Portal
Worth it · Shooter · 2007
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $9.99, a BANGER if it drops to $8.99.
- Length
- 3.1h
- Value
- $3.22/hr
- Reviews
- 99% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Portal is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Runs on Windows, Linux.
Portal™ is a new single player game from Valve. Set in the mysterious Aperture Science Laboratories, Portal has been called one of the most innovative new games on the horizon and will offer gamers hours of unique gameplay.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $0.99, set in June 2017. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 64 in the 14 years tracked, about 8 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 8 weeks. Past sales have already crossed the $8.99 BANGER line 64 times.
Value puts it in the top 5 percent of the games it competes with. It is the best reviewed of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Portal 2 ($9.99, scores 91) beats it on value, while it beats Suicide Guy ($5.99, scores 74).
The press gave it 90; the people who bought it give it 99 percent. A 9-point gap in the buyer's favour.
8 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written December 2024 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 725 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 662 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 95 percent of the 16,649 reviews written there were positive, against 99 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 3.1 hours; clearing it takes 11, which is 3.4 times the campaign.
Still 638 concurrent players, 19 years in.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 3.1 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
2 players here own this. Their libraries average 65 BANG. See the leaderboard →
The drop-off
81% start to 3% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
638 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
This might be the one video game where I have no criticisms. An absolute banger. Go play it if you haven't already.
Fun puzzles with a great concept and beautiful graphics; I love brain games. Thank you.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Portal scores 83/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/400/portalThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 10, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.