Critical Play: Portal

Published in

Game Design Fundamentals

4 min readOct 29, 2020

Today I played Portal… for 4 hours. I probably should have stopped, but honestly I love puzzle games and Portal has been on my list for years. I actually bought it almost a year ago and just never downloaded it. It took a bit of time for me to get it up and running since it didn’t want to run on my Mac. Luckily, in a moment of weakness I purchased a year of Shadow PC on Black Friday last year. Shadow PC is basically a cloud based PC that allows you to run a Parallels like PC on your Mac. Once I got it all up and running, I was in.

Portal is a puzzle game with a clear narrative and an air of mystery. You wake up in a room with a pod like device next to you and a timer counting down outside the room. A voice welcomes you to the Aperture testing facility. This voice will be your companion through the tests aka puzzles. It helps you figure out what to do and gives you warnings about possible danger. For example, landing on the lava-like floor will mark down your score and kill you.

One of the things I love is how the story gives context to the puzzles and how puzzles in the context make complete sense. At the core, they are simply logic puzzles, but they’re also an obstacle course. Aperture is testing us so these puzzle obstacle courses make complete sense. Of course, we don’t exactly know how we got there or why we’re being tested. As the story progresses, we start uncovering clues that indicate a more devious side to these tests. I haven’t finished all 19 levels yet, but I have a feeling I won’t be receiving cake at the end…

One of my favorite mechanics of the game is the auto-save and manual save features. The game auto-saves at key moments in each level which allows you to keep your progress in the level even if you die. This was amazingly important and I really appreciated it. I was quite worried the first time that I died halfway through a level. I thought, for sure, I’d have to redo the entire level. Luckily I only went back one small section. On the flip side, I also love the manual save which allowed me to choose a spot to refresh at so I wouldn’t have to keep redoing a more time consuming section when I kept dying at the hard part.

The most interesting feature I’ve noticed in Portal is all the hints and “warning” tiles. They help the player figure out where they are and what they might need to do next. They also point out the dangers found in each level. In addition to voice, these provide players with a lot of guidance towards figuring out the logic aspects of the puzzles.

All in all, I’m really enjoying Portal. I’m definitely going back to finish it. I’m so close to the end! The obstacle course like puzzles provide a nice challenge and a decent balance between logic and physical demands (like timing and jumps). The easy saving and recovery help those who struggle with the physical aspects and the hints and voice provide help on the logic aspects. Portal is not at all what I thought it would be. I honestly didn’t even realize it was a puzzle game when I first bought it last year, but I’m so glad it is.