For this blog, I’d like to talk about one of the most unique games that I’ve ever played: Portal. There have been two games released, the first in 2007 and the sequel in 2011. Portal can be considered a first-person puzzle game, which sounds kind of strange and doesn’t do a very good job of explaining it, but that’s the basic genre. The game is set in a dystopic future in which a company called Aperture Science runs endless tests on human test subjects. You play as one of the last surviving test subjects, a nonverbal character named Chell. The antagonist of the game is a character named GLaDOS, a robotic artificial intelligence that has taken over the abandoned testing facilities of Aperture and has become obsessed with running tests. As Chell, you must use the resources available to you to solve the tests and work your way through the game, eventually confronting GLaDOS in an attempt to escape.
What makes Portal so unique is stated in the name of the game. The main mechanism for solving all of the puzzles is something called a portal gun. The portal gun allows you to shoot two portals, one blue and one orange, on certain surfaces in the game. When you walk through one of them, you come out the other, no matter where it is. The game begins with some very easy puzzles as a form of tutorial. For example, in a room where the exit is significantly higher than you can jump, you must shoot a portal in front of you, where you can reach it, and one on the upper level. You walk through the one in front of you, come out next to the exit, and walk out the door. After those introduction levels, the game quickly becomes exponentially more difficult as more mechanisms are introduced and the puzzle rooms themselves become more complex. While I was playing through Portal 2, there were several sections where I would be stuck on the same level for more than half an hour. It can become immensely frustrating as you desperately try to come up with new solutions, but once you finally figure it out, the feeling of satisfaction is even better.
If all of this doesn’t sound complicated enough, Portal 2 also introduced a multiplayer mode which requires two players to work together to solve puzzles. Each player controls their own two portals, but either player can use either set. One of my good friends and I decided to sit down for a day and just work straight through the game, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more frustrated with someone than I was that day. Teamwork is almost impossible to maintain; every level started with each of us looking at the chamber ourselves, trying out a few ideas, then we would spend the next 5 minutes arguing about the right solution. Once we finally started executing the solution, the frustration only increased because being half a second late on shooting a portal would often mean the death of the other player and we would have to restart something that we had spent 10 minutes on. Regardless, it was one of the best experiences that I’ve ever had in a video game and my friend and I both agreed an experience like that can only bring you closer.
Portal sticks out to me so much just because of how uniquely challenging it is. I’ve played a lot of hard games in my life, but usually those games are hard either because the artificial intelligence is meant to be better than you and kill you instantly or it’s an online game where you simply aren’t as mechanically as good as the other players and you can’t win. With Portal, though, the difficulty comes not from other players or monsters running around and killing you before you can get started, but instead provides an intellectual challenge that forces you to think in a unique way in order to discover the solution that you know must exist somehow. Every level you clear makes you feel like a genius, and the discovery process itself is incredibly rewarding. Portal is definitely a game I’ll be coming back to, and I can’t wait for the next sequel.