Portal is the game of the year

[Solver]

Portal Prelude was released very recently, you can give it a try. I hear it's more difficult. Also, there are loads of custom Portal maps out there, some of them an order of magnitude more difficult than the regular ones.

I'm pretty glad the difficulty was what it was, that way the game remained a cohesive experience. If I had to spend an hour figuring out some late-level puzzle, the cohesiveness would be broken and the game wouldn't be so immersive overall. Portal was largely intended to be playable by people who haven't played / enjoyed "standard" puzzle games.

[Quillan]

If you replay the game with the commentary bubbles on, there's one late in the game from Ellen McLain, the woman who does the voice of GLaDos, and sings "Still Alive" at the end credits. In it, she said she'd never played a computer game in her life, but she was going to get this one.

[DrSpike]

Even on Portal the challenge levels are pretty hard.

[Solver]

If you mean the advanced chamber levels, yeah. But still, those absolutely pale to some fan-created levels difficulty wise.

[DrSpike]

No, not the advanced levels. They are tougher than the normal game but still not that hard. The challenge levels around minimum portals, steps, time, those are hard.

[Solver]

Ah, those. Have you seen the videos of what some people managed to accomplish there? They complete some of the levels with much less time/portals spent than even the challenges require. There are completions with 0 portals (exploity, of course) and a 5 second completion of some chamber. That one is just insane, I can barely follow in slo-mo.