Portal (video Game) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

See also: Critical reception of The Orange Box

Reception
Aggregate scores
Aggregator	Score
GameRankings	89.15%
Metacritic	90/100
Review scores
Publication	Score
1UP.com	A
Eurogamer	9/10
GameSpot	9.0/10
GameSpy	4.5/5.0
IGN	8.2/10

Portal was very well received by critics. It was a favorite of The Orange Box, often earning more praise than either Half-Life 2: Episode Two or Team Fortress 2. It was praised for its unique gameplay and dark, deadpan humor. Eurogamer cited that "the way the game progresses from being a simple set of perfunctory tasks to a full-on part of the Half-Life story is absolute genius", while GameSpy noted that "What Portal lacks in length, it more than makes up for in exhilaration." The game was criticized for sparse environments, and both criticized and praised for its short length. Aggregate reviews for the stand-alone PC version of Portal gave the game an average rating of 89% based on 27 reviews through Game Rankings, and 90% through 28 reviews on Metacritic. Upon release of Portal 2, Valve stated that Portal has sold more than four million copies through the retail versions, including the standalone game and The Orange Box, and from the Xbox Live Arcade version. This figure does not include sales figures for Valve's own Steam digital download service.

The game generated a fan following for the Weighted Companion Cube—even though the cube itself does not talk or act in the game. Fans have created plush and papercraft versions of the cube and the various turrets, as well as PC case mods and models of the Portal cake and portal gun. Jeep Barnett, a programmer for Portal, noted that players have told Valve that they had found it more emotional to incinerate the Weighted Companion Cube than to harm one of the "Little Sisters" from BioShock. Both GLaDOS and the Weighted Companion Cube were nominated for the Best New Character Award on G4, with GLaDOS winning the award for "having lines that will be quoted by gamers for years to come."

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, of Zero Punctuation, gave the game the only entirely positive review in the show's history, calling it "the most fun you'll have with your PC until they invent a force-feedback codpiece." Croshaw went on to say: "I went in expecting a slew of interesting portal-based puzzles and that's exactly what I got, but what I wasn't expecting was some of the funniest pitch black humor I've ever heard in a game." He states that, while the game was short, the two to three hour length of the game was perfect as the game did not outstay its welcome, and called the ending "balls-tighteningly fantastic."

Portal's story has been stated to be well-established in the context of Erving Goffman's dissemination on dramaturgy, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which equates one's persona to the front and back stage areas of a theater. In the case of Portal, the story carefully establishes the front stage, the pretense of the Enrichment Center, and hints at problems in the back stage through various technical faults, and then slowly reveals more and more of the back stage to the player throughout the game. Due to this, the video game was made part of the required course material among other classical and contemporary works, including Goffman's work, for a freshman course "devoted to engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives and fostering a sense of community" for Wabash College in 2010. Portal has also been cited as a strong example of instructional scaffolding that can be adapted for more academic learning situations, as the player, through careful design of levels by Valve, is first hand-held in solving simple puzzles with many hints at the correct solution, but this support is slowly removed as the player progresses in the game, and completely removed when the player reaches the second half of the game. Portal was exhibited at the Smithsonian Art Exhibition in America from February 14 through September 30, 2012. Portal won the "Action" section for the platform "Modern Windows."