I have played more Portal 1 than any other person. This is not something on my account from some seedy method, if you google "siblinghood portal" my speedrun.com page is at the top of the results and my high hour count is relatively known in the community. This may change at some point, but at the time of writing I am the most qualified reviewer of portal possible, and I plan to take this responsibility as seriously as I can muster.

Portal was a marvel of technology at release. Many design decisions had to be made due to technological limitations at the time. It started development in 2005 and the task of programming to realize the vision for the game was a much more complex problem than perhaps any other game at the time. Many corners had to be cut. For one example, because the player's collision box is a rectangular prism that doesn't rotate, when walls don't run parallel to axes of the coordinate grid, they have different collision experiences with the player than you would intuitively expect. You can see the impact of this in the level design. The vast majority of surfaces in the game are parallel to two axes of the coordinate grids, making everything rectangular. The portals themselves are also not eliptical on a mechanical level, they are rectangles, which you can feel for yourself once you've heard it. Limitations in creation breed creative workarounds, and arbitrarily restricting the tools available to you is a technique you can see thoughout all artistic endeavors. I believe this same concept applies in the case of Portal. Its minimalist aesthetic and themes are enhanced by these circumstantial limitations, and don't, as one might initally assume, take away from its value today.