Ever since I played FEZ, I learned that I couldn’t just assume I would enjoy a game simply because it has “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews (at least, I thought I learned my lesson, but then I played Antichamber, and, well…I made a whole post about that game). Because of this, I’ve become quite sensitive to negative reviews, and I’ll only buy a game if I think I’ll enjoy it despite the common criticisms I see (and only when it’s on sale >66% off). Sure, I might miss out on some games I’d like, and sure, it is far from full-proof (negative reviews of PS2-era games like Beyond Good and Evil only complain about specs and crashes rather than detail anything about the game itself), but on top of already having a backlog, I think it’s worth it if I can avoid games that simply aren’t for me.

This summer sale, I put my mentality to the test. I checked how much money I had left over from card sales, looked at all the games (and their corresponding reviews) on my wish list that I could afford with that amount of money, and I bought exactly one game. Let’s see how that worked out for me:

This is a game where you shoot portals at walls, floors, and ceilings, then enter the portals to progress to the next room. Only two portals can exist at a time (one blue and one orange), and entering one will have you exit from the other. People claim that this is a puzzle game, but I never found any of the “puzzles” to be that hard to solve. Honestly, the only two parts of the game that took me a while to get past were the parts where you need to shoot a portal while in the air before you hit the ground (and for one of those, you won’t even know that the area is portal-compatible unless you maneuver the camera in an unintuitive way to look in that direction while you’re in the air). In order for a game to be a puzzle game, the challenge needs to come from figuring out how to use the mechanics to progress; with this game, most of the challenge isn’t from figuring out what to do, but in actually doing it. Therefore, I’m classifying this as an FPS.

Anyway, the game starts with you waking up in a cell, and after waiting about thirty seconds, the computer talks to you over the intercom and provides a bit of world-building. When the computer is done talking, a portal will open up automatically, angled in such a way so that you can see your character model in the cell on the other side of the portal. The first room teaches you that doors will only stay open if their respective switches continue to be pressed, and the second room shows that portals can change location. Unfortunately, the location of the portals change based on a timer, so if you miss them, you have to wait (and being forced to wait has always been a huge pet-peeve for me). You get to fire blue portals after this room, but orange portals are still either fixed or change location based on a timer. It isn’t until half-an-hour in that you finally get the orange portal gun and gain the ability to shoot both types of portals, and honestly, with as gradual as the difficulty increased during that time, I feel like it could have been condensed to ten minutes without any loss (during that part, rooms are practically the same as previous rooms with one minor difference). Plus, you’ll discover something else about the game after getting the orange portal gun: even though the aiming reticle has blue on the left and orange on the right, you shoot blue portals with the right trigger and orange with the left trigger (yes, I played with a controller). This threw me off multiple times.

Now that you can shoot both types of portals, you might think that the game will start to pick up in difficulty, but no, the game continues to have its difficulty increase so gradually that I still thought I was on the tutorial part of the game. Of course, that’s only if you’re looking at it as a puzzle game. Test chamber 15 is where the devs begin to drop the pretense of this being a puzzle game, as its the first of the two areas I mentioned earlier where you need to open a portal while falling before you hit the ground. After that part, there’s a part where platforms will be moving toward you over water (if you fall in the water, you die), and you need to use the portals to jump forward and progress (shoot one color at the end of the hall, shoot another right by you, and when you see the next one come across, jump through). Again, it isn’t hard to figure out how to progress, but jumping in this game is a bit finicky, and you have to jump or you’ll fall in the space between the wall and the platform, and if you don’t jump right at the edge of the platform, you’ll still fall in the space between the platform and the wall (or even the space between the other platform and the wall). In other words, progress here is reliant on platforming rather than puzzle solving. The part right after this is time-based: you have to hit two buttons that open doors, then get an energy ball past them before they close. I’ll stop here because if I went over all the examples on how this isn’t a puzzle game, I’d probably be here all night.

On top of this, after test chamber 19, the game starts to run out of ideas. There were multiple times where you have to climb up a vertical shaft and shoot a portal past a fence (with the climb up the shaft being easy to figure out and easy to do). Plus, there were a few times where you had to shoot a portal at the top of a wall, then make another portal to see where you land, then moving the second portal to the part where you land so that you gain falling momentum and launch yourself across the room. Also, near the end of the game, the game introduces a new obstacle (missile launchers), and the boss of the game is based around manipulating this obstacle that had only been recently introduced (also, the boss fight is timed). If this were a puzzle game, that would be a pretty cheap tactic since that would mean the devs couldn’t figure out how to make a challenging puzzle with the mechanics that you had already been using for the rest of the game. However, the devs couldn’t figure out how to make a challenging puzzle with them, either, so it just means they couldn’t quite make a cohesive experience.

I guess that’s my main issue with this as a puzzle game: the portal mechanic doesn’t lend itself to clever puzzle design. Even the “advanced” rooms (which are really exactly the same as rooms in the main game with one or two minor differences) never require that much thought to solve. I’m sure the portal mechanic in itself is (or at least was) very impressive from a technical standpoint, but once you wrap your mind around how the mechanics work (which will happen by the time you get the orange portal gun due to how slow the game is), there’s not much the game can do to make puzzles require much thought. The only time I had to stop and think about how to progress was in advanced chamber 18 where you need to figure out how to knock over all the turrets without any of them spotting and shooting you (as a side note, advanced chamber 18 is the second of the two areas where you have to shoot a portal while in the air, and it’s the one that requires awkwardly turning the perspective to see where you need to shoot).

On top of this, the game shows its age. The first thing you’ll notice is that the default resolution is, like, 640x480. You have to manually change it to your native resolution in the options. For another example, the game will have an elevator sequence between each test chamber. You might think this is to mask the loading times, but then the entire game will stop and display a text box on screen that says “LOADING.” None of these are deal-breakers, though.

However, the most notable instance of age happened in advanced test chamber 16. You see, test chamber 16 introduces turrets, and advanced chamber 16 is exactly the same, except the turrets are in cages and, as a result, can’t be knocked over. At one point, there are two turrets facing each other, as well as a short branching path with some dead-weight blocks (blocks that can’t be picked up. My first instinct was to use the portal gun to move the dead-weight blocks in front of one turret, essentially forming a wall, then using a companion cube (blocks that can be picked up) to shield myself from the other turret. However, as I was laying portals to send the dead-weight blocks to their target position, something peculiar happened: I heard the sound of a turret being knocked over. When I went to check on what had happened, I saw that the dead-weight blocks weren’t on the floor: they were in the floor, with some jutting out at odd angles. Whenever I tried to jump on one, I’d lose control and slowly slide off. Plus, when I moved them again with portals, they would fall through the floor (and cages) entirely, never to be seen again. Even the companion cubes had trouble colliding with the floor after this incident. Although this helped in that I could knock the turrets over, it was also a curse since the companion cubes would now fall through the switch that needed to be held down to open the door. This wasn’t that big a deal, though, since I could just shoot a portal past the door while it was open, then shoot another portal in the room I was in and progress that way.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for challenging puzzles, give this game a pass. However, if you want to introduce video games to someone who literally hasn’t played video games before, I recommend this game. Actually, on second thought, there are probably better games for that, too.