PORTAL

he original Portal is the closest we’ve ever gotten to a perfect game. It’s inventive, hilarious, full of surprises, and has a perfectly balanced learning curve that throws new challenges at you just when you’re ready to tackle them. And of course, it introduces us to GLaDOS, one of the best videogame villains in history. As a game it’s wonderfully short, taking maybe three hours to complete, which means it never has a chance to grow stale, and lets you finish it in a single sitting. The first time I completed Portal, it left me delighted and hungry for more that I immediately started playing it again from the beginning.

has naturally been overshadowed by , which has a bigger scope, a greater variety of puzzles and systems, and more characters and lore. It’s a fantastic sequel, is probably a better game than the original. But is still closer to perfect. Somehow, in my brain, those statements make absolute sense.