Though earth and man are gone, I thought the cube would last forever. I WAS WRONG.

Portal first arrived in 2007 as part of The Orange Box and turned out to be the surprise star of the bundle. The idea is simple, you hold a gun that creates two linked portals and you use it to get through a series of test chambers. Soon you’re flinging yourself across rooms, using momentum to reach far off ledges and thinking about space in ways no other game had asked you to before.

What makes it work is how well it teaches you. There are no long tutorials. Each chamber introduces one idea, lets you practice it, then quietly builds on it. By the end you’re pulling off moves that would have seemed impossible at the start and it feels like you figured it all out yourself.

GLaDOS is the heart of the game. The calm, passive aggressive AI guiding you through the tests starts out as a slightly odd narrator and slowly becomes something much more sinister and hilarious. Her dark humor, along with the Weighted Companion Cube and the famous promise of cake made Portal one of the most quoted games of its era. The way the story unfolds through her voice and the hidden rooms behind the walls is subtle and memorable.

It’s also a short game, usually two to four hours and that works in its favor. There’s no filler and every chamber feels purposeful. The ending, capped off by one of the best credits songs in gaming is a perfect send off.

Portal is a compact masterpiece. It’s smart, funny. tightly designed and its influence can still be felt in puzzle games today ultimately serving as a great proof of concept for its sequel Portal 2 which builds on it perfectly. If you haven’t played Portal it’s well worth a few hours of your time.

Two Hours of Foreplay, Zero Cake

Regret: 18% (worst price per hour, best two hours)

Just under 2 hours and the credits rolled. That’s the worst price per hour in my library and somehow also the longest anything has lasted in my bedroom. A robot mom called me fat, I murdered my only friend in a furnace, and it was a cube. GLaDOS has better writing than every AAA game from the last decade. The cake was a lie. So was the hourly value.