HomeFeaturesPortal
RPS GOTY Revisited: 2007’s Portal remains a lodestar for very good gamesThey don’t make ‘em like this anymore
They don’t make ‘em like this anymore
When Katharine told me about this idea to take a look at RPS Advent Calendar winners of years past, I thought it was a good idea. But when she said she wanted me to do the first one, and that the first GOTY awarded on RPS was 2007’sPortal, I almost laughed. Does Portal hold up? Why even bother asking? Shut this whole article down. Of course it holds up. It’sPortal.
Of course, conventional bait-and-switch writing would dictate that this is the point where I tell you that, aha, after playing Portal again in the blinding light of 2022 it’s actually a heap of rubbish, such as could only otherwise be found on the streets on day ten of a two week bin-lorry strike. But obviously that is not the case, because we’re talking about Portal. If anything it’s even better than I remember. Like. It’s fuckin’ Portal.
We Answer Your Steam Deck Questions For 19 minutes StraightWatch on YouTube
We Answer Your Steam Deck Questions For 19 minutes Straight
If you’ve not played Portal, you may have assumed it’s one of a bunch of other older games that everyone says are good but that you can basically skip because the industry has improved and evolved since it was made. Portal is not that. You should go and play Portal right now. Push toddlers aside and blast through red lights if necessary.
Portal is a physics puzzle game, except what Portal really is, is some kind of impossible bending of the course of linear time. You play Portal now and you can’t conceive of it existing in 2007. There must be some mistake. It represents such a great leap forward in construction, in tone, in ideas, in writing, that it feels like Portal needed Portal to exist before Portal could exist. Except it did not, and nothing really like it has really come along since. I can’t comprehend Portal’s existence apart from as “it’s as if Oasis was simultaneously The Beatles.”
The gradual increase in complexity, and the marvellous tool that is the portal gun, allows you toplay. You spit portals everywhere to see what they do. Portal teaches you, gradually, to (as the meme goes) think with portals, to know what happens ifthisportal is at an angle to that one, or how the angle of the thing goingintothe portal changes on exit, or how you can make something fall between portals forever… Within the game you become a daring expert, the Indiana Jones of applied physics.
While that is going on you’re also being subjected to a masterclass in funny and poignant writing, combined with level design that reminds you “environmental storytelling” means way more than post-apocalyptic graffiti (and the debates about it that cycle around every 18 months or so). Aperture Science has clean, grey-white walls and glass observation windows, behind which you can dimly see chairs and desks. Early on the game trains you to look for radios playing a tinny, jaunty little tune, and if you follow the noise you find things. After a little while, you realise you never actually see another living person in the place. After another little while, you find dens. Someone has been hiding behind the shifting mechanical walls of the facility in little nests of tins of beans and cardboard boxes, and you see that the guts of the place are rusted and in disrepair.
And then there’s GLaDOS, the only person (??) you talk to. She was conceived,according to Eric Wolpaw(who, along with Chet Faliszek, came on to write for Portal) to be an “adversary personality that hadn’t been done to death”. He explains that, “GLaDOS does yell a lot and shoot rockets at you, which I guess is fairly traditional, but she’s also kind of supportive and funny and sometimes she’s a little sad and even scared”. He points out that GLaDOS becomes more human as she becomes more openly antagonistic, using the pronoun “I” to describe her thoughts and actions, rather than the “we” she used earlier on in the game when she’s acting as the representative of Aperture Science as an organisation.
There are so many good things. The Companion Cube, which makes a comparatively small appearance in the game but is even now immortalised as a tattoo on my actual real life thigh. The way the robotic turrets chirp things like “There you are!” moments before gunning you down. The escalating mentions of neurotoxin.
A wonderful achievement. A lodestar for game design. The best there was and is, but I hope not the best there ever will be. It’s fuckin’ Portal.
