Valve's Portal first impressions

Valve is working on three projects for its upcoming "Orange Box" of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. At an Electronic Arts press event on Tuesday night, EA and Valve gave the attendees the chance to actually play a small portion of the puzzle action game Portal.

As you may know, Portal gives the player a Portal gun which allows them to fire interdimentional rifts to get to different locations on a level more quickly. At the start of our demo we only had access to create one portal at a time. The first few locations in the demo already had a second portal in place and it was up to you to fire your portal to get to the required location. Valve has limited where you can place your portal in the game (metal surfaces cannot support portals but concrete surfaces can be used). The puzzles are easy at first but get more complicated over time. Some portals require you run or jump down to gain momentum to pass through the portal and fling your character over a ledge where the second portal is located to land and move to the next section.