User blog:Sunshineandravioli/Stuff Sunshine Likes, Issue I

(Note from Sunshine: Like Owe's Review Series, I plan to include a banner of sorts with my review articles, but I could not get it up today as I have not yet had time to color it. Sorry, y'all. I'll do my best to have the banner up by tomorrow! :D)

Review of: Portal

Media: Video Game

System(s): PC, Xbox, PS3, Mac

Developer: Valve

Released: 2007

Welcome, one and all, to my first installation of review/recommendation column, “Stuff Sunshine Likes”! In order to begin getting a handle on this whole review business, for my first article I will be sticking to a game that, at this point, most people here are very familiar with – a little title known as Portal, released in 2007 by the company Valve, best known before that point for their very popular series of Half-Life games (which, I will confess, I have never played). Keep in mind that this article will contain SPOILERS for the game’s plot and ending, so you may not want to read if you wish to avoid such information. If you’ve played the game already, don’t plan to play, or simply aren’t afraid of spoilers, though, by all means keep reading.

Let me start by noting that, at the time of its release, Portal was just a “little title” – a short, experimental game largely headed by a group of kids fresh out of college (the DigiPen Institute of Technology, to be exact), brought over to Valve after the company became particularly impressed by their DigiPen project Narbacular Drop, a game utilizing the first incarnation of what would become the portal mechanic. With everyone uncertain about how Portal, the spiritual successor to Narbacular Drop, would be received, the game was tossed into the “safety net” of the Orange Box (a collection of Half-Life and Team Fortress 2 - another Valve title - games and expansions) and tagged as being in the same universe as Half-Life in the hopes Half-Life fans would become interested in the game. At the time, no one could have possibly expected Portal to become what it has.

Portal has become a phenomenon. And, unlike most items that work their way into American pop culture nowadays, Portal is more than worthy of all the praise it receives, all the attention it gets, and every meme it spawns. Portal is truly something incredible – and for everyone who plays it, it manages to be incredible for a different reason. That’s how incredible it is.

Allow me to start with the basics. Portal is a game originally released for PC and Xbox, though it has since been ported to PS3s and Macs. Though in many ways it defies genre, Wikipedia defines it as a “single-player first-person puzzle-platform sci-fi video game” – and that many words and dashes should more than prove my point that it tends to defy genre. Portal is not just a puzzle game or just a first-person shooter or just a platformer or just sci-fi or just anything. Actually, Portal manages to contain a little bit of everything; whether you’re someone who likes Valve’s first-person shooters or someone who likes to be challenged with puzzles, whether graphics or story is more important, whether you want a humorous tone or a darker one, Portal has something for you. And that’s just one of many things that make it stand out in our gaming world.

Portal is unique among modern games in many ways, most of which stem from the very foundation of the game – Portal contains a grand total of two main characters and eight secondary characters (and that’s including enemies, bit characters and, crazily enough, objects that still manage to count as characters due to their purpose and depth), two voice actors (three if you count the archive recordings used in the original release, where the player character released pain grunts originally used in another Valve title), and while you control the player character from first-person view while holding a gun-like item in the style of literally every first-person shooter ever, you don’t actually spend the game shooting everything in sight. Furthermore, both main characters are not only women, but powerful, capable, wholeheartedly real women who also happen to not be incredibly and overly sexualized (I’m looking at you, Batman: Arkham City…). The minor characters are all either feminine or completely genderless, with only one or two appearing to be masculine (and even that’s up for debate, considering one is simply an electronically deepened female voice and the other is a series of incomprehensible snarls). I don’t know about you guys, but for me, that alone constitutes the basis for a great game. But, as constantly seems to be the case when it comes to Portal, there’s more!

When Portal begins, the setup is this: you are Chell, an apparently mute young woman (though the game’s first-person setup and decision to render her silent effectively allows the player to decide whether or not to believe they are Chell; they can just as easily decide to picture the player-character as themselves or any other type of character, a move that helps aid the player in becoming connected to the world of the game) who is contained in an “Enrichment Center” owned by a company known as Aperture Science, and is forced to run through a series of tests by a disembodied voice, the artificial intelligence project GLaDOS. Interestingly enough, neither of these main characters has their name communicated to the player through the script – GLaDOS’ title is revealed through little things on walls and equipment the character might choose to read towards the game’s closure, while Chell is never referred to by name and the player only sees her title when the end credits thank the woman who acted as a model for the character (incidentally, this was Alésia Glidewell, who works primarily as a voice actress and may be remembered for voice work in Sly 2, Star Fox: Assault, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl).

