Portal

October 15th, 2007 | Posted in blog posts | 1 Comment »

I’ve been playing a super-addictive game lately called Portal. It is a first-person puzzle game made by Valve, the same people who make Half Life and all its sequels.

In Portal you are a test subject for a mysterious company named Aperture Science Laboratories. You are given a special gun that can open up portals. The portals are linked, so if you enter one portal, you come out the other. Equipped with this gun, you are presented a series of puzzles in increasing difficulty that you must use the portal gun to complete and get to the exit. It is a deceptive game and it gets hard very quickly.

You have to be very clever with the portals. For example, there are some armed droids in various levels that will fire on you and kill you if they see you. You can, however, open a portal right above one of them and then open a portal right below a heavy block. The block will fall through the portal, landing on top of the droid and effectively disabling it.

You can also fall for infinity. Open a portal right above yourself, and one right below, and you will continue to fall and pick up momentum until you hit terminal velocity.

That’s one aspect of the game you will make use of in later levels; As you fall through portals, you retain the momentum you build up, so you can therefore use that to jump across normally insurmountable heights and distances. There is part of one interesting level where it seems like you are bouncing up and down as you try to move yourself higher and higher up a tower towards an exit. It is a neat effect but can make you motion sick if you aren’t prepared for it!

There are 19 official levels in the single-player game, but there are also some advanced mode maps that are incredibly difficult. The first 18 levels are pretty easy and prepare you for the real challenge of the last level. Overall, the game feels too short, but it is a very unique and enjoyable experience that I recommend any FPS fan check out. I can’t wait for a sequel, more maps, expansions, or incorporation of the portal gun into other games such as Half Life.

View the trailer here, or if you have/want the Steam downloader, check out the HD version here.