If you ask me, Portal’s signature moment involves putting a portal in the ceiling and another portal in the floor just below. Thump, thump. These portals, for the uninitiated, are basically two sides of the same magical hole; walk through the orange gate and you will come out through the blue gate. In the game’s magical arc fiction you experience a device that projects these holes, allowing you to do unusual things with space as a result.
How unusual? With the floor and ceiling installed, you have created an extremely short tunnel, the height of the room you are in. Yet it’s also a tunnel you can fall through forever, that single room zipping over again and again as it repeats. domestic background in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
Here’s the thing, though. Over a decade after Portal’s release, thinking about Portal can be a bit like falling through that simultaneously short and endless tunnel. Oh, to make a Slinky out of your thoughts! Blue becomes orange, distance becomes time, ceiling becomes floor becomes ceiling again. Absolute conflict versus conflicting absolute.
Let me give you a quick example. A portal is a sandbox. It’s a series of mostly empty lab rooms for you to move through as you play with one of gaming’s most exciting toys – a gun that allows you to fire both sides of the same hole on any relevant surface and then screw off around with what you do. have done But listen up: it’s also the complete sandbox, because these empty rooms are home to one of the most precise puzzle games ever delivered, where everything from lighting, geometry, textures, and the voice your ear – which we will no doubt return to in a minute – leads you endlessly towards one correct, if sometimes torturous, answer after the next. Because Portal wants to show you things so cleverly, and specifically because it gives you so much potential power in order to show you those things, it has to become limiting as well.
Floor becomes ceiling becomes floor. To put it another way, Portal breaks its own spaces into impossible shapes, and brilliantly allows you to break those spaces yourself, in order to give you a Platonic example of a linear video game. Meanwhile, its plot requires the slow, muttering creep of entropy – the constant revelation of chaos and decay bubbling up beneath the barrenness of the testing lab you’re trapped in – but the entropy itself is perfectly controlled. by the stage, and use it micro-surgically and it is, in other words, nothing like entropy at all.
On it goes! Over the last decade, this perfectly linear video game – almost linear, even now I have to remember that there are overlooked moments for self-expression, generally involving the removal of turrets – over the past decade this detailed game has been beautifully hacked. in pieces and rearranged by fast runners. But then, wait a minute! Perhaps that was the intention, the main campaign set out as a taunt, an impulse to destroy something that had been so carefully constructed, without air? There’s a really lovely IGN video, where developers react in surprise and confusion to what speedrunners are doing with the game they made arguing otherwise, but the point still stands I think: you can build a rickety crate tower of contradictions very easily with Portal – and a crate tower that will allow you to reach the ceiling. (Or is it the floor.) "
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that thinking about Portal can get pretty complicated and annoying. And for years I haven’t really played Portal, so it’s been in my memories of it, gradually turning into the idea of something that’s inventive but a bit airless, such a great game that it deconstructs itself as you play, while an antagonist patronizes you for your progress. OK. But this week, I went back. I went back in! Portal has arrived on Switch so I put all my headache Portal theories and counter-theories out of my brain and played the game. And guess what? Above all, Portal is really, really fun.
And more specifically, it’s still surprising. And I mean surprised in a very specific way. When I played Portal for the first time all those years ago, if you had been weird enough to record my voice as I played, you would have heard nothing but a shrill burst of delighted laughter. You gasp when something is moderately shocking, but when something is shocking, I think laughter takes over – and Portal is consistently, level by level, a mind-blowing game.
It’s surprising when the first portal appears in your test subject’s cell at the start of the game, exactly where you didn‘t expect it to be and does exactly what you didn’t expect it to do, which is to give some sort of a player’s self-portrait, a glimpse into the visual embodiment that Valve otherwise omits for large parts of the game’s course. It’s amazing when you discover that you can use portals to your own kind of hypertext around the environment, the way clicking on a content link sends you from one part of a document straight to another. (It’s shocking to have a reason to think of the player as some kind of accessor, but maybe they are? Maybe they always are!) #xD;
It’s amazing when you start playing with momentum, starting with that one great level where you raise yourself higher and higher by dropping one hole after another. Momentum! Portal is at its loosest, of course, when you’re hurtling through the air, piercing the oncoming floor portal just in time to step back in the arc of your own movement but with your extra speed intact.
And it’s amazing when you bring all the parts of your arsenal together for the final levels and find that the mind-bending things you’ve been asked to do with space and geometry in this game have somehow – somehow – become internalized to the point where they are second nature.
Oh, and it’s amazing when you hit the end credits after a few hours and there’s a beautiful song to listen to, the villain singing you a poisonous lullaby built around the cheerful theme of futility. Why doesn’t COD end like this?
