Portal Speedrun by DemonStrate: Test Your Puzzle-Solving Skills!

Portal remains a well-known game, despite being fifteen years old. Speedruns like the one by DemonStrate are definitely helping to keep the game alive. Starting speedruns over a decade ago, DemonStrate has managed to put up some insane times over the years. He also has some great videos of Portal 2 speedruns.

However, DemonStrate tackles other games too, such as Half-Life 2 and CS-GO. More importantly, he provides explanations of how to pull off the amazing tricks that are necessary to speedrun Portal. It’s important to note that DemonStrate does not use any cheats for his speedruns, but he does take advantage of glitches in the game.

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08/29/2023 09:09 am GMT

Developed by Valve, the first Portal game came out back in 2007 and really changed what people thought of a puzzle game. The original game was very short, with an average three-hour completion time on howlongtobeat.com. Yet its profound impact on the game world remains to this day. The original title served as a demo of what was possible on Valve’s game engine.

In the game, players use what is known as a “Portal Gun” to blast a portal onto walls. These portals are what lets players teleport through the puzzles which are essentially large obstacle courses. Therefore, Portal looks like a first-person shooter, but instead of shooting enemies, you get to shoot at walls. But besides shooting portals, there are also cubes and devices to interact with.

As the game progresses, levels get increasingly more difficult by combining different puzzles together. In between these levels are elevators that serve as load screens, which dramatically slow speedrun times. While this is all pretty standard in video games, Portal isn’t your average puzzle game. You aren’t left wandering rooms, instead a computer named GLaDOS provides narration and guidance.

However, Portal also served an important role in showing the world that puzzle games could be much more than connecting rows of colors or search-and-find games. It also spawned a sequel that built heavily on the mechanics from the first game. But arguably, the most important thing the game did, is it made players think. Each level is completely different than the last and some throw surprising curve balls.

DemonStrate

DemonStrate, who now goes by Michael Yanni on YouTube, has some incredible speedruns of numerous different games. However, one of his most popular remains the Portal Done Pro video, where he speedruns the entire original Portal game in under ten minutes. To put this in perspective, he managed to cut this down from an average of three hours.

There are several ways to take on a speedrun in Portal. For most games, speedrunners go for either 100% completion or the fastest way to beat the game, while also using the original hardware the game ran on. Because Portal is a linear game with only a single way to win, that isn’t an issue. However, there are a number of glitches in the game that speedrunners can exploit.

It is important to note that glitches are usually considered acceptable in speedrunning. This is in stark contrast to using cheats, which modify the game in some way. DemonStrate’s method is to complete the game as fast as possible with glitches but without cheats. Although, some gamers choose to speedrun Portal without using any glitches.

What makes the speedrun remarkable is that Portal is unlike other commonly speedrun games like platformers. This is because there are cutscenes in Portal that you cannot skip. However, DemonStrate does take advantage of a number of glitches to get through the game faster. Even so, it is an extremely impressive run considering most of the time is spent waiting in elevators. Check out DemonStrate’s amazing run in the video below.