seem a minor thing, but to me, the fact that you could actually look through them, use them to see the back of your head, use them to create a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect, fall for miles in a room only 20 feet high, was simply incredible. We had to think with portals.Īnd, dammit, the portals actually worked. We were in a first-person shooter environment, with first-person shooter controls and contrivances, and peril around every corner, but we couldn't shoot our way out: we had to think our way out. Puzzles that would, as often or not, result in us being dissolved in acid, riddled with bullets, or vaporized by High Energy Pellets. And what did we use our ASHPD for? We used it to solve puzzles in the name of science. It was simply a way of creating shortcuts from A to B. The Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device was no gun. But we couldn't shoot back.Īll we could do was create portals-wormholes linking two parts of the level through which people and objects could walk, jump, or fall through. Indeed, we would be shot at on a regular basis. It was a first-person shooter in which we couldn't shoot. It used the basic vocabulary of the first-person shooter, a genre familiar to any gamer, and gave it a unique (well, OK, not quite unique) twist. The first Portal game was a remarkable feat. But is this game really that good, or have reviewers been caught up in Valve's promotional fervor? It is already being spoken of as a Game of the Year contender. Just as with its predecessor, the reviews of the game have been uniformly spectacular, with the game currently standing at an impressive 95 percent on Metacritic. The Potato Sack Alternative Reality Game and the prospect of unlocking the game early stoked the fires of anticipation still further. Valve's Portal 2, the long-awaited sequel to 2007's landmark Portal, was one of the most eagerly awaited games of the year. This article is going to discuss many aspects of Portal 2 in detail.