The past month has been something of a bonanza for us on the 360. I must have grabbed about 800 gamerpoints just playing Halo 3, PGR4 and Assassin's Creed. But the most intriguing and fun game I've enjoyed in a long time is The Portal from the Orange Box. I knew this was coming. It was worth the wait.
The Portal is a challenging spacial puzzle game for the XBox 360 brought to you by the Valve folks who brought you Half-Life. It is part of The Orange Box, which contains all three sequels to Half-Life, the award winning FPS/adventure game. If you don't understand, it's your fault. The Portal places you in the shoes of a test human in a physics lab called Aperture Science. You are challenged, basically, to use a Portal gun to get through a series of mazes.
There are 19 mazes (so far as I can tell, I'm still working on #19) that go from the simple to the complex. Although they all have similar themes and are constructed with some fairly basic elements, they are the most fun and unique challenges I've seen in a video game since Myst.
When I first saw the Orange Box, I was somewhat disappointed that The Portal was its own game, and not part of some FPS. I originally considered the Portal in the context of Prey, another game in which gravity is a key player. Instead, everything in The Portal resembles tutorials of the sort you would think Morpheus would design in The Construct. The whole theme of the game is just that, a tutorial with a disembodied computer voice (every bit as distinctive as Guilty Spark) that becomes more and more sadistic and cruel over time. With each successive level, the puzzles get more complex and 'impossible'.
This is as clever a game as it gets. It's a great entertainment for everyone.
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