Like many young men, I spend more time than is healthy imagining how I might escape dangerous hypothetical situations. Sure, I'm calmly typing at my computer right now, but a lifetime watching TV and movies has taught me that at any instant a gang of thugs could kick in my front door and unleash a wild ferret on my junk.

This is why men constantly prepare emergency survival plans even though they are pure fantasy, not unlike the hypothetical threats they're designed to counter. In reality my defense against thugs and ferrets would be to assume the fetal position and hope that my salty tears do not agree with ferret taste buds. But that doesn't stop me from formulating a survival plan where I crash through my back window and land in a tight roll before vaulting over the fence to safety.

This unshakable belief in my imaginary Houdini/Van Damme survival skills is one of the big reasons why Portal is such an enjoyable game. Video games in general offer different forms of escapism that play on our desires to possess special abilities or participate in unusual scenarios, but few are able to tap into a persistent fantasy that afflicts nearly all men (and not a few women) of my generation.

Think about it. Portal is the ultimate escape fantasy. The game begins with almost zero character introduction; you roll out of a bed and then are immediately thrust into a series of rooms from which you must escape. Innovative puzzle elements aside, the goal is to divine increasingly elaborate exit strategies and then carry them out. The game is even played with a first-person view, which conveniently lets us escape-hungry guys forget that Portal's hero, Chell, is in fact a heroine.

You could argue that many first-person shooters such as Doom or Left 4 Dead fall into this same category of escapism escapism (get it?) but that's not really true. Ignoring the hellspawn and zombies, those games stretch our fantasies to the breaking point by granting us incredible weapon skills and the physical stamina to ingest enough stim packs to win the Kentucky Derby on foot. Meanwhile, our Portal heroine dies at the briefest dip into an acid pool or after absorbing a handful of slugs from strangely apologetic security drones. Chell's infinite rebirths are admittedly unrealistic but this is still a video game after all.

Even Portal's sterile gray walls and shaded observation windows bring to mind that cult movie Cube, which is itself the ultimate survival film not named Rambo. The entire movie is about a group of strangers who wake up in a giant, isolated cube and must navigate a series of booby-trapped rooms to find a way out. If you've seen Cube then you no doubt wondered how you would fare in the same situation. In Portal, you can find out for real (kind of). (And admit it, if an artificial entity harassed and cajoled the Cube's prisoners it probably would have sounded a lot like GLaDOS.)

It's a shame that Portal 2 won't come out until 2011, but I don't envy the challenge Valve faces in trying to improve upon its predecessor. How can you top an elaborate escape plot filled with dimensional portals, an insane robotic supervisor and cake? I imagine it's almost as difficult as surviving a snarling ferret attack with your junk intact.