Portal (2007)

I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure

Game number 49 was Portal. Portal is a puzzle game where the player has to go through a series of different rooms and figure out the way to the next elevator. The main gimmick of the game is that there are blue and orange circles that act as the two sides of a portal. You need to put the portals in the correct places to figure out how to get around.

Graphics/Sound: The graphics and sound here are fine. I don’t think there was ever a time where Portal was pushing the limits of the 360, but the aesthetic of a clean, white research facility was fun. The voice acting in this game was done very well and portal wouldn’t have the lasting appeal that it does without the many pieces of dialogue in the game. I also really love the song. (6/10)

Story: The story of Portal is much more deep than it may first seem. The player finds themselves in a research facility and forced to perform a series of tests. As these tests go on there becomes some deadly enemies and the research facility may not be as normal as you may have once believed. Telling you anything more is spoiling things and a good amount of fun in this game is figuring out the mystery of the facility you are in. (7/10)

Gameplay: The bread and butter of Portal is the gameplay. The Portal gun is an actual stroke of genius! It is such a fun gun to use and it is so entertaining to figure your way through these rooms. Portal is exceptionally good at creating fun puzzles that are just the right difficulty. I don’t think most people are struggling super hard to figure out what to do here, but it isn’t necessarily apparent at first glance either. The physics system in Portal is also really cool and you can make your character fly really far by spending a good amount of time falling through portals! Portal really nails its gameplay system. (9/10)

My experience: This was my first time playing either Portal game. Yes, really! I made it through the entire lifespan of the Xbox 360 and never picked up this masterpiece. Everyone always talked about it being one of the greatest games of all time and I just sorta missed it. The good news is that I enjoyed every minute of my time! I guess I would say that I do not think the game was super deep and that it may have only had about an hour and a half of time in it. I don’t see myself ever replaying Portal now that it is done. I would like to see if Portal 2 is able to take the tech demo that is essentially Portal 1 and really push it to the next level! Nevertheless, I had a great time here. (8/10)

Overall, I think that Portal may be considered essential play for anyone who is really big into the Xbox 360 era of gaming. I don’t think there is really anyone who is going to pick this game up and have a bad time. It's only a couple hours long, you should all go out and play it! (8/10)

I spent 2 hours, 10 minutes, and 50 seconds playing Portal.

I have spent a total of 496 hours and 51 minutes on the Road To 360 challenge so far.

Next Game: Assassin’s Creed

Portal with RTX looks and feels like the game as I remember playing it in 2007. Of course, it looks wildly better than it actually did in 2007. The updated materials and lightning in this version make the visuals feel modern. The gameplay feels unchanged, but I wouldn't be surprised if a Digital Foundry analysis shows more quality-of-life updates than I realized.

I figured I'd play for a bit and quit but I just kept going till the end.

Performance-wise, I was hitting 60 most of the time but had some drops to around 55 in some areas, with an RTX 3080ti at 1440p. The RTX settings (accessible in their own menu after hitting Alt+X) changed in real time, which was nice, but I wasn't able to quickly figure out which options had a big performance impact. I'll leave optimizing the settings to the professionals, I'm just glad I got to see what RTX can do in a game I love.

When the Orange Box came out in 2007, I wasn't remotely interested in Half-Life or Team Fortress 2. But one day, I saw a friend of mine playing Portal on his computer. That was like a revelation for me—I had no idea games like this could exist. I needed to play it, which I did, and Portal soon became my favorite game. To this day it still is.

Portal is a first-person puzzle game set in a facility called the "Enrichment Center". You're a test subject in some kind of experiment that involves dimensional portals. You must go from room to room solving puzzles with your portalgun, as a sarcastic A.I. comments on your progress.

I think most people know already how it works, but I'll still explain: using the portalgun, you can place two connected portals on almost any flat surface. The portals connect two points of space, so that anything that passes through travels from one point to another seamlessly. You can also see through portals. This is disconcerting at first, because they look just like holes in the walls. Realizing that you're just traveling from and to various points of the same room is an amazing experience that I never really found anywhere else after.

The portals mechanic redefines the way you think about and move inside a three-dimensional space. Portal's rooms are bleak, flat and mostly devoid of details, but with so many possibilities for portal-based tricks and stunts, they become playgrounds with infinite potential.

This potential is so great that even the developers weren't able to anticipate all the possible solutions for some of their puzzles. One room can be solved in a few seconds, whereas the intended solution takes about 10 minutes to execute. My favorite room is probably the one from that picture above; I could think of maybe five different ways to complete it, some more elegant than others.

