Portal and Portal 2 are some of the all-time great first-person shooters. The dialogue is sharp and funny, Aperture Labs is a fantastic setting, and the pair have some of the most iconic characters i🐻n video game history. But none of those things would matter all that much if the puzzles weren’t good. Basically everything you dꦜo in Portal occurs within the context of a puzzle. Sometimes that puzzle is in a test chamber and sometimes it’s in the back rooms you find off the beaten path, but either way, solving puzzles is the main thing you do in the game.
With 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Legend of Zelda: Bre💝ath of the Wild and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo built on the Portal formula. Instead of the puzzle r🌜ooms being laid end-to-end, though, BotW and TotK spread them out over a huge open world. There are other puzzle games, of course, but fe𒁏w capture the same vibe as Portal.
In part, that’s because most puzzle g🅘ames aren&rsq🔯uo;t as physics-driven as Portal and nu-Zelda. Portal, at its most basic level, doesn’t need to be physics focused. It’s about geometry; figuring out where in a level you can shoot your portals to make a path for yourself or connect a laser to a switch. But it builds on top of that foundation by doing really cool things with physics, like requiring you to build up enough momentum by shooting portals in certain locations where gravity can help you gain speed.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom use physics, too, but also branch out into other kinds of science. When a shrine requires you to build a cart that’s light enough to make it up a section of track, but not so light that it flies off course, that’s a physics and engineering puzzle. When it allows you to use a metal sword in your inventory to create a makeshift circuit for electricity to pass through, that’s circuitry. These games build on the physics systems that Valve’s Source Engine enabled, and ta𝔍ke it way further than any other game in the space.
Zelda also builds on the aesthetic of Portal. , playtesting quickly revealed that players would get hung up on unimportant objects if rooms were at all cluttered. So, the devs scaled back the design of each room, only including the bare minimum needed to solve the puzzle, within gray rooms with 🌜largely bare walls and floors. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have the same look. There’s an entrance, an exit, an optional treasure chest, and whatever is necessary to get from A to B. That’s it.
It’s a necessary aesthetic choice, but it also highlights confidence on the part of both Valve and Nintendo. It’s tough to look graphically impressive when you're only rendering flat gray surfaces, but that’s exactly what Portal and Zelda choose to do. It shows a firm belief that the gameplay speaks for itself.
If Zelda’s massive success is any indicator, that belief is right. Breath of the Wild and Portal 2 weren’t the most graphically impressive games of their era, but both routinely reach the top ten in lists of the greatest games ever made. That should tell us something about how much graphics matter in the long run. Tears of the Kingdom's critical acclaim and the longevity of other, similar games makes it extremely likely that we'll continue to see more games like this in the future. It's almost like Zelda is giving us a Portal into the future.