Reviews: Insert "Still Alive" Pun Here.

This review is considered "better late than never" for many reasons. Both because I was late about this column, and the game I reviewing really should have been played and finished like a year ago by now. Well, that's hyperbole, but it's not much of one.

The game is Portal, the tiny puzzle game included with Team Fortress 2 and various other Half-Life related games in Valve's collected Orange Box. Despite being a relatively short and unassuming title, Portal soon rose to become the start of the collection, often winning Game of the Year awards from various publications. Not bad for a game that can be beaten in 3 hours.

The game can be summed up simply enough. Though seen from a first person viewpoint and using the same engine as the first person shooter Half Life 2, it's really more a puzzle game. You play a test subject (possibly the last surviving one) of the doomed Aperture Research Center. The Center, which is apparently under the control of the increasingly insane AI GLaDOS (yes, I had to look up that spelling,) is testing one of their recent inventions, the Portal gun. Said gun creates two interconnected dimensional portals that can be attached to most walls. Under the guise of testing the gun's capacities, the player is forced to solve puzzles using the gun's properties.

The game is praised for both its gameplay and its story-telling elements. The former comes into play more, it being a game and all. Using the Portal Gun is often hilarious, especially with the way it plays with physics. For example, you could fire portals on the ceiling and floor so that one is right above the other, and simply fall forever. Or you could make two portals on the floor, drop an object down one, and watch it constantly pop up between the two like a Whack-a-Mole. It helps that many of the puzzles utilize the portals' momentum-based attributes, or as GLaDOS puts it, "Speed goes in, speed comes out." For example, if you put one portal at the bottom of a drop and one on a wall, after falling through the portal at the bottom, you go flying at high speeds out of the wall portal, often letting you clear otherwise impassible gaps. It's great fun and one of the best uses for a first-person perspective I've seen outside of shooters.

The story is more subtle, but just as compelling. Initially, the test circumstances are often seen humorously, but not that ominously. You often hear glitches in GLaDOS' instructions, but by and large the tests are simple and you are praised for completing them. Then GLaDOS starts to openly lie about tests. And then you notice that while you often see labs above you as you perform, those tests are invariably empty. And then the tests turn lethal, including one where GLaDOS "accidentally" has to send you into a test with lethal gun turrets. And then you see warnings, hidden by past test subject, that the entire test, or at least your rewards, are just a lie.

It's less exposition than we're used to in a video game, but it's no less unsettling. It helps that so much is left unsaid, including the antagonist's motivations. Are you really the last living thing in the lab? Who was the predecessor that helps you indirectly throughout the game, giving you hints on how to escape? Is your escape just another test? After all, someone else did the exact same thing you did at some point. How does the game fit into the Half Life universe as a whole? And what is your protagonist, a woman named Chell's, deal?

This isn't the best story in video games, but it's the method that makes it resonate so well. Nearly everything in the game has created a meme just by its presence. The phrase "the cake is a lie," the fixation on the Weighted Companion Cube, a minor object from only one level of the game, the perfectly hummable and deeply unsettling credits song "Still Alive," where the antagonist you just spent most of the game to defeat, disassemble, and burn in a fire reveals she survived the attack and continues to alternately praise and threaten you; all of these have become timeless moments in a matter of months. The only commonly quoted downside is the game's length; many went in expecting it to last for longer than the 2-3 hours it takes to beat. Fortunately, I went in knowing how short it was, so I expected it to only last an hour and was pleasantly surprised to learn otherwise.

And so, Portal gets an A from me. It's not my usual style of game, but it fit in perfectly between the defeat of Persona 3 and the just released Smash Brothers Brawl. It has moments I'll never forget and ones I'd love to play again (once I get sick of Smash Brothers Brawl, obviously.) I regret only not playing it sooner; well, that and not having a computer that could easily play it, leaving me with a few days of frustration as I struggled to make the damn thing work. But work it did, and I'm grateful for it. In conclusion, the game takes the cake. And I'm very sorry for that line.