Speaking of voices, let’s take a moment to discuss GLaDOS’. The at times sarcastic, at times passive-aggressive, and always cold and sterile AI is voiced by opera singer and voice actress Ellen McLain (and with that, I watch the eyebrows of every Total Drama fan suddenly raise in horror XD). As not only the voice that tutors the player, guides them through the game, and is present throughout every level and challenge, but also as the voice actress for all but one of the other speaking characters, Ms. McLain is more or less required to carry the game on her shoulders – and, without a doubt, she succeeds. A fair amount of Portal’s success comes thanks to McLain’s incredible voice work: she takes the pitch-perfect, monotone electronic chatter delivered by GLaDOS and infuses it with a quality more human than most actual humans in video games, particularly in the game’s second act. As GLaDOS’ control begins to unravel, so does she, and McLain’s voice brings us on that journey beautifully, with subtle little pauses and tones and rising and falling of her voice that illustrates the AI’s mental and emotional shifts – from cool, automated control to subtle manipulation; an increasing bitterness disguised as a mentor’s desire to challenge the pupil; cold confidence; stunned and frantic panic; shaken desperation; indignant sternness; disbelieving anger; and finally a glorious final confrontation where, over the course of no more than six minutes, she begins as darkly amused and transitions to uncertainty, then coolly and calculatingly murderous, adding layers and layers of hatred, desperation, panic and terror until she’s left as a raging, unhinged emotional mess desperately clinging to what remains of her power. But what’s truly impressive about McLain’s performance is not only that she accomplishes these subtle transitions (and all while maintaining the steady, computerized tone of her character), but that even as GLaDOS becomes hateful and unhinged… we remain connected to her. Even in her final crazed moments, we cannot feel triumphant over her regardless of what she’s done to us, because we feel sorry for her. We have become connected to GLaDOS, we trust her, we love her. Call it Stockholm syndrome (for those of you who don’t know, a condition wherein someone who has been kidnapped ends up forming feelings of trust or love for their captor) or whatever else you might believe it to be – the fact stands. As the only other real “character” you interact with and the only voice you hear for almost the entire game, GLaDOS is all you have to connect to in this world and thus, even as her behavior begins to become suspicious, you trust her – and when things finally grow so bad that you’re forced to begin to doubt her, it truly eats at you, makes you try to reject such thoughts until you simply can’t anymore. And even as you begin to work against her, even as you begin to ignore and deny her demands, even as you enter that final confrontation, it’s practically impossible to hate her. And that’s what makes GLaDOS one of modern pop culture’s greatest villains – she has such a realness to her that you can’t just define her as a black-and-white, pure evil, metaphorical mustache-twirling villain; there’s a goodness to her as well as a darkness, a tragic element to her when she finally begins to unravel, and in the end, a part of you doesn’t want to have to confront her – you want her to be redeemed.

Allow me to use a specific example from my own first play-through of Portal. The computer I played it on was older and fairly slow in rendering the graphics, so fast-paced, elaborately rendered scenes, including the end of the GLaDOS confrontation, crept by so slowly that it practically went frame-by-frame. But this allowed me a little moment with GLaDOS that has, since then, shaped how I view the game as a whole: as the final system crash occurred and GLaDOS’ machinery swirled around us, I stared up to watch the spectacle; and, as debris swirled around in the aforementioned frame-by-frame manner, GLaDOS’ head turned to face me and, for several long seconds, her eyepiece seemed to bore into my own gaze. And even though, at first glance, it would seem to be simply a big yellow light, I saw something there – panic, fear, questioning. She was asking me, silently, “What have you done? Why are you doing this to me?” Just that frozen gaze, like a deer in the headlights, for several long moments before my system caught up to speed and kept GLaDOS spinning, got her gaze to turn away from mine. But in that moment, I felt something that video games don’t usually make you feel when you’ve finally defeated the central antagonist. I didn’t feel that triumph of a hero prevailing for justice. I didn’t feel that GLaDOS’ downfall was only right and I had acted for the greater good. I didn’t feel like the good guy. Looking into GLaDOS’ eyepiece in that moment, I felt like what she would spend a good amount of the game’s successor calling me: a murderer, killing this very broken, very real woman in cold blood.

