Puzzle games never gross the reputation other genres receive, but Portal is definitely deserving.
The story is quite basic. You play as a female protagonist seeking the reward of chocolate cake. To do so you attempt to get through a chain of chambers, trespassing on guarded territory, flying over large pools of toxic ooze and flinging yourself over towering obstacles. Your method of doing so is an experimental weapon that opens enter and exit portals for instantaneous teleportation between the two points. Constantly observed by a big-brother-like network of surveillance cameras, the memorable GLaDoS never fails to condescend you with humorous rebuking and witty interjections. With a sudden twist in the plot the game closes on a depressingly melancholic note and GLaDoS takes one last, hilarious moment to tantalisingly mock your efforts.
Finding solutions to obstructed maps takes innovative exploration. Things like insurmountable gaps, walls, automatic turrets and more hinder your progress and you need to galvanise your brain cells if you're going to get anywhere. Momentum can be used to throw yourself over enormous rises in the ground level, you can cunningly transport you and your portal gun over walls and other blockades by opening an exit portal above them and beam yourself around to squeeze into the tinniest of passages. But then there is the companion cube, that mute block of metal who sits silently waiting to assist you with his generous servitude. Dropping him on buttons that open doors, pulverising machine guns with his weighty mass and helping you vault obstructions, you come to adore his inanimate boxy self.
An additional beauty of the first person nature of Portal is that it also requires a certain amount of reflex. Whilst gathering enough momentum to make a broad leap to the exit you have to aim precisely on target and shoot within a marginal time to succeed.
Environmentally, Portal does an awfully good job of feeling sadistically unwelcoming. Austere walls with uneventful white murals span the chambers, their undecorated bleakness a reminder that you're just the guinea pig in the test. Warnings sparsely scribbled on the walls in blood and ancient photographs of the horrors that take place in this suicidal experiment accumulate with the eerie vacancy of sound to produce an atmospheric affect. GLaDoS occasionally interrupting the silence with demoralising jeers, meticulously positioned to perfect the dark humour. The sadistic tones of isolated sentinels are able to scare you. Portal does an absolutely flawless job of making you feel alone and considerably unable to overcome the things that you face.
Despite Portal's minimal length additional challenges are unlocked that require you complete chambers in the fewest steps or portals possible but these simply do not hold up to the standard of the first playthrough. Nonetheless Portal forces you into utilising logic and takes a different direction than most games on the modern market. Portal's humour, fantastic gameplay, persuasive sense of place and the thoughtful nature of puzzles makes this a game highly deserving of critical acclaim and a genuine must-buy.