I had played both Half Life and Half Life 2 on the original Xbox and was strangely excited about Half Life 2 being graphically updated and released on the Xbox 360. It wasn’t being released alone though, Valve had put together a compilation which contained not only Half Life 2 but also Half Life 2 episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2 and a new game called Portal. All these games were bundled into a collection called The Orange Box.

As it was getting closer to the release date, I had seen a few on the animations that had been shown for Portal and I liked the idea of this game. It was a puzzle game that allowed you to use portals to go through one and out the other, or send objects through one and out the other. I have always been a fan of puzzles and puzzles games so I was looking forward to seeing how Portal played.

On the day The Orange Box was released I bought it straight away, by this time I was looking forward to playing Portal more than the other games in the box and when I got home I started playing Portal, and I loved it, every single minute of it, right down to the end credits. If fact I loved it so much that I didn’t stop playing it until it was completed. I can’t think of another game that I enjoyed so much that I completed the entire game in one sitting.

So, let me go back to the start and share a few things about why I enjoyed this game so much. You start off in a sleep chamber and after a countdown ends two portals appear, one inside the room and one outside, you go through one and out the other and next thing you know you’re outside your sleep chamber. You’re also taught that pressing switches opens doors and that placing a box on a switch keeps the door open while you walk through. A simple enough premise or, at least, it starts off that way.

When you start the game, you have no control over the portals and must make use of the portals that the game creates. The game is based in Aperture Science and you are a test subject trying to navigate your way through a number of test chambers, solving puzzles and making your way to the exit. A computerised voice accompanies you through the game, this is the voice of GLaDOS, whose function it is to monitor your progress through each test chamber, offering your praise when you reach the exit of each level and offering you cake as a reward for taking part in the test once it is all complete.

The first few test chambers start of very small with maybe just one puzzle to solve to make it to the exit. There are a total of 19 test chambers in the game and each get bigger and require more problem solving to get through the levels. Not long into the game you get the portal gun, a device that allows you to shoot certain walls to create a portal for you to progress. At first,the portal gun only shoots one portal but eventually you will get the other part of the portal gun and can shoot a blue portal and an orange portal.

By the time you have both, you will be accustomed to solving puzzles and making your way through the test chambers. Having control of both portals gives you the freedom to place the portals on any surface, be it floor/wall/ceiling, that can accept it; there are certain surfaces that a portal can’t be placed upon. You can place a portal directly above you, another directly below you and fall through the floor, come out the ceiling and fall through the floor again, endlessly until you move so you don’t fall through the floor or place the portals elsewhere.

I never sat down initially with the thought of completing the game in one sitting, but as I completed each test chamber and worked out the puzzles needed to get through, it left me feeling of just one more go; and it never wavered. Not having read much about the game beforehand, I thought the test chambers would get you accustomed to the controls and would then lead to a bigger game; it turned out the test chambers were the game. As you got into the later levels, gun turrets were introduced to try to stop you as well as energy balls which required guiding to an energy receptor which them activated a platform, moving either up and down or across part of the room.

As the levels got bigger, they contained more and more puzzles; at times I would stop and just look at the rooms, figuring out what I needed to do, where I needed to go and how to place the portals in order to achieve this. Some of the levels seem to have panels on parts of the wall missing and if you looked inside you would see writings on the wall behind, one scrawl message indicating the cake was a lie; what this meant you didn’t know.

As you complete test chamber 19 you will see your reward, however if you had been paying attention to GLaDOS previously you would have picked up on something mentioned in test chamber 18 that should have made you think. If you haven’t played Portal by now but still want to experience it for yourself, then you my want to skip the next two paragraphs as it will give away the rest of the game.

During test chamber 18 GLaDOS states “at the end of the test, you will be baked and then there will be cake“. Concentrating more on working out puzzles, I thought maybe I had mis-heard the comment and continued on. Unfortunately, the test ends with your death as your final platform moves toward a chamber of fire. You don’t have long to figure what to do, but you do have that handy portal gun. The rest of the game involves you making your way through the back areas of Aperture Science trying to escape, and after a while you discover a large room with GLaDOS in it, and your final Boss encounter.

The whole experience of solving puzzles to complete test chambers, to having to escape, to having to square off against GLaDOS was just so thrilling. Working out where to place portals to navigate platforms or to go in one portal and use inertia to come out the other portal to advance further was so satisfying that I couldn’t stop playing; I was having so much fun. Even after completing the game and the end credits roll, you were treated to an outro song which was sung by GLaDOS and it was awesome.

I once played and beat the game again just so I could have the song again at the end. Every gamer who had beaten Portal knew that song when someone mentioned it. It was so popular in fact that it became a free downloadable song for Rock Band.

Portal was initially going to be a XBLA game, but due to the size restrictions Microsoft had with downloadable games at the start of the Xbox 360 life it wasn’t to be.. Microsoft wanted all games to be no bigger that 64mb so it could fit on a memory card so those without hard drives wouldn’t be excluded from downloadable games. That rule eventually changed and Portal was released on XBLA. Valve didn’t want to charge for it but Microsoft did so when it was released it was called Portal: Still Alive (the aforementioned song was called Still Alive) and included the full game from The Orange Box as well as 14 new levels to challenge gamers.

I bought this as well because I wanted more Portal, even though I already had beaten the main game a couple of times by then. The new levels caused a lot of head scratching but that was the fun of Portal, working out how to complete the levels. Portal 2 will be coming in 2011 and it will be bought without hesitation. I ♥ Portal, with or without a companion cube.

Last five articles by The Rook

• Gaming Through Time
• Exclusive Exclusions
• I Heart Portal
• Only When I Game
• TBP