So while I liked the bits of story-telling that Portal does through exploration/evidence, I would have liked to see more content and more surprises after the outset. I felt the same way when playing Myst, years and years ago, and sifting through the mounting evidence against both Sirrus and Achenar, and thinking, Right, I get it already! They’re not nice! But then there are more spaces like this, and for the most part those do not reveal anything terribly new. The den, the scrawls of “the cake is a lie”, were chilling and evocative. The first time I saw a handprint, I gasped a little. My biggest gripe about this technique is that the first glimpses are the most effective ones, and that the more evidence the player acquires, the less emotionally effective it is, because the authors/designers don’t keep putting in surprises or new evocative information. Speaking of back-story revelation, Portal does that in a time-honored way: by showing abandoned spaces and evidence of past inhabitants. But that’s a tiny story, very simple, very incomplete. I went from skepticism about GLaDOS (because everyone knows that AI voices might be evil) to fear and defiance and, in the final end sequence, stony indifference to her pleas. The plot is short (one could describe all the salient events in a few sentences), and the emotional progression is simple. There is not a particularly long or complex story here, and the techniques used in its telling are not especially new. But it is not the epiphany in interactive storytelling that I had somehow built it up in my mind to be, based on all the praise I’d heard. Portal does it much more systematically.) It’s a funny, smooth, clever, and essentially awesome piece of work.
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(I tried to do that with Savoir-Faire, in another way and another medium. The puzzles are of a kind I particularly like: carefully sequenced training in a set of coherent physical rules. I’m not sure that disappointment is at all fair - this is really a fantastic game, beautifully designed and put together, just like everyone says. Under those circumstances, it’s hard not to come away a tiny bit disappointed.
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I’d been spoiled a little, both in the sense of knowing a couple of concrete plot details and in the sense that I had some idea of what people thought was so awesome about it. What follows is spoilery and also probably doesn’t make that much sense unless you’ve played. I hardly ever play mainstream commercial video games - I don’t have the hardware to run it well, for one thing - but I was really curious about Portal, so recently when I got a chance to play it on friends’ XBox, I took it. For months now I’ve been hearing about the astonishing storytelling power of Portal, along with its fabulous physics and game design.