ZarkSeven

Introduction

Portal is a small game included in The Orange Box by Valve. Three to five hours tops from start to finish, not counting all the achievements you can get with the Xbox 360 version. But it might be worth buying The Orange Box all by itself…

Story

It’s difficult to describe the story of Portal without giving too much away, and this is one game where saying too much would definitely spoil it. You play a female character named Chell who is seeking a way out of a facility called The Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center. Your sole “companion” as it were is a female voice coming through the facilities intercom system. In essence, the game is a series of increasingly difficult puzzles, the solving of each allowing you to go to the next level of the facility.

Gameplay

The game is played from a first-person perspective, much like Half-Life 2. I presume the game engine is the same, and the game universe is the same too, since Aperture Science Inc. is a fictional company in Half-Life. Unlike most first person type games, your character in Portal has no health bar on screen, although you can take damage and die. The controls are very simple as well, consisting on the Xbox 360 of using the 2 trigger buttons, the green button, and the right shoulder button. That’s it.

In order to traverse from level to level, you have to solve the puzzles in each level. You do this primarily through the use of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. The portal gun can be used to create a portal from one place to another through which you can travel. The portals themselves are created by the trigger buttons on the controller. One trigger is used to create one end of a portal, and the other trigger is used to create the other end. Once both ends are created, you can physically travel through the portal. So can objects, or missiles, or whatnot. There are only particular kinds of surfaces that these portal holes can be created on, but they can be on walls, floors, or ceilings.

The essence of gameplay is to use these portals to solve the puzzles, whether it’s moving yourself from one place to another, or opening doors, or diverting energy balls, or whatever. You can also pick up some objects, allowing you move some things around to your advantage, like the Weighted Storage Cube, which can divert energy balls, or can be jumped on to reach higher areas, etc.

Gravity is also used greatly to your advantage, as you can create a portal end down in a pit, and another in the side of a wall, and you can jump down through the end in the pit to fling yourself out of the wall side and across a room, perhaps over a barrier or onto a ledge that would otherwise be unreachable. That sort of thing is a major aspect of the game, as you learn to maneuver yourself from one area to the next.

The heart of Portal, and what really sets it apart, is the comedic aspect of it, coming mostly from your disembodied voice companion. It’s hard to talk about it without major spoilers, but suffice it to say that cake has never played such an important role in a game. You can’t play Portal with the sound off. You’d miss the whole essence of the game. Items such as the Weighted Companion Cube, also generate a few chuckles.

Internet chatter about the game revolves mostly around the end, specifically a song that plays during the end credits. The song was written by Jonathan Coulton (of Code Monkey fame), and the song and end credits almost make the game worth playing by itself. It’s full of spoilers, so I’d avoid it if you are planning on playing the game, but suffice it to say it’s probably the funnest little game tune to come along in ages.

Extras

Being a short game in and of itself, there are no real extras per se. There are, however, numerous achievements in the Xbox 360 game that would require a lot of replay, such as completing the levels in under a certain amount of time, falling a certain distance, jumping a certain distance, and so forth.

Conclusion

Portal isn’t your typical first-person shooter (okay, it’s not really a shooter even, more like an action/puzzle game), but that uniqueness sets it apart and makes it the little jewel of The Orange Box. If Half-Life 2 with Episodes 1 and 2 don’t convince you to buy The Orange Box, not to mention Team Fortress 2, do yourself a favor and pick it up for Portal. You won’t be disappointed.

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