For this critical play, I played Valve’s Portal, a spatial puzzle single player game (ESRB rated Teen). For Portal, as the name would imply, the heart of the game is the core mechanic of its puzzles: the portal gun. Although it is provides a sensory pleasure in its usage with movement alone, the obstacles, goals, and story context enrich the game’s experience by providing stakes and positive and negative feedback on usage.
Core Mechanics:
All of these are linked to spatial exploration. The core mechanic is the portal gun, which enables the player to manipulate space and momentum. The companion cubes and pressure plates unlock new areas. Environmental hazards define areas of danger. Level structure itself exists as new independent areas to explore separated by elevators.
Dynamics:
Spatial exploration alone acts as more so a toy (without a goal) as nebulous pleasure in sensation, particularly with the momentum mechanics in the 3D space of Portal. Where Portal becomes a game is how it defines that exploration of mechanics into concrete goals (the levels). As games are sometimes defined as fun from arbitrary obstacles, Portal’s fun derives from the mechanics working together to pose challenges to the player. These exist as object puzzles (using the companion cubes), sequence puzzles (using the portal gun), and timing puzzles (with moving platforms), but many of these types are used all at once.
For instance, there is a level where the floor is entirely water (environmental hazard) with a raised platform for the origin portal and a moving platform that connects to the level exit but needs to be activated with an energy orb (also an hazard to the player). In order to solve the puzzle, you must use the portal gun in the correct sequence and timing to transport the energy orb to the moving platform to power it. Then you can move with that platform to avoid the water to pass the level.
Experience of the Game:
The pleasure of such a level is the process of unraveling how to solve it, which relies on the game’s feedback to your solving. Portal is extremely transparent with this. You instantly die upon contact with the hazards, and the game warns you so. The game’s narrator congratulates you heavily upon solving a level. Mechanics are always consistent, and the game structures their usage in simple introductions into more complex use cases akin to a world in Super Mario. It is a smooth experience.
Another factor that aids the player’s desire to continue playing in addition to the satisfaction of completing puzzles is the exploration of the world. This is explicitly linked to the completion of levels, since the narrator, the main source of information, is primarily prompted through passing levels.
Ethics:
There are some puzzle games that suffer from a preconceived notion of culture or knowledge base from their players. Portal manages to avoid this issue more or less since it’s building a new unknown world from the ground up. Its level system also eases you into the knowledge and know how of the game. Even the narrator is explicit with her instructions, although she is lying sometimes.
