Portal

Doors. Always just doors. You open one, move forward, another door, another room. In Portal from 1986, almost everything revolves around moving between rooms and collecting things that will simply be enough to get you through the next doors. A simple recipe that built plenty of adventures in the eighties.

It's a text-and-graphics adventure — in each room you see a minimalist picture or description, below which you enter a command. You're rescuing someone or something, progressing deeper into some building or cave, collecting magical items. The game leads you forward linearly, though with a few branches. The graphics are primitive even for its release, colored pixels like images that might appear in some old encyclopedia. Sound — or rather beeps and bleeps — serves more for orientation than entertainment.

Playing boils down to entering commands like TAKE, GO, LOOK. You have to guess the keywords or read them from the manual. There's no elegance of later text adventures, just straightforward progress: you see an object, take it, find where to use it, move on. If you don't try the right word, you'll get stuck. It's logical, but frustrating — a procedure without depth. There are barely any dialogues, atmosphere relies purely on imagination.

Portal resembles hundreds of other text adventures from that era. It clearly wasn't a bestseller; these days people fire it up mostly out of nostalgia rather than for any deeper reason. It offers nothing that better games in the genre wouldn't later perfect. It doesn't stand out mechanically or story-wise.

If eighties aesthetics appeal to you and you want to feel how gaming was done when everything was still written, you won't be disappointed — but you won't be moved either. It's solid average. Rather than a game, you should view Portal as a document of a time when it was enough to give a player a room, doors, and tell them to go. Today it would entertain you for maybe twenty minutes.