This isn't just about the puzzles, though. Any problem Portal presents you can be solved in various ways. Take the turrets for instance. Turrets will shoot at you until you tip them over. You can do that by grabbing them, shooting portals beneath them, or you can drop cubes on them. Combined with the physics engine, the portals mechanic allows you to deal with challenges in creative ways, which makes the game very enjoyable to replay.

Now I should say something about the story and atmosphere, the second great quality of Portal. The story is built around a twist, which can't be as effective today, because Portal 2 expanded upon what was established in the first game, and it received a lot of attention. I think it's a shame; Portal was interesting for its eerie atmosphere and elusive backstory. The mere fact that GLaDOS is a character at all, with her own motivations, was a surprise back then. Elements like the infamous "The cake is a lie" graffiti were part of that revelation and contributed to the overall tone of the game: somewhat comedic, but ominous too. You don't really know what the Enrichment Center is about, you barely expect an actual story to be there, but through subtle hints the game suggests something sinister is going on behind the scenes.

I wish I could recommend Portal to anyone. The truth is I'm not sure someone who already played Portal 2 will be as impressed by the original game. But I'll strongly disagree that Portal 2 is the definitive experience. It is an excellent game, sure, but in my opinion it didn't retain all the best aspects of the original.

But I'm not writing a review of Portal 2, so I'll leave it at that. I feel like I could seriously call Portal a perfect game. I don't really care that it's so short, because somehow I never got tired of playing it again, and again, and again. So I guess it's a perfect game for me at least!

Since I catch myself in analysis-paralysis when deciding on a game to play (and then feeling like I should play another game after I've chosen), I decided to start playing through all my Steam games in order of when I got them. That system consistently feels fair for me to stick with, mainly just as a way to prevent wasted time stalling.

That said, with my first game being Portal, I've already played through it countless times. So I figured that the moment I'd be sick of it, I'd move on to the next game on the list. Instead tho, I ended up trying the radio achievement challenge... missing 1 radio in the end. Ah well, it was a nice excuse to play through it all again (only a couple hours). I just wish I could mute the dialog -- that's the least replayable aspect of this game imo.

Also, as inventive as this game is objectively, its style, themes, and focus don't really captivate my interests all that much personally. I come out of it feeling kinda gross tbh (as opposed to playing hours of any good NES/SNES or 2D-indie game).

Anyway, I'll probably continue making status updates for each game as I continue down my list.

(Part of the Orange Box, however I decided to review the games alone and then review the bundle.)

Wow. As the credits roll in this game, I'm literally amazed. This game managed to have me laughing, thinking and searching for cake. At the same time. The game's plot is pretty simple until you are extremely advanced into the game. So I won't spoil it for you. The premise is this: You are a woman that is realizing tests under the guidance of an unknown robotic voice (Brilliantly voiced by Ellen McLain) that tells you that you will receive a cake at the end of all the tests. It's really simple throughout the entire game (until you reach the final test chamber) but that's really not the reason you should play this game. The gameplay in this game is awesome. You are given a portal gun, which can make two kinds of portals, an orange and a blue one. You pass through the blue one, you are dropped out of the orange one and vice versa. Simple right? Wrong. If you jump from a higher place trough one of the portals, you will be projected as you leave the other. That can help if you want to reach a higher place, but what if you want reach a small platform and you end up falling because you jumped from a ledge that was to high up? That's where the game stops being simple and you have to calculate every move you make. Glados (the unknown robotic voice) makes everything even better with her child jokes (that I ended up laughing) and her not so helpful advices. Now, after all that good stuff, onto to the bad things in this game. And there aren't many. I've heard people saying it's short, and if you play it again knowing the answers to the puzzles it will be incredible short. But my time with the game was enough. If there were more I think it may had lost its charm. Now I did experience technical issues with the game. I've been informed that most of them are sadly exclusive to the ps3. Framerate problems were constant and the game crashed once, but the game was still playable. Those loading times were annoying tough. In resume, Portal was a great game, and one of the best puzzle games I've played. Step aside Tetris. You have been finally surpassed.

I almost forgot about something. That's how you make credits. I give this game a 4/5 stars.

I can't criticize a game for being "too short", especially considering it was originally part of a bundle. This is a must-have gaming experience. Fun gameplay, hilarious monologue, an interesting story and very clever mechanics. The combination of first person ("shooter", loosely said), platforming and puzzle make this game as innovative as it gets. Even if this game had turned out average, the concept alone would've made it important. It's so fresh, no one has even managed to copy it succesfully. Plus, the difficulty curve is very well achieved and extremely satisfying.

This is a game I had in my mental backlog (before I was on Grouvee) for like half a decade. I wanted to play it out of intrigue for the genre mishmash, but I was missing out on a true classic. Don't make that mistake.