This game will forever and always hold a special place in my heart - I remember in 2011 playing this game after randomly coming across some fan art on DeviantArt, reading the synopsis on Wikipedia and pretty instantly buying it on Steam <3 I played both this and the sequel on an eight-year-old laptop using the trackpad, and despite the awfulness of that set-up, I loved it - the characters, the plot, the music, the gameplay...there is honestly nothing bad I can say about it to this day. In fact, it was this series that first made me think it's someone's job to design these games and led me to ultimately complete a degree in Computer Games Arts - I never managed to do anything with it, but I think that's a testament to the power these things hold!

That aside, I'd say - especially for the price on Steam nowadays - this game is definitely worth a playthrough if you haven't come across it until now! The runtime's fairly short - I think my first playthrough was a few hours, and now I can get through it in an hour if I'm trying to be fast. The atmosphere is set with the music and the isolation of being the only human in this facility, and the story is told to you via the environment and occasional asides from GLaDOS, a robot voice that accompanies you throughout the game (and my one true love). The gameplay is logic-focused, using portals to navigate to the exit alongside buttons, cubes and other, more deadly elements :)

You knew this was coming up, right? Where Portal laid the foundation (and what foundation!) Portal 2 came in and stole the show for a lot of players - I've seen a good few people over the years online that'll say they played Portal 2 but not Portal! For such a story-driven series, it still blows my mind that there are fans out there who might not get why GLaDOS and Chell's relationship is so fraught, and why their gradual mutual acceptance is so meaningful!

Now I've gotten that off my chest, this game...there were major graphical improvements, and further building on the environments and story, making the sequel seem fresh despite the outward similarity to the first game! In Portal 2, you get deeper answers to a lot of the questions from the first one, 'meeting' the CEO and GLaDOS's previous version (sort of!) and exploring Old Aperture :) The music goes hard in this one as well, with a much bigger presence than the first game's one. Where the first Portal got me thinking about game design and concept art, Portal 2 found me pressing Chell up to the walls, examining the textures! It's just a really beautiful game!

Finally, worthy of mention are both the co-op mode (yay more GLaDOS time!) as well as the Perpetual Testing Initative (PeTI)! Both additions increase overall playtime (although the story mode alone will take newbies probably a good 10-15 hours), as well as adding overall replayability - both good things for an already replayable game! PeTI allows players to build their own test chambers, and some creators have gone full ham on designing their own multi-chamber stories (Don't Make Lemonade is a great short and sweet one). There's also a good few custom spin-off games which are, for the most part, fantastic and free!

Despite this game being one of the first ones I tried playing (aside from multiplayers), I actually only played it the whole way through in 2023! I'm not the best at games (despite my love for them haha) so it took me a good few tries to actually make it through (with moderate walkthrough use!) That's nothing against the game itself, I think everything about OoT is so well-designed and put together, it's still very enjoyable to play despite its age!

My favourite part of OoT has to be the music - the OST and even the sound effects are beautiful and the music is often in the background when I'm concentrating on something (like coding or studying) - timeless! The story, although nothing really new for LoZ games, is enjoyable, and the characters are well-designed. I'm looking forward to my next playthrough of this one at some point this year :) (fuck the water temple though)

Aaah the story of this game is amazing! It's one of those concepts that we all think about in terms of what will become of humanity in the future, and whether we'll be instrumental in our own downfall. The game design is also stunning, and I love how despite the open world nature of the game, the environments all have their own, clear-cut look to them, whilst still looking believable. I also really appreciated the 'story' difficulty level, cause personally I found the combat very challenging, and that was taking away from my experience until I switched :)

I did find the rappelling and wayfinding tricky at times: for the most part, the climbable elements were highlighted in yellow, making them distinct from the rest of the environment, but sometimes they were really hard to spot (particularly the climbable ridges in cliff faces). The wayfinder, particularly in more closed-in environments, would sometimes be quite unhelpful in terms of understanding where to actually go. Finally, I'm a very sentimental person, and especially considering the designs of most of the machines, I really didn't like killing them! This is another reason why 'story' mode was so good; for the most part, unless it was necessary for a quest, I could avoid killing machines unless they were specifically coming for me!