Ever hear of the game Portal? It’s a brilliant game by Valve, the creators of Half-Life, where you escape from a seemingly uninhabited, undisclosed government building with the aid of an exceptionally conceptualized Portal gun. With Portal, Valve established the same atmosphere of brooding mystery seen in Half-Life, an atmosphere made more palpable and engrossing with its well-crafted storyline and puzzle-escape game progression. Unlike Half-Life, Portal lacks action-packed scripted events, relying instead of the intrigue the player surmises from an unexplained environment and minimal character interactions. With this premise, the game allows the player to focus entirely on the Portal gun, and the many convoluted, but necessary logic puzzles extrapolated from its use. As with any good mystery, sometimes the questions are best left unanswered.

How I Hate The Night, an iPhone app developer, was so mesmerized by Portal and its dizzying complexity that he decided to create a version of the game for the iPhone. But, hold your horses. Don’t expect a strict translation of the game, with first person play and impressive graphics (well, impressive for an iPhone). V is for Vortex is influenced by Portal in its objectives, and its use of portals, even the use of the now famous Companion Cube, but it is most definitely not Portal. However, it is a pretty good game in its own right.

You may or may not be enchanted by the simple, two-dimensional artwork on graph paper and stick figure sketches, clad all in shades of gray, but I found it to be creative, and clever enough to remind me of Trace. The artwork and ensuing game was made all the more impressive to me by the fact that the sole creator of How I Hate The Night drew and programmed everything by himself. If unlike me, you don’t enjoy handsketched games, then I don’t care if the game has a look of drawn crayon, you must know that’s pretty stellar.  Whatever initial enchantment I felt, however, was quickly obliterated by the ominous ambient music, slightly creepy in a whispering, metallic way, most fitting, I envision, for a dank windblown sewer with dripping condensation, in some future, post-apocalyptic world. It is, actually, very Valve, and was very effective at getting me into the game.

You may play in Story mode, where you view a cartoon board reminiscent of the beginning of Portal, or by Free play, where you can choose to play any of the 18 levels in the game. Each level is actually a fair representation of the types of levels found in Portal, with ledges, plunging drops, even those innocuous cameras moving from side to side, watching your progress silently. Your character is really tiny, and he holds what looks to be a very cumbersome gun the size of his body, with three pronged bars at its barrel. For those of you who haven’t played Portal, this gun is the portal gun. What’s that, you ask? A crafty device that harnesses the power to create rifts in time and space, to bring you from point A to point B instantaneously, a tesseract or topological shortcut, if you will. You have two portals at your disposal, one blue and one orange, and either can be used as an entrance or exit point. To use the gun, simply shoot a portal by tapping anywhere onscreen. As in Portal, in V is for Vortex, a portal will appear where you shoot, and once you shoot the other portal to open elsewhere, you will have created a link between the two, activating them, and you may then step through to your destination. Two arrows at the bottom of the screen are used to move your character left and right, and a crudely drawn Jump button is available on the right. A pause button lets you exit a level.

Now it’s on to solve the puzzles. Each level presents different challenges, with the end objective being to move your character through the hallway leading into, presumably, the next room or level. Different obstacles present themselves in the form of plunging abysses, blue light rays of instant death (like a fusion reactor beam that atomizes you), and large, red buttons that must be held in place by the ever helpful companion cube, which you must manipulate with portals and by physically pushing to hoist it in the correct location. Unfortunately, while these puzzles incite the imagination and improve logical thinking, there many glaring glitches and quirks that nearly render the game unplayable, or really, just laughable.

When I was first introduced to the companion cube, it occurred to me just how challenging it is to maneuever it around. The buttons to move my character, first off, are slow to register at best, and when pushing the companion cube, I realized it had a slick bottom of sorts, so that even when I stopped pushing, it had a forward momentum lasting a few, good in-game feet before coming to a standstill. It was only after pushing it through portals and having it come flying out the other side, away from the intended red button, did I start taking into account the pushing speed and direction. Okay, that’s easy enough, right? It’s just a part of the puzzle. Right? Wrong.

There’s nothing wrong with the portal mechanism, per se – unless you step into a single portal with no exit, in which case you’re lost forever, in some alternate dimension, and you must restart the level – but there is something wrong with the level design. As I’ve already mentioned, the cube likes to move forward with kinetic energy of its own, and when it pops out on the other side of a portal, it pops out with enthusiasm, a hop and a skip. So when you push, or even gently nudge the companion cube through a portal to come out through another set above a red button (to open a door to the next level), what often happens is an infinite back and forth loop of the cube between the portals. The problem with the level design is the spaces, or ledges, where your character and the red buttons appear are so scrunched and lacking in space, that there’s barely a gap between the portal and the destination, meaning the cube just ricochets off its landing space back into the portal and then back through the starting portal, and on and on ad infinitum. Sometimes, the cube will just disappear, perhaps demateralized after so much time and space warping, and you must restart the level. Also, if you must push the cube from the opposite direction, thereby necessitating your jumping over the cube, then I bid you good luck. Jumping over the cube is ridiculously frustrating, because you will always hit the cube with your feet, no matter the running leap, and you will push the cube along with you. If you corner the cube against the wall then, trust me,  just call it a day and start the level over. Add to that slow loading times and no restart button (you must exit to the main page) and soon you’ll be dropping this game for another. *tears out hair*

But, having said that, V is for Vortex certainly has potential. Quite a bit, really. The layout, the design, the puzzles – they’re all good, fantastic even, and if some of the aforementioned problems are corrected, then this game would probably be one of my go-to games, probably even one of the top sellers in the iTunes store. As of now, reviews are mixed, but I disagree with a few comments on how Portal is a much better game. OF COURSE IT IS. IT’S A FULL GAME ON PC AND CONSOLE. THIS IS A SIMPLIFIED RENDITION. Give me a break.

It seems How I Hate The Night plans on releasing several updates, each with 18 more levels, to conclude with a total of 108 levels (wow!), so I really, really hope they contend with the issues preventing this game from being stellar.