Now you're thinking with portals

If you would ask me upfront I would say I've been a big Portal fan for a while, but I have to admit, I've only bought the game previous summer. Everything I knew about it before was from viral videos, gameplay descriptions and well... just the crazy promotional videos from Valve itself.

So, half a year ago I found the original Portal game heavily discounted in my local mediastore. I just couldn't resist the temptation and brought it home with me the same day. After a quick install and setting up a Steam account, I was ready to go... and I was gone for the next few hours. 

What's so fun about Portal is that it utilises a learning curve and combines humor with a great storyline into an addictive game that makes use of your brain juice and makes you wish for more...
Making you wish for more is by the way the only flaw of the game. It is just too darn short! You roughly need about 8 hours to finish the game, which is a real shame as the setting makes for so many interesting storylines and gives so many possibilities to exploit. Nevertheless, the quality of the gameplay and the design of the levels and characters is topnotch. This is where Portal really shines.

Labrat

You start the game by waking up in a facility without knowing who you are. The only thing that keeps you company is a slightly sarcastic female AI, who challenges you to do a series of tests and promises  you delicious cake at the end of these tests. ( The cake is a lie! >:( )

It soon becomes clear that you are in the playground of a huge testing facility named Aperture Science, which conducts tests on portal technology and the teleportation through them. Early on you find a portal gun which makes you able to shoot 2 portals in distinct colors, namely orange and blue. You need two portals to travel through them, as you will need to enter one to exit in the other. The portal gun is vital for progressing the testing rooms.

As you wrestle yourself through the many testchambers, you explore things that go beyond simple testing.You get to know more about the facility, what you're actually doing there and what the purpose of that sinister AI is, who indentifies herself as GLaDOS.

Characters

Next to the inovative gameplay, the one thing that makes a big impression is the characters you meet throughout the game. The most stunning fact about these characters is that they're actually objects, some with or without an AI equiped. When playing the game, I developed great fondness for my weightened companion cube, which, as GLaDOS gladly elaborates, "will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak. In the event that the Weighted Companion Cube does speak, the Enrichment Center urges you to disregard its advice." And I mean, the cube has friggin' hearts on it, what's not to love about it?

 

The next thing that has stolen my heart is a bit more lethal. As you advance to the more difficult chambers of the game, you will find some of them equiped with turrets. They can not move, yet they are quite painful if you stand in their vision scope, which is luckily not too broad. Because they are  immobile by themselves, you can hide behind them without becoming wounded by them (unless there's another turret facing you, of course!)  For being deadly sentry's they have a remarkable polite AI. If they've spotted you but lost you out of sight they ask if you're "still there", and if you tip them over to make them shut down they "don't blame you" for it.

The last one is probably the best known. GLaDOS is without a doubt the star of the game. With her witty, yet sinister remarks it becomes very hard to not love her. It is not very difficult either, because she is in fact the only character that actively communicates with you. As the game progresses she becomes more sadistic and although this is not necessarily a good thing for you, you feel there is some sort of eerie bond between the character you're playing and GLaDOS which makes the ending kind of bittersweet. (Unless you know what happens in Portal 2 of course)



There's a lot of chemistry between the characters and I'm sure that even though the story itself is great, it wouldn't be the same if it weren't for these characters. Because of this, Portal is, together with Portal 2, easily one of my favorite games. I'm secretely hoping for a spin-off as I'd love to know more of the history of Aperture science and the making of GLaDOS... There's a lot of information about it already out there and Portal 2 has partially answered that wish already, but it would be great to experience those in an actual game.

And... last but not least, the cake is not a lie!