Portal – Mentally Challenging Physics Gaming for Free!

If you have been looking for a thought provoking game but have been reluctant to shell out your hard-earned cash, you might be in luck.

Portal, is a game that will challenge your spatial reasoning and get you to think outside of the square when it comes to physics. The basic premise of the game is that you control a character in possession of a portal gun that can create one entrance portal and one exit portal. Only one of each type of portal can exist at any one time so if you fire an exit portal shot whilst one already exists, the old one will collapse and the new one will stick. To progress through the game, you need to solve a series of puzzles under the direction of the in-game AI called GLaDOS.

As with many games on Steam, there’s a bunch of in-game achievements to attain whilst you bust your brains trying to work out how to get past a particular level. Also, this is one of the few games you might play where it will be hard to die except for some specific areas so you can freely experiment without fear of failure. So don’t be afraid to let your creative juices flow as there can be more than one way to complete each level.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game and have come back to it several times after I finished it. The game itself has won several awards since its release in 2007 and is currently rated 90/100 on Metacritic.

The best thing about this game is that it is free for everyone who downloads it before May 24th. All you need to do is install Steam (which I touched on in Steam vs Retail – Which is Best?) and then get Portal here. You’ve got nothing to lose (except maybe your download speeds for the month if you are on a fairly low plan).

Game on!