How do the mechanics of the puzzle(s) influence the experience of the game?
For this critical play, I chose to go back to the classics and play Portal. I had already played Portal 2 with a friend back in high school, but I had never experienced the original singleplayer game.
Portal is a delightful game that uses minimal mechanics to form progressively complex puzzles and platforming challenges to accomplish. The exposition locks you in this test chamber, haunted by an automated, auto-tuned voice who is telling you what you, the test subject, should be doing. You are then shown the very basics; when you enter the orange oval, you exit the blue oval, and vice versa. You’re then shown the goal to complete: move the companion cube onto the big red button to unlock the door and move onto the next section.
To up the ante and give you more powers, you are then given access to a gun that you can use to make your own portals. After doing enough puzzles traversing these 3D chambers, all the while still being nagged by some robotic lab investigator.
Each room is either gently teaching you a new way to use these portal mechanics, or is a test designed to challenge your conception of what’s possible with your given tools. In that way, the gameplay is very structured and emergent, as you need to adapt to the skills required to successfully complete each room.
As an aside, I like the elevators as a level separator, since it’s really just using visual trickery to make you think that the levels are more continuous than they are. Rather than actually moving in the elevator, you are staying in the same place while the previous level unloads, and the new level loads in. Newer games are more consistent about the lighting and everything else being more seamless, but it’s a really solid execution of this technique for its time.
Back to the puzzle mechanics, there is nothing more satisfying and fantastical than being able to play with this fantasy concept of portals in such a well-implemented way. Using gravity and an infinite portal loop to accelerate is something that we would definitely want to try if we had portals in real life, and the game delivers on not only letting you do this, but making it an essential part of some room solutions. This plus the classic source engine movement leads me to highly praise this game for the dynamic, sensory, interactive, discovery type of fun that I have playing it.
To grapple a little bit with the ethics questions, I think this game does make some assumptions that would cause me, an experienced PC gamer, to have more fun than someone who is more new to the game and genre. Working with kids and elderly, I have found that many people are not super comfortable with WASD movement and mouse pointing, and I think a lot of what makes this game feel good to play stems from having a good mental model of how to move my character in this clunky 3D world. I think past that, the puzzles themselves are designed in a solid way that don’t ask too difficult of questions for the player, but I imagine that some might need a walkthrough for certain parts, which maybe should be an integrated option within the menu.
