Portal - an Orange Box of reviews and impressions
Usually when I am playing a game I write down my first impressions and then later on a mini review once I have completed it. With Portal however it all happened in one day.
I was at a friend’s place yesterday when I decided to have a go at Portal to see what the fuss was all about. The gaming world had been buzzing lately about this surprise hit, one of the 5 games found in Valve’s
The game starts you off with the female computer voice making the introductions and giving you a rundown of what you have to do. You are given a portal gun with which you can place portals on surfaces be they walls, ceilings, floors. When you go inside one portal you exit the other. Place boxes on switches to open doors, go through portals to get to non accessible areas and so on. It is a FPS puzzle game which plays a lot with the 3 dimensional environments.
The game does a great job of easing you into it although I did find that it leaves the best part of it until near end of the game. It only really starts to be challenging and mind blowing from the 16th-17th level onwards, out of a total of a total 19.
What I really loved about this game is that it basically has only a handful of variables to consider when tackling a situation but it still manages to challenge you to find the way to solve it. It is a not a trial and error puzzle game. Everything you do is logical and once you get into how the game works, figuring it out becomes second nature but it never loses its magic and thrill when you are solving a specific puzzle.
It has a story to tell but it is more abstract than actual and is loosely set in Half Life’s world. It is a preview on how this portal gun and puzzles will be implemented in Valve’s later games.
The game will take you around 5 hours to complete and it will never frustrate you. I got stuck in one particular situation for around 30 to 45 minutes only because I failed to “read the instructions”. Completely my fault.
Much has been said about the humour of the female computer voice but to be honest I did not pay any attention to it (except for the last level) as I was too engrossed in the puzzles so I cannot give an opinion on that.
It is a short but charming game which comes truly alive in the later stages. I don’t think I have ever played a game on a console before where I would just pause and just walk up down “calculating” in my head the solution to a puzzle. A refreshing game that plays tricks with your mind. You will never see a room the same way again.