RobotGeek

Given all the undeniable genius and charm in the Portal games, I tend to feel it’s some failing on my part that I’m not head over heels in love with them. I enjoyed both games, sure, and loved parts of them. But I have a confession to make: doing room after room of self-contained puzzles, I actually got kind of bored.

Portal doesn’t do much to disguise the nature of its puzzles: even the story itself is, ‘crazy AI puts you through a series of increasingly difficult test chambers in an attempt to destroy you’. It’s pretty clear that Portal originated around the novel gameplay mechanics and the story was kind of built around that.  The input of GlaDOS is always brilliant, and it makes for some magic moments, but generally, whether it feels instigated by the developers or by a mad AI, the conceit doesn’t hide the bare bones of a very abstract puzzle game. For me, there are the clever puzzles, and there’s the hilarious writing and environmental storytelling that mostly happens around and in between these puzzles—but, saving the occasional Companion Cube or speaking turret, the two are nearly always separate.

This is not to say that the puzzles are wholly unaffected by the context in which they’re placed. GLaDOS’ presence is always implied, and the mood, such as it is, is very consistent—though the relentless sterility probably has a good deal to do with the game’s feeling of monotony, however intentional. With Portal‘s premise, though, you inevitably get exactly what it says on the tin: test chambers, contrived puzzle instances that you get through for the sake of getting through them. And at the end of each test chamber, that’s exactly what you’ve achieved: no more, no less.

Of course, this isn’t quite true. Getting through the chambers means resisting GLaDOS and, ultimately, defeating her. That’s motivation in itself, particularly when it comes to the anticipation of what outrageous things she might say and do next. But for me, the monotony of the test chambers prevailed a little too often over GLaDOS’ endearing antics. There are considerable stretches with too little a sense of progress, too meagre a reward for completing one chamber before being thrown into the next.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with puzzles that are just puzzles, just like there’s nothing inherently wrong with any games that are about no more than being games; fun mental challenges, where progressive difficulty is the only kind of progression looked for. But as a continuous, extended experience, especially one that sets itself up as a narrative as Portal does, I honestly found it kind of a drag at times.

I realise individual player preference is going to play a big role here. For some gamers, the challenge of the puzzle is all they need, or what Portal offered hilarity-wise was more than enough to carry them through. It was enough for me, just about—I completed and would still recommend both games for the good stuff, including the ingenuity of the puzzles. But it was just a little dry as an overall gaming experience.

As far as I know, this wasn’t picked up on in very many reviews of either Portal game, and to be fair there was plenty to report on positively. But if you look at the critical response to a not totally dissimilar game, the 2D puzzle platformer Limbo, interestingly, a related criticism surfaces with a little more regularity. In summary, the latter section of the game is considered somehow less interesting than the former, even though the puzzles themselves get more elaborate. This certainly felt true for me. And it also felt like exactly the same thing that I experienced with Portal.

Limbo‘s first half has the player character wandering through a forest-like environment and encountering giant spiders, flies, mean kids and corpses, all of which offer some kind of narrative, however impressionistic and unexplained, and all of which are used as part of different puzzles. It’s still obviously a puzzle game, but engaging with each puzzle is about interacting with the game’s world, being intrigued, being horrified, wanting to see how it plays out, rather than just doing puzzles because there are puzzles to be done.

Somewhere in the second half, this all gives way to an industrial landscape of giant gears, machine guns, magnets, electrified platforms and topsy-turvy changeable gravity. But the only thing you’re about in these sections is figuring out the logic of each new puzzle. The atmosphere is still mostly there, as are the gruesome trial-and-error deaths, but the journey becomes more abstract and meaningless.

Again, like Portal, it’s part of the narrative that the player character is put through one sadistic ordeal after another, seemingly without end—this is limbo, after all. And the world is meant to be cold and unyielding, even more so amongst the dead industrial machines than the savagery of the forest. But that in itself doesn’t make it interesting to play; and besides, despair was conveyed much more effectively earlier on. Rather than having the sense of a kid on a journey where his presence is felt by the world, however meaningless or futile that journey might turn out to be in some sense, later he feels no more than a moving, fleshy piece to be used in each puzzle.

In short, while initially the world is not built for the puzzles but the other way around, in the second half this is clearly inverted. And what we get, essentially, instead of an interesting narrative, is a series of test chambers, in exactly the sense I described above.

Finding myself with this theory-of-sorts about puzzle games and my own enjoyment of them, I wanted to test it out on another game that, with no small amount of nostalgia, I’d always regarded as a favourite. Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus, another 2D puzzle platformer, always had heaps of dark atmosphere like Limbo, and a healthy dose of irreverent, oddball humour like Portal. (It was actually a sequel to a nearly identical game called Abe’s Oddysee, but it’s Exoddus that I played originally and the one that I remember most.)

In this game, you play as Abe, a member of an Oddworld race known as Mudokons, tasked with freeing as many fellow Mudokons as you can from their enslavement in the nightmarish mines, factories and offices of the Glukkons, a greedy, corporate race. At the same time, passing through these perilous dangers, you have to keep yourself alive. Death is just as brutal as it is in Limbo. Tunnel by tunnel, zone by zone, gulag by gulag, as you make your way through the different levels, rescuing Mudokons (or not) as you go along, each area is constructed as a puzzle: you have to figure out both how to get yourself through each part and to get the other Mudokons to special portals that will lead them to safety.

It turns out that even after all this time, two prior playthroughs had left me with a pretty good memory for the puzzles themselves, which always hurts replay value. But my verdict, though I didn’t replay the whole thing, is that it still mostly holds up. Though the game world is somewhat gamey, in that aspects of the world are reduced to repetitive gameplay mechanics (such as GameSpeak, where you can say certain phrases to get Mudokons to do things, and a Mudokon can be brought back from the brink of suicide just by patting them on the back and saying ‘Sorry’), there’s still a prevailing sense of narrative, albeit with tongue often in cheek. There’s a sense of progression not just in saving Mudokons, but in advancing deeper and deeper into the Glukkon industrial realms or the creature-infested Mudokon tombs or wildernesses.

The game is not without its test chamber syndrome, given that the structure does revolve around these zones and gulags that are very much self-contained, and there are times when you are presented with, say, Vaults 1-8 and you have to attend to each in turn before you can progress with the overall story. I can’t deny that it does feel repetitive at times, with each obviously contrived puzzle following on from the next. But within each of these, the story doesn’t stop and wait, and the world isn’t just a backdrop or a dressing. Puzzle and narrative are one and the same, without ‘solve the puzzle’ being that narrative.

Just like the better portions of Limbo, Oddworld itself largely prevails over the abstracting tendencies of increasingly complex puzzles, and rarely do I get the sense that I’m playing primarily for the puzzles, even if their challenge remains.