Note: If this is your first time to TotalFluff, please visit this brief explanation. Thanks!
Greetings, readers!
First of all, it has recently come to my attention that some of you are confused as to who is who on this blog. So I am going to clarify it for you. This is me, Fluffy McGiggles. The “Webmaster” (who has a bit of a pretentious name, if I might add-)
-uses the ridiculously over-the-top purple motif.
Since I am currently living in what you call the “internet”, when I speak, it appears in whatever style you see it as.
Second, since I quickly moved on to playing Portal 2 after I finished Portal 1, I did not have the kind of time I now wish I had taken to do a more in-depth review of Portal.
It is now time to fix this problem.
As I mentioned in my previous review, I enjoyed it a lot.
The game play was smooth, and intuitive. Controls were (mostly) taught as needed, in a subtle way that did not detract from the game play. (The one exception to this is that they key-in for “crouch” is the “ctrl” key on your keyboard.
The only other critique I had is that when you die (which happens frequently, although there are minimal consequences for such behavior), I, at least, needed to inform the game when I was ready to reload. That was actually fairly nice, from my perspective, as it gave me the opportunity to look around. However, it did take me by surprise the first few times.
One of the other very nice features of the game is that it did emphasize solving the puzzles. There are a few things required that might have required very fast reflexes to do in a different game. However, the trick for Portal is solving the puzzles. Therefore, as soon as you figured out the puzzle, it would default to getting you to the proper place, thus making game-control fairly easy, and the game emphasis truly on the logic behind the game.
Portal 1 also did an excellent job of making it clear what you were supposed to do. There were few distraction items– anything you encountered was likely to be useful for solving the level’s puzzle. (For example, when there is a big red button in the room, you will need to push it to solve the puzzle.)
So, no red herrings, then? That’s what you’re trying to say?
Correct, Webmaster. Well done. There are minimal red herrings in Portal 1.
The story was also very simple, and very excellent. I think it would have been an even better story if I had not known what I was getting into, so I will not spoil it for you. But it is worth playing through.
And those constitute reasons why I really enjoyed Portal 1, and highly recommend it.
