14 DAY TRIAL // All players who have not experienced it yet can log into their Steam account and download Portal for free until May 24. Developer and Steam creator Valve is offering their most innovative title for free both on Windows PCs and on the Mac, probably in order to celebrate the fact that the digital distribution service has finally arrived on the Apple home computer.
Portal was first released in 2007 as part of The Orange Box, the videogame package that also included Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. The entire game experience is based around a Portal gun, which allows players to create entry and exit points for their characters.
It is used both to solve puzzles and to actually battle the final boss, GlaDOS, a computer entity. Portal was widely praised for the way it encouraged players to experiment and for the complex feelings interwoven with the spare plot. Players fell in love with both the inanimate companion Cube and with the hilarious yet threatening GlaDOS.
Using mysterious transmissions in the original Portal, Valve announced that it was planning to launch a sequel before the end of 2010 on the PC, the Mac and the Xbox 360. The single player narrative will again see protagonist Chell even if it is set a few hundred years after the events of the first game and a cooperative campaign will be introduced starring two apparently sentient robots. Valve has been trumpeting a bigger game that will arrive as standalone and establish a clearer link between the Portal and Half Life universes.
Valve has long promised fans a new game in the Half Life series, completing the main story arc for Gordon Freeman and Alyx. Gabe Newell, one of the founders of Valve, spoke about how the third iteration would actually increase the range of emotions the player would be experiencing.