For the critical play on puzzles I played Portal. Portal is a first person platformer/puzzle game developed by valve. In it, you go through a series of tests, each getting progressively more difficult to test human problem solving skills. At the end of the test, they promise you cake, but more on that later. Portal is great for achievers, explorers, and anyone who loves puzzle games.
At the start of portal, you don’t have a portal gun. You just have to wait for portals to open where you want them to. But as you get farther through the game, you get the portal gun and can even upgrade it(the upgrade makes you able to place the blue and orange portal). This changes the game from mostly timing puzzles to sequence or exclude the middle puzzles. As you get farther in, you need to press buttons or help the pellet catcher catch the high energy pellets. The levels sometimes have the whole puzzle upfront, allowing you to complete part of it, but if you can’t complete the whole thing, you can’t move on(exclude the middle). But most of the time, it’s a sequence puzzle. You have to open a door to another room in order to get to more of the puzzle. Some puzzles even use a combination of the two, which was really fun and cool to see. In portal, narrative is woven through it’s mechanics by allowing you to do whatever you want with the puzzle gun, which makes the player experience a lot more enjoyable.
One of the things I’ve always loved about portals is the possibility of an infinite loop. So, the second I got access to the fully upgraded portal gun I made one and fell through it for a while. This causes the sensation type of fun because who doesn’t want to watch a character fall through an infinite loop. Doing this also made me think of the narrative of the game. Many humans would do that if they had access to a portal gun, so it really made me feel like the average human test subject.
Another test it has that makes you feel like a test subject is the companion cube level. You are given a cube that looks like any other, but there are hearts on it. You are tasked with protecting it, and if it takes too much damage, you die. The level starts out with you just having to use it as a stepping stool. But then immediately sends you into having to use it as a shield to block a high energy pellet. All the while the robot voice is telling you it cannot talk and it doesn’t have feelings. Even so, I feel into the trap of caring about the little cube. I even felt bad for having to use it as a shield. At the end of the level, you feel like you’ve made a friend with the little cube(I named them Jeffrey), just for the robot to tell you to do the unthinkable. It tells you to escort the cube TO THE INCINERATOR. Not only is the cube going to burn, but you are the one that has to turn on the incinerator and put your new friend in it. This is an excellent way the devs put the story into simple mechanics. All you had to do was carry around some heart cube then burn it. But most players chose to treat it with kindness and even befriend it. Which shows that the robots are just wanting to test if humans still have empathy, and not caring about your feelings for the cube.
(I had so much fun with the level I completely forgot to take a photo of Jeffrey. So here is one I found online)
Another way the narrative is woven in through the mechanics are the secret rooms. Some levels had parts of the walls that were pushed forward, and stuck there because of boxes. If you go in them, you see a totally different picture.
(for some reason it wouldn’t let me take a screenshot of Portal, it just kept taking me out of the game before allowing me to screenshot. So the photo was taken on my phone.)
You can see in the photo above, that instead of the white walls were used to, it is all rusty with graffiti and torn posters. On the walls there are tallies, making you think someone has been trapped in there, and was keeping track of how long. Plus, there is a lot of writing that says the cake is a lie.
(for contrast here is one of the earlier levels. You can see it is mostly white, with some black parts on the walls showing you can’t place a portal there)
The contrast between the normal level and the hidden rooms show a side of Aperture Laboratories(the place you’re getting tested at) that they don’t want you to see. Which makes you feel unsure, because they’re hiding something big from you. If the cake is a lie, what’s at the end?
The devs of Portal did an amazing job with the ethics part of it. The only way to look at yourself, is through a portal. There, you can see that you are a woman. This goes against the stereotype that videogames are played by men and therefore videogames should have male avatars. Plus, the levels don’t require you to know anything before hand. They show you pictures of the skill they want you to learn in the earlier levels, and it’s just a try and fail cycle until you nail it.
