I just got around to finishing Portal, one of the five titles included in the 360/ PC over-generous box of treats, The Orange Box. The game’s floored me.

I mean, it’s astounding. I love the length (it’s about 2 and a half hours long) as the game burns very brightly for it.

The dialogue and narrative is all at once interesting, menacing, funny and terrifying (written as it is by the Old Man Murray team) as you take on the role of a lab-rat human, working your way through a series of test/ puzzle rooms under the watchful encouragement of Hal-like female sentient computer, GLaDOS.

Talking about the game in specifics will spoil it for those of you looking forward to picking it up tomorrow so let’s not do that.

Here’s a mechanical overview though: your character Chell, must work her way through a series of puzzles solved by teleporting her and other simple objects using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Shooting the gun’s ‘bullet’ against a flat surface opens up an oval portal door. Shooting a second bullet somewhere else in the environment opens up another door and stepping into one will see Chell emerge from the other.

By far the most successful and ongoing activity in videogames is shooting stuff. Aiming and firing at objects is the most natural activity within the confines of a videogame – not just because of our boyish, Yippee Kay Ey! tendencies – but mainly because pointing and shooting at things is the easiest way to interact instantly with objects both near and far within a 3D space. You can take out an obstacle standing in front of you or flick a switch with a bullet 100 metres away just by pointing and clicking.

What Portal does is to mess with this formula by allowing you to manipulate the environment around you using the same reticule + projectile conceit but by removing the offensive/ aggressive violence of solid projectiles (e.g. bullets). Challenges are thus constructed in a completely different way but using an interface and control scheme that is immediately familiar and comforting.

The game presents more than just passive physics puzzles (i.e. how to get from here to there) as there are more traditional ‘enemies’ that must be disposed of. However, as you only have the Portal gun, which is essentially a passive tool and not a weapon at all, the way these antagonists must be overcome is by turning their violence against themselves.

Thus you let a turret aim its sights on Chell before ducking out of the way, opening a portal where you were standing and sending their bullets right back at them.

It’s pure passive-aggressive gaming. While Halo’s designers often wax lyrical about how much of their series’ success comes from that player feeling that Master Chief is a one man army ploughing on against insurmountable odds, Portal is far more successful in exploring how it feels to be weak and helpless and as such the value of victory is raised much higher than in traditional FPS titles.

The Portal gun will inevitably be shoehorned into a more traditional First Person Shooter (either by Valve themselves or by industrious fans UPDATE: here it is working within Half-Life 2, in fact) where it will become just another tool in the player’s arsenal of more traditional weapons. This will be interesting (fire a Portal under an enemy’s feet and see them tumble down a ravine) but it will never be as successful or effective an experience as it is here where the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device is the only tool available.

In Portal you’re forced into approaching gaming’s traditional problems and obstacles with a new perspective and fresh eye in a way that would lose much of its power and intensity if you could default to a pistol when challenged.

Developer Valve manages to reinforce these mechanical themes with the scenario, narrative and dialogue (indeed, the GLaDOS AI character which guides Chell through the tasks is a passive aggressive mastermind, the irony of which is she’s also one whom you take on with a purely passive aggressive tool-set) – a peculiarly female way of examining conflict perhaps.

The game’s ending is particularly memorable – not only because it manages to pull off a satisfactory one (take note Bioshock) but because it’s soundtracked by a cute song sung by GLaDOS herself. Written by folk-nerd singer songwriter, Jonathan Coulton, it’s unusual, quirky and interesting and helps to underline what’s one of the few unusual, quirky and interesting releases in a year of blockbusting heavyweights.

Here’s the story behind the song which, if you’ve not finished the game yet, you should read as soon as you have.