E for Everyone: Portal

Why should you play "Portal" (2007)? Because it is arguably the most intuitively-designed game ever made. Also because it’s hilarious, absurdly fun, outstandingly satisfying and has a very touching origin story if you’re interested. But there are so many facets of this wonderful little four-hour game that exploded expectations everywhere that I’m only going to focus on two: innovation and tutorial.

In the world of "Portal," you wake up to white walls as a test subject for Aperture Laboratories and must navigate a series of chambers containing puzzles of increasing complexity. Your only contact is a robotic voice full of Valve’s patented dark, dry humor telling you what to do, and you’re given no weapon for the entirety of the game even though it’s in first person perspective.

Let’s just say that before "Portal," there were few first person games that contained no other tools but a gun not meant to harm anyone. Now there are countless riffs on the idea because it was so ingenious. In "Portal," you manipulate your reachable spaces by teleporting through portals you manually place on the walls, floor and ceiling. This many seem like a daunting or at least dizzying idea, but "Portal" leads you into its depths one step at a time.

Without spoiling anything, I can firmly say that all lessons "Portal" teaches you about its world culminate in the game’s conclusion. In this way, "Portal" is one big tutorial, and even the youngest of players can figure things out for themselves in such an environment. In fact, whenever someone asks me what they should start with when getting into the world of games, I nearly always answer with "Portal" for PC. Because players can proceed at their own pace with absolutely no retribution in-game and because a lot of user action is met with entertaining voice lines attaching the player to the world, I believe "Portal" is a perfect first game. Never used a WASD + mouse control setup? That’s fine. "Portal" won’t start messing with you until you’ve got your footing. Not used to puzzles? That’s also alright. Take your time. "Portal" is an elegant game with simple goals explained explicitly and accomplished perfectly by level designers. Unlike quite a few puzzle games, "Portal" doesn’t want to make you feel stupid; quite the opposite, it wants to make you feel like a genius.

"Portal" is available for purchase for $9.99 and is frequently on sale for $4.99 on Steam. Available platforms are Windows OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and even Android for specific devices (though it will require the use of a controller). Additionally, if you play and love Portal, its sequel came out four years later in 2011, and expanded on the world of Aperture Science and its characters. If you found any part of Portal charming (and how could you not?), Portal 2 is also worth checking out.