Portal Review
“Portal is a 2007 first-person puzzle-platform video game developed by Valve Corporation. The game was released in a bundle package called The Orange Box for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 on October 9, 2007, and for the PlayStation 3 on December 11, 2007. The game primarily comprises a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player’s character and simple objects using “the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device”, a device that can create inter-spatial portals between two flat planes.” – Wikiepdia Portal (video game)
Welcome to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. You are Chell. When you wake up you are in bed and a voice tells you to exit to begin testing. Your only companion throughout the game is GLaDOS, a Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System that monitors and comments on the Chell’s progress through each test chamber. You are promised cake and grief counseling after the tests, but notes scrawled onto the walls by someone known as the “Rat Man”, presumably another tester who survived hiding from GLaDOS in the walls, says “The Cake is a LIE.”
When you make your way through the last test chamber, GLaDOS lifts you up to toss you in a fire pit, your “Victory Candescence.” You use your trusty Portal Gun to escape the tube and make your way through the bowels and maintenance passages of the Enrichment Center. After a battle royale with GLaDOS where you rip her to pieces, literally, and then the room is torn apart by a Portal malfunction. The final scene shows Chell zooming through the pipes and a black forest cake, a weighted Companion Cube, and disguarded personality cores. The Personality Cores light up, one-by-one, and a robotic arm drops down and extinguishes the cake candle. The room goes dark. Credits roll and GLaDOS can be heard singing “Still Alive.” TO BE CONTINUED…
I didn’t think much of this game before I actually started playing it. I thought it was like most free games that came in bundles released with games we actually stood in line for. I began playing and I didn’t stop until I had beat the game. Literally. Took me 9 hours. I have issues with hand-brain coordination, so jumping in games is difficult for me. Despite my gaming issue, I still love this game. I think most of the puzzles have multiple solutions and it is fine to play each level over and over. Each test chamber becomes increasingly more difficult and your build upon the concepts from previous tests, even if it was from the room around the corner.
The dialog from GLaDOS really makes the game. Challenging puzzles are great, but an AI that calls you a fat orphan no one loves takes the cake. She is just so mean, and condescending, yet hysterically funny. I can play this game over and over again.
