The experience was short and sweet in the purest sense, with a great climax and the introduction of the now-classic gaming character, GlaDOS - whose hilarious dialogue and monotone voice managed to give the overall experience some considerable weight.Īs a sequel, Portal 2 was always going to be hotly anticipated, as even though the original surprised many gamers with its wonderful gameplay, it also felt like it was a component of Valve’s Half Life franchise rather than standing as its own entity. As the protagonist was the test subject taking part in experiments, this allowed the puzzle and level-based nature of the game to make perfect sense, as players moved from test chamber to test chamber, solving each increasingly difficult problem in increasingly creative ways. As players traversed the semi-futuristic scientific installation of Aperture Science armed with the aforementioned portal gun, they took part in various tests run by a somewhat insane AI called GlaDOS. It made you feel smart, for a moment anyway.Īpart from providing the player with exceptional level design, wonderfully complex and intuitive puzzles to solve, Portal also featured a narrative that although quite simple, was genuinely funny and surprising. Relying on lateral thinking, the solution to each puzzle that was presented never felt cheap, always natural, and in most cases gave a sense of a figurative light-bulb lighting up in a thought cloud every time a solution became apparent. Many games can be commended on their puzzle design, but in the case of Portal, the fact that players were seemingly creating and controlling what looked like rifts in the space-time continuum (via portals generated by a simple projectile device that allowed the placing of an entrance and an exit), meant that it was also an amazingly memorable experience.
No go back to Jurassic Park, I think the Velociraptors are about to attack that blonde chick you used to date” - or something similar along those lines.Īs part of the Orange Box release, and also as a stand-alone budget download title, Portal was in many ways a perfect proof of concept. Now, most gamers aren’t quantum scientists, let alone know what that profession entails, but if presented with the same question, would probably respond with, “Relax buddy, I’ve played Portal, so the shortest distance is zero. As a sort of simple scientific test, and an equally cocky display of intelligence on Sam’s part, the non-scientist character naturally responds with the answer that the shortest distance would be a straight line between each point.
There’s a scene in the somewhat terrible film, Event Horizon, where quantum scientist Sam Neil asks a seemingly non-scientist character what the shortest distance between two points is.