Portal

RELEASE October 10, 2007 DEVELOPER Valve PUBLISHER In-houses LINK bit.ly/3DGTBRz

Portal has a place in gaming canon that makes it difficult to argue why you should replay it. Either you’ve played it, and love it, or you know what it’s all about. It’s like pitching somebody on watching the original Star Wars trilogy for the first time: we all know who Luke’s father is. Its iconic moments are part of games culture – the companion cube is almost passé as a symbol of nerd culture, not quite old enough to be retro but old enough to be out of date – and ‘the cake is a lie’ was more thoroughly memed than ‘taking an arrow to the knee’ was for Skyrim. And in the meantime, plenty of other games have built on Portal’s ‘thinking with portals’ mechanics, from puzzlers like Bridge Constructor to shooters such as Splitgate.

That’s before mentioning , too, which expands significantly on what the original introduces. About four times as long with additional puzzle mechanics both gives us backstory on Aperture Science and GlaDOS, and introduces the highly quotable new characters of Wheatley and Cave Johnson. Johnson’s speech about how ‘when life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade, make life take the lemons back’ may not have surpassed ‘the cake is a lie’, but it’s printed on many, many tea-towels.