Portal is a fun, quirky first-person puzzle game that focuses around tricky problem solving and an interesting storyline. You are taken on an adventure through factory rooms that each involve one or a variety of puzzles to complete which allow you to progress to the next room.
The puzzles involve the use of walls and a ‘portal gun’ that creates temporary hole-like portals in some walls that allow you to teleport yourself and objects between them as you jump into each. Through these portal connections you can create transportation systems across large gaps, slingshots via the use of gravity and projection, or just endless loops by shooting one on the roof and one on the floor if you feel like messing around!
Below is an example of shooting just two portals into two perpendicular walls.
Portal 2 works on the same basic ideas of the first game, but evolves it into something much more interesting, with gameplay elements greatly improved from the original. This game introduces new elements into the worlds that allow you to really have fun with the portal guns, including liquids that let you bounce around rooms and others that let you shoot portals onto walls that usually wouldn’t allow them. The stages themselves not only take place in the rooms as they did in Portal, but also branch out into more open arenas with multi-level puzzles that take more planning and creativity to complete correctly.
I personally also loved how dynamic some parts were, such as walls collapsing around you as you play a level, with a robotic ‘creator’ setting up more ahead of you. The relationships with other characters in the game were also a selling point for me! I’ll try not give too much away.
The games are not for everyone, but for those who like a bit of a mind-bending challenge, it’s a great couple of hours worth of time wasting! There are very few fun console games these days that really give your mind a workout as well as your fingers, but these games do just that.