(I’m making a note here: Huge Success!)
In Retrospect, a thought a gamer has at some point is: “What’s the first game to let someone play to get them into the genre?” Usual Portal is the game chosen to bring people into the genre. Many games focus on complexity or telling a large plot with a lot of characters. The first Portal shows that you don’t need that to make a brilliant masterpiece. It’s focused on the simple concept of using two portals to solve puzzles and only has one character that speaks throughout the entirety of the game and yet Portal is still something that’s unforgettable for most gamers.
The opening of Portal is seemingly quaint compared to other games. There aren’t any massive explosions or a massive inciting incident, it’s just you waking up in a glass box with a robotic voice named G.LA.D.O.S. letting you know that you’re here to take tests using portals. The tests start out easily at first with a room filled with a box and a pressure plate and slowly begin to incorporate puzzles. The first major shift in the game is when you get your hands on the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device or as I like to call it the Portal gun. Initially, you can only shoot blue portals and have to work with another orange portal in fixed positions around different test chambers. These puzzles continue on with some more advanced ones using an energy ball to charge different lifts. G.L.A.D.O.S. keeps giving you praise and encouragement throughout the series of puzzles that she sets out for you to solve as you start to grow trusting of the voice.
The second major shift to its mechanics is getting the upgraded Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device that can shoot both blue and orange portals. This allows you to fully use the sandbox to your heart’s content. At this point, the designers start off with an easy level to make sure you still have your bearings and then start throwing increasingly challenging ones at you such as testing you on concepts like momentum.
Eventually with test chamber 16 you start to encounter turrets that open fire on you using live ammunition while the Artificial Intelligence G.L.A.D.O.S. acts like nothing is wrong and that this is all the pursuit of science. This is also the first time you start to realize that something has gone horribly wrong with the facility that you’re in. If you’ve been paying attention all along you can notice this from the first room that you wake up in. There is glass that reveals chairs and computers but they’re all empty. Something here has gone horrifically wrong and if you aren’t careful you’ll disappear too.
That all being said puzzle 16 is where the game also places a Rattmann den in your path in which it revealed that there is someone else is alive in the facility as evidenced by empty water jugs and cans of beans. This individual is also shown to be deranged judging from the things written on the wall.
Since you are equipped with a portal gun the turrets are easy to take out by simply getting behind them and knocking them over. It’s a well-designed puzzle with multiple turrets deeper in covering each other’s blind spots relying on you to find ways around it. Throughout the final few puzzles of the game, you find a little cube with a heart on it called the Companion Cube. You use the cube as a tool to save your life a few times getting quite attached to it however in the end you have to kill it to continue testing. G.L.A.D.O.S. remarks after killing it:
“You euthanized your faithful companion cube more quickly than any test subject on record. Congratulations.” – G.L.A.D.O.S.
Finally you reach the finally puzzle at the end of which you will receive your cake. That doesn’t happen however and instead you are slowly lowered into a pit that is on fire with the expectation that you will be killed. Naturally the player escapes and is let loose throughout the internals of the facility. In one area you find the observation rooms in which there’s a projector showing how G.L.A.D.O.S. was made. She originally was a way to out compete Black Mesa.
Throughout the internals of the facility, Rattmann scrawled notes to help you find the correct path to G.L.A.D.O.S. She keeps trying to stop by but trying to kill you but eventually you reach the room in which she’s housed. A morality core falls out of her which you incinerate on accident before finding out what it is. It was preventing her from using neurotoxin to kill everyone in the facility. Thankfully for her, you just removed that limitation to which she gleefully turns on the toxin, and you have 10 minutes to figure out a way to kill her before meeting your demise.
It’s a classic David and Goliath showdown but G.L.A.D.O.S. didn’t account for one thing: Your brain. You can use her own rocket turret against her but having it fire at where you were dodging out of the way and into a portal aimed directly at her. Slowly but sure you drop more pieces of her into the incinerator while she taunts you.
One of my favorite quotes from her is: “Neurotoxin… *cough* So deadly… *coughs* Choking… Hahahaha… I’m kidding. When I said ‘Deadly Neurotoxin’, the ‘Deadly’ was in massive “sarcasm quotes”. I could take a bath in this stuff, put it on cereal, rub it right into my eyes. Honestly, it’s not deadly at all. To me… You, on the other hand, are going to find the deadliness a lot less funny.” (Check out the Portal Script if you want to see the dialogue- https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/934386-portal/faqs/50477 – Thanks for the quote: Ayelis)
Eventually, you kill her and are knocked out in the Aperture Science of the parking lot and are slowly dragged back into the facility to start Portal 2. You do find out though that the cake wasn’t a lie and just was INCREDIBLY well hidden. At this point, everyone knows the song that plays at the end but that doesn’t stop it from being on my Father’s favs music playlist.
Portal is something everyone everywhere should play and is a wonderful yet simplistic game that spawned one of the biggest memes on the internet. It’s often used as a tool to get people into gaming and every time I play it I’m refreshed.
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