Portal: remarkably innovative and refreshingly humorous.
I'm only going to talk here about "Portal". I have already written a review on "Half-Life 2" at:
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/halflife2/player_review.html?id=182449.
Portal starts in a futuristic gymnasium where we appear as a female athlete with spring heeled trainers. We are going to have to solve a series of physical and mental puzzles that involve "portals" which are dynamic gateways into other parts of the building. This a research project that is being supervised by a female computer, so during the whole game we are being observed and evaluated by this computer.
It starts with some instructions about safety, and we see these "saftey at work" style signs everywhere which are part of the game's iconography. The inital puzzles are simple and the computer seems also to be testing us psychologically. We get the impression that it is a psychological, as well as a "physical & mental agility" experiment.
As the game progresses, we are given more and more control over the creation, deletion and use of portals with a special gun, that looks a bit liek the gravity gun in Half-Life 2, only cooler. The computer continues with its psychological tricks, which includes the promise of some light refreshment at the end of the experiment in the form of a "cake". The puzzles get harder and more dangerous, and you don't know whether the computer is lying or not, or whether you're allowed to go behind the scenes, and so on. Are there rules, or not? Or is the only rule that there are no rules? Is the computer serious or is it all part of the experiment.
As the game develops so does your relationship with the computer, which turns out to be a passive aggressive computer that is in fact negative towards you but it tries to hide it. All this is very humorous, by the way.
The physics of the game literally leap into a new dimension. Although the world of portals is not one to be found in reality, it is modelled as it would be if it existed in reality. In other words, the physics makes sense but is a little twisted. For example, you can make "in" portals and "out" portals. If you put an "in" portal on the floor and its corresponding "out" portal on a wall, when you jump through the portal in floor you come flying feet first horizontally out of the "out" portal on the wall, upon which gravity then pulls you down, in a trajectory manner.
You can have of fun with this, and with practice it adds an entirely new dimension to gaming. If there had been a mission builder, or a multiplayer possibility, I would not have been able to leave this game alone! But given this game's success, I think we'll be seeing more games from Valve featuring the portal gun and portal physics in the not to distant future..
Oh, a review of this game would not be complete without a mention of the song at the end which the computer sings to you. A huge success ;-)
And remember, the cake is a lie. Or is it?