Review: Portal: Still Alive

Let me begin by saying that everyone should play this game. I loved it, seriously loved it. Go buy it right now. Moving on…

Portal is a first-person puzzle game released in 2007 by Valve Corporation. Valve is responsible for titles such as Left 4 Dead and Half-Life. Portal is available for several different platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, and Mac/PC.

Basically you start the game and you find yourself in some sort of lab/testing facility and an AI (artificial intelligence) named GLaDOS is telling you that you must complete a test. But not to worry, “Cake, and grief counseling, will be available at the conclusion of the test”. You are given a gun that creates a blue portal and an orange portal in walls so that you can travel from one portal to the other. You use this gun to solve the puzzles in the room before moving on to the next room and the next puzzle. 

You must get through 19 test chambers to complete the test (One with the help of your friend, The Weighted Companion Cube). After you complete the last test chamber, you learn that the facility was intending to kill at the conclusion of the testing process by throwing you into a fiery pit of death. Fun.

 

GLaDOS tries to convince you that pretending to kill you was part of the final test protocol and that there is a party and cake waiting for you if you place your gun on the ground and wait for an associate to come and get you…

“Assume the Party Escort Submission Position, or you will miss the party.”

At this point you must escape to find GLaDOS and defeat her.

Although the game is fairly short, it’s well worth it to make it to the end where you are subjected to GLaDOS’ rants about how you have no friends and that you will soon be dead. The dry humour is spot on and really quite insulting. Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the GLaDOS character.

There’s also a treat for you at the game credits in the form of a song by GLaDOS. She sings about how she’s not even angry because in the end she’s “still alive”, which is the name of the song.

I really liked that this game was challenging without being impossible to figure out. Not one puzzle is unsolvable but some might take you longer to complete than others. Of course, the chambers get progressively more difficult as you move on through the game but it also becomes more interesting as you learn to use the portals in new and creative ways. I sometimes found myself wishing that I could jump higher and/or farther but that’s just another part of the challenge. Each time you enter a new room there’s an air of familiarity without it being too repetitive. You quickly discover what the objective is; the challenge is in how to get it done. In addition to the main story, there are also advanced challenge maps that you can do just for fun.

I am giving Portal 8 pieces of cake out of 10. This game was original and hilarious and I can’t wait to play Portal 2.