We know how videogame plots go don't we? Wake up on a beach, rescue the princess, wander the wilderness for 28 years, discover you're the last heir to the empire, form deep and meaningful relationships with your robot sidekick, that sort of thing.

The word I'm struggling for is Epic.

If yer standard videogame plot was a novel it would be confined to that section of Waterstones where the shelves buckle under the weight of 800 pages of small print. The sort of book that aspires to be the Lord of the Rings, but which almost always end up lost and unloved at the back of your local Oxfam.

But, thankfully, not all stories aspire to be Sagas. Not all stories aspire to be books.

In many ways, the perfect length for most fiction is the short story. This is especially true of genre fiction - Sci Fi, Crime, Horror, War Stories - all videogame staples. (We're a long way, hopefully, from having videogame equivalents of Bridget Jones)

The short story ethos - get in, make your point, leave the reader pondering the possibilities - is writ large throughout Portal. On the surface, or played with sound down, it's just a glorified version of Sokoban. Push the boxes around, stand on the switches, get to the exit. Challenging enough from a gameplay perspective, but really it's little more than a demonstration of a gameplay mechanic.

But the devil is in the details, in the little side rooms full of graffiti, in the burgeoning relationship between you and your nemesis. In the cake.

Like the best short stories, it leaves you with more questions than answers. And like the best short stories, your first reaction upon finishing is to turn back the pages and start all over again. It is a masterpiece of story telling, by stripping out all of the extra guff and trimming the action down to a starkly minimal few hours, it exposes all other story driven games - not only of this year - as the overblown, overwritten, overengineered nonsense that they really are.

Simply put, if you haven't played Portal this year then you're missing out - it stands out even among the many highlights of the Orange Box. And for that reason it is my Game of the Year.

January 2008

Comments