It’s this ability to play with our emotions that Valve wields so effectively in Portal, and utilizes to its full extent to make the game great. They know just how and when to make us feel a certain way, to keep us from defining this world into black-and-white terms of good and evil and make us question whether or not we’re really the “hero” of this adventure. The stark white-and-grey test chambers of Aperture fill us with the feeling of loneliness that aids us in attaching to this disembodied voice as the only other thing that exists besides us; the occasional rumble, flickering of lights, garbling of important-sounding information and radios playing incessantly upbeat tunes in the midst of this cold world gives us the slight nagging feeling in the back of our minds that something here is not quite right; the contrast between the white, sterile world of the first act and the gritty greys-and-browns of the second act gives us a clear view of what has changed and how during this transition. Even the minor characters are presented and written so that they help trigger some emotions within us: the “enemy troops” of sorts, the talking stationary turrets that appear in certain test chambers and quite frequently in the second act, lull us into a false sense of security with their melodic, childlike voices (a modification of Ms. McLain’s, further proof of her ever-impressive voice work) only to pump you full of bullets the minute they catch sight of you – and then, the minute they’ve been knocked over or otherwise disabled, they whimper out a final pitiful sympathy or heartbreaking question (childlike murmurs of “whyyy?”, “I don’t hate you”, and “no hard feelings” as their eyepiece dims) just to make the player question, again, if they’re really the hero. The “personality cores” found attached to GLaDOS during the final confrontation, though only seen for a minute or two at max, have such engaging voices and dialogue that they become fully fleshed-out characters that make you regret having to dispatch them (save for the last one, perhaps, as it simply snarls rabidly at you from the moment you pick it up until the moment it’s destroyed, though even it managed to get a little twinge of guilt from me with the little, puppy-like “huh?” sound it made as I dispatched it). Heck, they get you to become emotionally attached to a cube, for crying out loud. A silent, unmoving cube; an item; an object that manages to make you feel sorry for its plight. And believe me, if you don’t find yourself feeling even a little bit guilty or depressed over that cube’s short but moving story arc, you have no soul. None. At. All. *moment of silence for the Dearly Departed Companion Cubes of Portal* This is the power of Portal’s writing. Seriously, the people at Valve are freakin’ geniuses.

Speaking of geniuses, let’s discuss another quality that makes Portal stand out so much: it’s an incredibly intelligent game. Every little scene in the game, practically, is stuffed full of ingenious little things for players to notice – the scrawlings of the “Rat Man” hidden in the shadows of the facility (which range from the infamous “the cake is a lie” to hints of Aperture’s history, frantic insistences that “she’s watching you”, and pastiches from poems including Emily Dickenson’s “The Chariot”, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Reaper and the Flowers”, and Emily Brontë’s “No Coward Soul is Mine”, all presented as odes to the aforementioned fallen Companion Cube… though with that in mind, I have to mention my favorite Rat Man scrawling has to be the image of the Companion Cube followed by the word “why” repeated in despair about twenty times); the business presentations still projected in long-abandoned conference rooms, detailing competition with Half-Life’s Black Mesa and the development of a “Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System” (look closely at the letters there); the aged and dusty keyboards with the letters of the name of Half-Life: Opposing Force protagonist Adrian Shephard highlighted (an in-joke and red herring included by the developers after fans noticed the abbreviation for the game’s “Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device” – ASHPD – resembled a shortening of his name); the screens of binary code that, if translated, are actually relating a cake recipe. Even something as minor as a single red telephone on a table as you enter GLaDOS’ chamber for the final confrontation has a story behind it (according to developer commentary, the team developed a backstory where they believed an Aperture employee once spent his days sitting by the phone, waiting to use it should GLaDOS begin to show signs of becoming self-aware). The writing for GLaDOS, clearly, has a remarkable amount of thought put into it and can be considered on a number of intellectual levels, getting more touching and funny the more thought the player puts into each line. Even the reasoning behind simple parts of gameplay and design choices prove Valve’s clear intelligence; the Companion Cube arc was reportedly based partially on a “declassified government interrogation thing” where it was proved that subjects would become attached to inanimate objects after being isolated for long enough, while also introducing concepts essential to the final confrontation with GLaDOS; the stark, sterile environments are such to keep players from trying to solve puzzles with decorative objects; the timed final battle provides a pressure that makes the confrontation, actually quite simple at its core, seem more complicated, as well as allowing the writers to create only a short amount of dialogue without having to loop it incessantly; the ties to the Half-Life universe not only provide the game with publicity, but also provide an approximate location and time period for the game, as well as allowing the developers to use Half-Life art assets rather than spend long periods of time developing all new textures and assets; even the seemingly nonsensical inclusion of cake as a reward stemmed from an intellectual source – head writer of Portal, Eric Wolpaw, describes the idea as coming about when the team sat down at the beginning of the development process “to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on”, after which he claims there was “about fifteen minutes of silence and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake”.

