When I first played Portal back in 2019, I was bewitched. The combination of an otherworldly yet oddly believable setting in the Aperture Science labs, a cold nonhuman villain in GLaDOS, and mind-bending puzzles made for a gaming experience like nothing I had ever encountered. I have completed the game seven times since that first playthrough, and it has a special place in my heart.
From writing and world building, to graphics and level design, you’d be hard pressed to find another game quite like it
Portal is arguably one of the most finely crafted games in the history of the industry, with its overall quality on par with a Rolex watch or a Cesc Fàbregas through-ball. From writing and world building, to graphics and level design, you’d be hard pressed to find another game quite like it. Portal received critical acclaim upon release, but what is it that makes the game so special?
One of Portal’s greatest strengths is in its simplicity. It achieves one of the trickiest feats of game design: taking a fairly basic mechanic and using it as the foundation for a complex and interesting puzzle game.
Valve’s expert level design transforms this setup from basic to brilliant
That mechanic is, of course, the iconic Portal Gun. Left click for a blue portal, right click for an orange one. Seems simple, right? Besides movement keys, there are only really 3 buttons worth pressing, yet Valve’s expert level design transforms this fundamental setup from basic to brilliant, with iconic items such as Companion Cube helping to simply elevate the playing experience.
Aside from level design, the work done by writers cannot go unmentioned. With just one speaking character, Valve’s storied team of writers were faced with quite the challenge to come up with and communicate an interesting story, but managed it with the invention of GLaDOS, an AI supercomputer turned tyrannical mad scientist (if reading in 2023, try not to dwell on that sentence for too long). She lets snippets of both her backstory and yours go via Freudian slips, supplemented by the dry, sarcastic wit that has become a hallmark of Valve games, leaving the player to piece together the twisted history of Aperture Science for themselves. Alternatively, you can learn that by loading up Portal 2, but that's a story for another article. Valve’s genius writers have also woven Portal into the wider Valve universe, meaning easter eggs and lore are abundant. When it comes to world building, nobody does it quite like Valve.
Portal has it all. A vicious villain, a spooky liminal setting, a mystery to unravel, Valve were truly ahead of their time with this one. If you are yet to experience Portal, there is no time like the present to give it a spin. For me, though, I think it’s time for my eighth playthrough.