Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

Major spoilers ahead.

And I say that more strongly than usual, ’cause in the same way that watching Pulp Fiction opening night let me enjoy it as a blank slate before years of references, quotations, criticism and other junk colored the experience for me, I have to rank playing Portal this week as one of my all-time great gaming experiences – because from the beginning to the end, I had no clue where it was going. So if you haven’t played it yet, skip this post.

So Portal. I’m very gullible. Ask anyone. I’m gullible in the same way as a lot of toddlers, or New Yorkers: I want to believe everything. I want to let my guard down. And when an experience is as complete and as satisfying as Portal, when every detail of the world and the story hang together and there’s are no cheese-outs, laugh tracks or cop-outs to break the illusion – well, it makes me happy.

I can honestly say that for most of Portal, I had no idea what would happen next. I didn’t even know it had a story. For the first part of the game, you have to run through a series of 19 “tests” – each of them a puzzle, or set of puzzles, designed to test how well you can think with portals. You start the game as a blank slate: you don’t know who or where you are, and you also know nothing about the erratic but musically robotic voice that guides you through the labs. I expected the robotic voice to be a running gag. I thought the game would end after puzzle 19 – whether with a happy ending or a tragic one, I had no idea. The robotic voice was equally funny and sinister: the script walked a very fine line between the two, and the tension she brings to the game never lifts.

She promised cake. But come the end of puzzle 19, and it turned out she was going to throw me into an incinerator. I thought this was such a good idea for an ending that it took me a minute to realize, hey, I could actually escape before the fire killed me. Talk about forgetting you have free will: you’re a puppet for so much of the game that you almost forget to preserve your own life. BioShock explored the same problem of free will – how can you say you’re an intelligent, self-directed free agent person when you’re doing every damn thing anyone tells you? But Portal handles it a little more elegantly: the moment you realize you’re free is the moment you save your own life. And from that point on, you’re on the run.

So, the antagonist: GlaDOS. This screenshot explains a lot of facts about GlaDOS, including the terrifically Douglas Adams-esque fact that she was supposed to be nothing more than a fuel system ice inhibitor, but some genius gave her a will of her own.

Is she better than HAL in 2001? Well, let me put it this way: did HAL sing you a song at the end of the movie? I didn’t expect to confront GlaDOS head-on. I thought I’d just escape. Instead, you destroy her, and then she comes back to sing you a song. Just when things have gotten as crazy and climactic as they possibly can, this is the extra cherry on the sundae, and how much farther out of left field can it come?

I still don’t know if GlaDOS is a “villain.” Okay, she tried to kill me. But I tried to kill her. Portal gave a bunch of reveals, but also left a lot of mysteries: is the world outside a wreck? What happened to the other test subjects, who left the trail that you follow through the last part of the game? Why are both the protagonist and GlaDOS female? (Yeah, I know: why wouldn’t they be? But still.) I’m also curious about how this’ll tie into the Half-Life 2 world, but that’s a mundane, fanboyish curiousity (similar to my fanboyish theory that the protagonist of Portal is actually Alyx Vance’s supposedly dead mother. Five bucks says I’m right!).

The whole thing runs two hours (okay, for me, six), which turned off a lot of hardcore gamers – and call me a snob, but I don’t care what the hardcore gamers think. The people who plow through a couple games a week and skip the story for the twitching probably don’t react to the tension, the foreshadowing, and the implications of a game like this. I’m not saying they’re stupid. They just aren’t interested.

But I am. I want a game that’s sophisticated, that never feels cheap or silly, that touches as many nerves as this one. I don’t want big, cheap mindfucks: I want subtle little unnervings. I don’t want to know that the end credits come with one of the best songs ever written for a video game. I don’t want to know anything, and I don’t want to skip a detail. I want to be surprised.

Additional Portal links:

Want to see the end credits again?

Want that with cake?

Hmm, what does this site do?

This guy finished level 18 about two hours faster than I did.

Ever wondered who the voice of GlaDOS is?

And by the way, who does this remind you of?

UPDATE: My review for the Onion is now live. I wish we could give an A+.