Perhaps what’s most intelligent about Portal, though, is the mechanics and gameplay itself. As the title implies, the gameplay is based around portals – openings in space that allow the player to move between disconnected areas through said portals, retaining velocity and the flow of gravity. In the case of the latter, this means that if one portal is placed on the wall and the other is placed on the ceiling, you will walk through the first and gravity will cause you to turn and be pulled downwards towards the ground; in the case of the former, it means if you place one portal on the ground and another on a wall, then jump through the first, you’ll exit the second with the same velocity you had when you entered the initial portal and subsequently go flying. Both these concepts are central to completing the game’s “test chambers” – in other words, the stages. These 20 clean-cut, linear stages exist within the first act of the game and basically teach the player the mechanics, then refine and challenge their knowledge. Initially, you have no control over where the portals are placed, instead using the existing ones that either remain fixed in place or move on a timer between specific areas, and the chambers require you complete simple tasks; after you’ve learned the bare-bones basics (namely, how to move through portals to otherwise-inaccessible areas, how to use switches, and how cubes can be placed on large buttons to activate certain machinery or open doors) you receive the single-portal gun, which allows you to control the placement of one portal while the other one remains either in a single place or moving on a timer. At this point some slightly more complex concepts and maneuvers are introduced, and when you finally gain control of both portal endpoints – complete freedom to place portals wherever you want to reach the goal – the real fun begins. The basic goal in each test chamber is the same – from the starting point, open and get to the exit door and proceed to the chamberlock, activating any machinery necessary to do so and avoiding dangers along the way. Each chamber will be set up in a different way and contain different mechanics (ie. High-energy pellets, which will kill you if they make contact and often must be redirected into receptacles to power up machinery; lifts that will elevate you to a higher level; moving platforms that often travel high above dangerous terrain; an “emancipation grill” through which objects cannot be carried and portals cannot be shot through, and which will close any open portals when walked through; and of course the cube-and-button combinations), obstacles (ie. The aforementioned high-energy pellet; toxic goo that covers some chamber floors and will kill the player on contact; the turrets that shoot from the minute a target remains in its range of sight to either the moment the player dies or the moment it is shut down) and portal maneuvers (simple long-range traveling between otherwise inaccessible areas; redirecting pellets into receptacles; dispatching turrets; and most importantly a maneuver known as the “fling” wherein a player places one portal on the ground and one on another surface, usually a wall angled upwards, and drops from a significant height into the first portal so as to fly a considerable distance; expounding on that is the “double fling” where a player must drop into one portal, fly out another, and replace the first portal in midair so they land in it without losing momentum and fly to an even higher, farther point than they could reach with a single fling).

When act two begins, you lose the clear-cut, linear goals of the test chambers – you’re on your own, without a clear endpoint or GLaDOS’ direction, and must rely on what the previous 20 chambers taught you in order to continue forwards. While this can be disorienting, scrawlings from the Rat Man and sparse amounts of portal-conductive surfaces (only certain flat surfaces can contain a portal, and must be large enough; non-conductive material is usually shiny and/or metallic, or is made up of something like a grate or fence links) provide clues that, for the most part, allow the player to puzzle their way through things and move in the right direction. Such is much of Portal’s uniqueness and appeal: rather than relying on “gamer skill” or forcing players to blindly thrash around without considering the situation, the gameplay of Portal forces its players to step back, think about what mechanics are present and what techniques they might have to employ, and experiment in an intelligent manner before they are capable of succeeding, while also incorporating just the right amount of technical skill requirements (though Portal requires a bit more pure “gamer” experience and coordination than its successor; many of the puzzles in Portal, particularly the later chambers and second act, require somewhat complex maneuvers that can frustrate a more casual, less coordinated player such as myself, who more than once spent hours trying to successfully enact a particularly tricky series of fling maneuvers). Portal will not allow a player who goes “well, I dunno what to do” and subsequently jumps and runs and shoots portals randomly to succeed – in fact, this often results in failure. The puzzles are just tricky enough to be challenging without seeming impossible; you’ll have to put some actual thought into it and consider the situation before acting, but when you actually manage to figure out the solution, it seems so simple that you’re often left facepalming and saying “doy! How’d I miss that?” Yet Valve engineers this in a way that you’re not made to feel stupid; on the contrary, you feel smart and accomplished for having sat there, thought about it, and had that “eureka! It’s really that simple!” moment. That’s a tough balance to achieve, but Valve does so with near perfection – further proof of the effort and intelligent design that went into this game.

