Just ahead of the 2007 holiday shopping season, Valve Corporation released a quirky first-person puzzle game titled Portal. This second-string title, originally released only as part of a bundle with other stocking-stuffer titles, became the little game that could—garnering critical acclaim and a cult following. The success lead to a sequel, released earlier this year. 

If you’ve not played Portal, the orientation video below will explain the core of the game in thirty seconds. (The remaining two minutes afterward are just … cake.) It’s a puzzle game that revolves around the idea that you can create wormholes between one surface and another, entirely separate surface. This idea certainly isn’t new. We all remember tunneling down green pipes in Super Mario Bros. to be transported to new realms (see below). And in the first-person shooter genre teleporters and the like are also fairly commonplace. But Portal beats all by taking this simple idea and making it the very core of the game. Each puzzle in Portal only makes sense in the context of portals. Portals are an axiom from which the entire puzzle game is built. 

Jonathan Blow’s Design Reboot lecture from the Montreal Games Summit in 2007 speaks in great length about this sort of bottom-up game design and its enormous design value. (Unfortunately Blow’s lecture was not videotaped, but a video of the slides and text is available here.) 

So the puzzle design is great. But what puts Portal over the top is its sharp character writing. Zero Punctuation’s review of Valve's Orange Box yields this synopsis: “I went in expecting a slew of interesting portal-based puzzles and that’s exactly what I got. But what I wasn’t expecting was some of the funniest pitch black humor I’ve ever heard in a game.” While Trachtenberg’s No Escape is faithful to Portal’s physics (and therefore exciting) it unfortunately looses the dark humor of the game’s protagonist GLaDOS who is conspicuously absent. If No Escape does blossom into a big-budget studio flick I do hope Portal’s original deadpan sensibilities makes the cut.

I’d be doing Portal fans a disservice if I didn’t mention Jonathan Coulton’s finale sing-alongs Still Alive and Want You Gone from Portal 1 and 2 respectively. These eccentric end credits are sung by GLaDOS as the lyrics and game colophon are printed to screen in the context of an old text-based terminal. (Your humble narrator’s been questioned about which came first: Portal or a particular other music video. The answer is that particular other music video came first by more than two years.)