Portal.

(A word of warning: Others recommend experiencing Portal without any prior knowledge, and I’m inclined to agree. There are no big spoilers here, but there’s something to be said for going in with a clean slate. If you’ve already finished it, or have no interest in computer games and would never play it anyway, read on.)

First, for the non-gamers: Portal is a quirky puzzle game bundled with Valve’s Half-Life 2 compilation The Orange Box.

When the game opens you wake up in a testing facility. A droll AI encourages you to make your way through various obstacle-laden rooms — there will be cake at the end of the experiment, she promises. I don’t want to give anything away, but I’ll say this: some other stuff happens too, and it is awesome.

Anyway, the conceit of the game is the handheld “portal gun” you’re given, which creates orange and blue spatial warp fields that embed themselves into most flat surfaces.

Yikes. Did that make any sense? A YouTube clip is worth a thousand words here:

(link)

As you can see, it’s a fairly simple concept that has some fairly unexpected consequences. Jumping fifty feet down into a portal and then, maintaining my momentum, shooting out of a wall like a cannonball was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in a video game.

For those who have finished the game:

• Schlaghund’s Playground has the best analysis of Portal I’ve seen.
• Jonathan Coulton, who composed a song for the game, wrote about his experience working with Valve (and posted lyrics and chords).
• And finally, from the department of questionable analysis, Heroine Sheik has the lesbian critique. Who says video games aren’t art?