The final little sliver of greatness I’d like to point out is something that, at first, seems like a success Portal achieved simply because of its nature as an experimental game no one thought would become as big as it has, but appears more of an intentional excellent decision now that I’ve seen they did the same with the game’s successor: unlike most video games nowadays, Portal does very little at its ending to set up for a sequel or franchise, something most modern cash-cow companies are more than eager to do, whether it be through games or movies or movies about games or games about movies or books or television or all of the above. In fact, based on the ending in the first release of Portal – one where Chell lay unmoving in the abandoned Aperture parking lot, GLaDOS’ machinery strewn around her, her fate left unknown – they didn’t seem to be prepping for any form of a continuation whatsoever. The only portion of the ending that could even remotely qualify for a sequel hook is the game’s glorious and now infamous closing song, "Still Alive", an unfittingly warm and cheery song written by the very talented Jonathan Coulton where GLaDOS, in a tiny, tentative voice to the tune of a catchy, spirit-lifting collection of faintly electronic instrumentals, sings of her own destruction and how, regardless of it, she still has science to do and matters to attend to in Aperture – a wonderful move by Valve that, in one fell swoop, does many things: reminds us of their wonderfully twisted sense of humor; cements Ms. McLain’s role as the indisputable star of the game; causes players to leave the game with a smile on their face in spite of the lonely, emotionally turbulent ordeal they’ve just been through; and above all, leaves us with the reassuring/chilling notion that GLaDOS just might not be gone for good.

In sum: Portal is an intimate, emotional journey with characters that seem very much real, lifted to great heights by the stellar voice work by Ms. McLain, smart writing by Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek, creative and intelligent gameplay and artistic design by the Valve team, and of course what is perhaps the best game-ending song in history. Portal is one of those rare games that not only looks and plays well, but also has engaging characters and a storyline that takes you on a real emotional journey. It’s something you rarely see nowadays – a masterpiece in video game form. Portal, without a shadow of a doubt… is a triumph.

I would love to give Portal a perfect rating, but sadly, I can’t. Why? Because I’ve also played Portal 2. And unfortunately, I can’t give a grade higher than perfect, much as this incredible series by Valve is just that. But Portal comes so flippin’ close that, if I hadn’t played its successor, I would grade it perfectly without a second thought.

So what are you waiting for? If you haven’t played it, you should. If you have, play it again, if only to experience this incredible emotional journey just one more time. And make sure to be here for my evaluation of Portal’s equally incredible successor, Portal 2, next week on “Stuff Sunshine Likes”

Overall Score: 9.8/10

The Good Points, in Sum: Fantastic and intelligent writing, incredibly realistic and emotional characters, engaging storyline, unrivaled voice work by Ellen McLain, innovative and creative gameplay, lots of little details to look for, unique brand of twisted dark humor, intimate experience due to short length and few characters

The Bad Points, in Sum: Occasional overcomplicated maneuvers, minor confusion as to how to proceed during parts of the second act, older machines may be incapable of keeping up the frame rate

Recommended For: The intelligent gamer, puzzle lovers, serious gamers, first-person shooter fans looking for something different, fans of Half-Life or other Valve titles, picky/intelligent fans of humor, feminists, anyone who loves a good story

Consider Before Playing…: Portal is rated T and contains some mild violence, including some depictions of blood in the turret levels (if the player is shot, bullet holes and blood splatters can be seen on the walls behind them). There are also some rather mild instances of language at times. One should also put consideration into which version they play; while I played Portal on PC, some gamers may be more comfortable playing on a console, though be warned that some fans have criticized the quality of the console ports. In order to avoid my frame-by-frame experience, those who wish to play Portal on a PC or Mac should consider how well their computer functions and ensure their system meets the installation requirements.