Furioso said:
Perhaps your brain is just built for puzzle solving? I thought some puzzles in P1 were fairly challenging, hell I thought a bunch in P2 were hard, and apparently that game is easy as cake (see what I did there? Oh god someone please punch me) Either way I still loved it, I hadn't played anything like it, and I love both of them to death
Quick, take these combustible lemons.
Anyway. I first played Portal only a few weeks before Portal 2 came out because, get this, I had actually managed to completely avoid all of the hype for Portal and I actually didn't see why it would be so praised; After all, it was a puzzle game about navigating rooms with portals. Doesn't really sound like something that would light the world on fire, right?
So, a few months ago I finally decided to actually install the Steam pre-loaded with Portal that came with my laptop and played the game, and you know what I found? A puzzle game in a first-person shooter format with a remarkably well-aged engine and absolutely hilariously dark writing complete with excellent voice acting (Honestly, I could sit and listen to those turrets all day long). Sure, it wasn't
too hard, but it had a habit of making things seem deceptively difficult and as someone who rarely plays puzzle games, it took me about an hour or two longer to finish than probably most people took.
Simply taking it as a puzzle game, I think it's a great way to
introduce people to the genre, as a sort of gateway to more difficult puzzle games, but veteran puzzle gamers would likely find the actual gameplay to be lacking. That's why reviewers/critics tend to take the gameplay, story, art design, sound production, etc. all into consideration at once in a final wrap-up of how they consider a game's quality; When you start taking individual elements out of context, it severely impacts the overall reception of the content.