Once Upon a Time

Gordon Freeman, Private Eye

But as with so much of the Half-Life world, you never find out for sure. The process of exploration, discovery and deduction that you experience inside this building is a microcosm of one that occurs in the Half-Life world at large. Valve refuses to serve up a single moment of conventional exposition. Instead it takes players, drops them in a warped, ravaged world and tasks them with making sense of it.

Going Portal

It doesn't always take something as obvious as a derelict, zombie-infested building to tell a story or shed light on the world that exists beyond the immediate limits of a game. Sometimes a single room will do the trick. Even a few thoughtfully placed props can suggest a greater narrative and occasionally tell a pretty poignant story in themselves.

By the time you reach Test Chamber 16 of Portal, you probably feel pretty pleased with yourself. You've dodged high-energy pellets, tripped switches, mastered momentum and escaped from a so-called "impossible" test chamber. It's at this point that GLaDOS - or to be more precise, the game's designers - decides to throw a surprise your way: "a live-fire course designed for military androids."

"The enrichment center apologizes for the inconvenience and wishes you the best of luck."

This is the first test chamber in which you're up against an actively hostile enemy in the form of Aperture Science's strangely adorable automated turrets. But this change in pace and tone doesn't come without a glimmer of hope - you're also given your first hint of another potential survivor hidden inside the facility.

The word "HELP" scrawled on the floor is the least subtle clue, but once you follow a breadcrumb trail of such evidence and discover the den of the individual who left them, hidden behind a pried-out panel of the chamber wall, you begin to get a feel for the mysterious individual fans know as "the Rat Man." The eerie red lighting and industrial architecture tells you that you've stumbled "off stage," and the scrawled writing on the wall - rambling pastiches of Auden, Dickinson and Longfellow, as well as that infamous phrase - hints that the occupant of this chamber was an educated, if slightly unhinged, fellow.

The items in the corner tell the saddest story, however. A replacement vat from a water cooler. An upturned desktop PC crudely converted to a stove. A collection of empty Aperture Science-branded tin cans. From these simple props, you get a sense of the ingenuity of your mysterious ally, along with the unfortunate realization that he's been stuck here for some time. There's even a (mercifully empty) bucket sitting forlornly in the corner.

A film could show you these things, of course, and a book could describe them to you. But no other medium can recreate the feeling of having stumbled across another person's private space the way games can.