Portal

Portal
First Person Puzzle? - PC
HD Backup
1 player

Portal was well-received when it appeared on Valve's Orange Box in 2007. Assuming it was just your average FPS, I didn't pay much attention to it. Recently, for whatever reason, I decided to watch the official trailer for the game... and turns out I was dead wrong. Portal wasn't an average FPS. In fact, it didn't resemble a FPS at all. So piqued was my curiosity, that I upgraded my archaic PC components and bought the Orange Box just to play it. I expected Portal to be good. What I didn't expect is that it would completely blow me away.

Portal is a puzzle game. It looks like a first person shooter. It controls like a first person shooter. But instead of bullets, rockets and lasers, the only gun you get creates portals. Left click for a blue portal, right click for an orange portal. Enter one, and you'll exit from the other. It sounds very simple, but it's completely brilliant. You can open a portal underneath an object to transport it. You can use a long fall into a portal to propel yourself out of the opposite portal. Your tools are simple, but the applications are numerous.

The game is generally set up in a series of stages, with one puzzle after another after another. The complexity of the solutions ramps up as the game goes along. In the later levels, the game includes laser-guided bots that are out to kill you. Since Portal is not an action-game in the normal sense, your only methods of taking out the machines come down to tipping them over from behind or knocking them down with objects, courtesy of an overhead portal. In these sections, it reminds me of stealth games in how you think of ways to get to the enemy undetected. The fact that the game is done in a FPS-style enhances the experience. Portal placement requires precise angles and locations, so the first person perspective is much appreciated. For instance, many of the puzzles require you to simply observe your surroundings to see what you need to do, and what you're capable of doing at any given situation. First-person perspective works best here, because you can quickly and easily get a full view of your environments.

Ingenuous. Surprising. Innovative. Breathtaking. Atmospheric. Captivating. Meticulously designed and beautifully executed. Portal just does everything right. Maybe for the first time in my life, I have nothing to complain about. Portal is perfect.