The Orange Box: Portal

I watched Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey recently. I always thought that HAL simply wasn’t creative enough in his plans to eliminate the humans. HAL had a massive amount of control over the environment on the Discovery One and could have just turned off the heaters, or blown all the airlocks, or filled Discovery One with battery acid. Thankfully, GLaDOS (the Aperture Science, Inc. Artificial Intelligence) does not have or exercise such control.

At heart, Portal is a plot driven puzzle game where the protagonist Chell wakes in a rat maze that seems to have gotten all stylistic cues from the original smooth white iPod and iMac line. The portal gun itself would make Steve Jobs proud, both for its clean white style and intuitive usability. Styling aside, Chell needs to make her way through various courses designed to test the effectiveness of her handheld portal creation device. The portal gun is a delightfully simple device: Point at a wall, hit the left trigger, and you have a blue portal. Point at another wall, hit the right trigger, and an orange portal appears. In a twist of physics and quantum mechanics that would leave a Trekkie muttering something about Heisenberg Compensators, the two portals are connected, twisting gravity and space in their wake. Think Wiley Coyote and ACME’s portable hole. Chell can now move objects or herself from place to place via the portals while maintaining their speed. The possibilities here are endless. I’m still trying to find a way to fling myself over 300 feet across a chasm in real life. Motivated only by promises of a fantastic slice of cake and grief counseling, Chell must use her portal gun and wits to escape various deadly acid pits, flaming infernos, and crushings by weighted companion cubes.

My only complaint with the gameplay was that I couldn’t fire a new portal through an existing one. Perhaps that would have made the game too easy, but the thought of pseudo-recursive portals tickled my fancy. The levels are engaging and challenging, and the humor delightfully deadpan. For a puzzle game, a surprising amount of timing and reflex are required. A few challenges had me on the edge of my seat with an elevated heartbeat. Will I time this jump correctly? Will the energy ball make it into the door control before the blast door closes? I thoroughly enjoyed the gameplay, and I would have loved it if the rat-maze levels were about twice as long.

Valve constantly impresses me with their ability to tie in various titles to a larger world and story line. Throughout Portal, references to Black Mesa abound, and while the ending is somewhat akin to a Resident Evil climax, I was left wondering if GLaDOS would have been a helpful companion in the conflict between humanity and The Combine. I lay awake at night dreaming of the day that Gordon Freeman has the portal gun as part of his arsenal for battling The Combine. Dropping cubes on Combine troops, or even dropping troops on other troops, or building hallways of infinitely falling Zombies: Valve has me drooling at the possibilities. That, and I can’t wait for my very own Weighted Companion Cube desktop toy.