While this is definitely putting the cart before the horse, I like Portal because it makes me feel like Rick Sanchez, blasting wormholes onto walls and teleporting through space, and messing a lot of stuff up in the process.
The 2007 puzzle game requires the same clever thinking that Rick and Morty’s cantankerous protagonist displays across 20 episodes of Adult Swim’s animated sci-fi hit (2013 to present), and it also encourages the same kind of anti-authority bent that Rick is famous for: unquestioningly obeying the disembodied computer voice that guides you through the game’s 19 short levels will lead you to a fiery demise.
While, the game requires some out-of-the-box (Orange Box, that is) thinking, the concept is simple enough. Using the right trigger, the player can shoot a blue entrance portal onto a wall, ceiling, floor, etc. The left trigger, meanwhile, opens an orange exit portal. So, if an automatic turret is blasting the edges of your screen blood red from across the room, you can shoot a portal behind it, shoot a portal on the floor in front of you, and take it out with a sneak attack.
Blast a portal onto a wall that’s angled toward the ceiling, and with enough momentum you can shoot out of the wall like a cannon ball. Blast a portal above one of those pesky turrets, and you can take them out with the drop of a crate from the safety of another room. Blast a portal on the ceiling and another on the floor directly below it and you can travel through an endless loop of openings and exits.
This is an endlessly fun mechanic. The game, however, is anything but endless. I tend to take longer than average to beat games, and I completed the main story in about seven hours. Howlongtobeat.com clocks the story mode at a brisk four hours. So, while what’s there is incredibly fun, the fun doesn’t last very long.
Valve, however, has done a good job of making this a non-issue. I picked the game up as part of the Orange Box, which also includes Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episodes 1 and 2, and Team Fortress 2. I bought the collection for 25 bucks, so I only paid about five dollars for Portal. And, in Valve’s 2011 follow up, Portal 2, the team expanded the story mode to about 10 hours meaning more of the same brilliant game mechanics, and more game to wormhole your way through.
In terms of story, the game is dubiously structured. The first 15 levels took me two hours, and basically function as a tutorial introducing you to the portal guns and giving you easy challenges to get a feel for their myriad uses. This portion of the game is mostly story-free.
All the difficulty and story content is loaded into the game’s five-hour back half. And while it’s interesting, it feels like a prelude to something more; something bigger.
Overall, it’s a fun game, but you will almost certainly move through it almost as quickly as your character moves from portal to portal.
