Gateway To Web — It’s Living

The Cake is not a lie, after all. Valve, the company which collided energy beams long before scientists in Geneva dreamed of it and gave us games like Half-Life, Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2, is working on a Portal sequel. The official announcement came a few days after some cryptic messages coded inside Morse code and audio streams were released to Steam users. Portal 2, which is expected to pick the story inside decrepit and abandoned Aperture Science Laboratories, will be released in “coming holiday season”, or in other words, at the end of the year.

I am sure that many readers here may not share my excitement at this news. So let me fill you in a bit on the story of Portal and why the game has achieved a cult following. It was released in 2007, bundled inside Valve's Orange Pack. Portal was supposed to be a slick little game that could provide gamers, most of them hardcore first-person shooter players, some relief from the endless cycle of run, gun and sniping.

In a break from the usual fare, in this game you were only armed with a Portal Gun and were supposed to solve a number of puzzles to advance inside the Aperture Science Laboratories created by a mad scientist. In the beginning, puzzles were basic — like creating a portal between two rooms and hence overcoming the wide gulf that separated them — but as the players progressed, the difficulty level increased. The same was true for design of the game. Initially, it seemed very basic where you were the only living creature, trying to make your way through a peculiarly designed science lab full of cubes and lit in yellow and blue light. But once you walked through the levels, you realized it was no ordinary game. After all, captivating the gamers accustomed to thick and fast action with just one gun and puzzles was no mean feat.

Everything about Portal was unique, brilliant and it reflected in countless awards that the game won in 2007 and often featured in list of most influential games of the decade at the end of last year. Though it was supposed to be an add-on, the game went on to eclipse even tremendously crafty and imaginative games like Half-life 2 and Team Fortress 2. Not only did its design and puzzles win some rave reviews, even its script and music — Still Alive became an instant hit — were lauded by gaming industry as path-breaking. The dialogues in the game were particularly impressive, helping Valve designers to make this game — where the character controlled by gamers is the only living thing — more human than the games like Call of Duty that have legions of paratroopers.

Of course, to fully grasp the game-changing nature of Portal, you have to actually play it. The rush starts to build only when you start cracking puzzles, create tunnels between the square rooms, run ahead carrying your companion cube with pink hearts on its sides and face automated turrets that fire at you and cry “no hard feeling” when you disable them. And then the significance of the game hits you in the face as you listen to GLaDOS, the mysterious and cunning A.I. of the facility, as she comforts, cajoles, threatens, pleads, mocks, lies, tells you to “marry the cube”, and even offers “some cake” to you — the Black Forest cake towards which you extend your hand in the end, only to be thwarted by mean machines living inside the bowels of Aperture Science Laboratory.