This time last year Portal crept into Valve’s Orange Box and stole the spotlight from the rather decent Team Fortress 2 and the brilliant HL2: Episode 2 that also made their debut in the collection. It charmed audiences with a cleverly written script, interesting premise and mind bending physics. That’s why it’s always welcome even when it simply gets a re-release.

Portal’s basic premise is less of a first person shooter and more of a puzzler from a different perspective. You then have to triumph over a series of complex puzzles by using your Portal Gun. Initially this gun can only spawn one portal to allow you to walk through to another stationary one. Then later on in the game you get an upgrade which opens up the game and lets you control both portals. You then use these portals to jump through, fly though and push objects through to get to the next puzzle.

The game is smartly written and genuinely funny. In each testchamber you’ll often hear the voice of GlaDos who is the computer in charge of the Apature Enrichment Center (where you happen to be). She’ll often chime in about an unwanted taste of blood you might encounter and of course constantly tease you with a party with that all important cake.

The game starts off by simply teaching you how to use the portals and it doesn’t really go much further than that. You actually spend most of the game learning about how you can manipulate the portals to get anywhere in the level to eventually achieve your goal. It’s best not to know the full extent of the twist, that’s if you live in a hole and don’t know the big twist, but it’s worth playing towards and really makes full use of the controls and skills you’ve just learnt.

Portal is quite short and can easily be completed in less than a couple of hours. Despite this the experience is so worthwhile and intense that the length doesn’t really matter so much. Your always being challenged or learning something new so you will be kept on your feet or off them as the case may be. Portal really demonstrates why quality is better than quantity.

For veteran Portal players there isn’t too much to go back for as the core game is completely the same. Luckily it does come with a whole bunch of new levels but unfortunately these are ones that where available for free on the PC version of the game. Luckily the levels are plenty and the difficulty is high. Neverthless if this is the only way of accessing the extra forty levels on offer then by all means pick this up. Otherwise you might as well opt for the cheaper and future extendable PC counterpart.

Once we found out what Portal: Still Alive actually was it made sense that Microsoft didn’t really say what it was when it was announced back at E3. The truth is that Still Alive probably isn’t worth getting if you already own Orange Box unless you really must play the extra maps. Despite that Portal is a bonafide classic that everyone should try and if you haven’t this is just another method of thinking with Portals.