The game itself is wonderful not because of the graphics or a major breakthrough in gameplay: the graphics are unremarkable and it has only one small innovation in gameplay. It is a first-person puzzle game with one vomit-inducing twist. You can place two portals on the walls that form a tunnel. Running into one causes you to come out of the other one at the same speed. The puzzle is to move the portals around in such a way that distant parts of the world are suddenly adjacent. Or so that instead of falling from a height and splatting on the floor you instead fall into a portal on the floor and emerge coming out of a wall elsewhere at great speed so you fling cross a chasm. If your kid can master this kind of artificial spacial reasoning he will never have a problem packing the trunk. Prolonged exposure to the game by adults may result in nausea, especially on large TVs (and bobsalive's TV is HUGE).

The premise for the game is that you are solving a series of puzzles controlled by an Artificial Intelligence. The AI is just doing it's job. It's mission is benign in principal and benevolent in intent. In practice it is quite malicious. Sure, you will almost certainly die but it is for the good of science!

Here are excerpts from the end-game song. listen to the whole thing.

We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
But there's no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the Science gets done.

..

Anyway, this cake is great.
It's so delicious and moist.
Look at me still talking
when there's Science to do.
When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I'm not you.
I've experiments to run.
There is research to be done.
On the people who are still alive.

Benevolent in intent. Benign by design. Malicious in practice. It seems like a good metaphor for the political season in the US.