Portals, gels, light bridges, lasers, a new friend and an old one
The first Portal was a triumph of modern game design: fun, challenging, funny and overall an original experience. The combination of mind bending 3D puzzles, humour that was genuinely funny, and a clean and fresh aesthetic gave the game the individuality which set it apart from the dingy grimy look of other games of the period. All of this was experienced in an afternoon’s worth of play time and gave Portal a special place within the hearts of all that played it. If there was ever a hard act to follow Portal was it. After three and a half years of waiting, cryptic announcements through morse code embedded in the developer commentary of the original, and avoiding trailers like the plague, Portal 2 is here.
The element of surprise was a huge contributor to the success of the original Portal, but surprise is like lightning in a bottle, almost impossible to capture twice, and also running around during a thunderstorm with an open bottle won’t get you invited to the right kind of parties. To replace the originality Valve has added a grand story. Where the original was succinct, Portal 2 is epic without losing any of its clarity. Without giving too much away, GLaDOS is up to her old tricks again and it’s down to you to stop her with your new friend Wheatley, voiced by Steven Merchant. There the story takes a few twists and turn and touches on themes of power, addiction, and impotence in a way that is very subtle which allows the humour to shine through. The humour is conveyed very successfully, something very hard to achieve in a video game, and valve also avoid the trap of using too many (at this point over used) cake jokes.
Although there is a much larger emphasis on story in Portal 2 you will still spend most of your time in test chambers manipulating portals to work out how to get from the entrance to the exit. Once you have mastered manipulating the fabric of space-time with the portal gun the game does a nice job of gradually introducing new tools such as the light bridges and the gels that change the dynamic of the puzzles. The puzzles are constructed in such a way that you use new tools in gradually more difficult puzzles until you master it and then moving on to the next one. The level design is where the game really shines. The way in which a puzzle will continue to frustrate you until you’re about to give up and that’s when you discover the secret and move on. This kind of frustration is exactly what the designers are leveraging, the sense of accomplishment in solving a puzzle after standing in the same room for 5, 10, maybe even 15 minutes, is something very difficult to capture without the player feeling frustrated. Portal 2 does this beautifully. You can’t help but think that people far smarter than you crafted this experience.
Once you have seen the end credits roll, as you wish you were one of the people still yet to experience the new Portal game, and just as you begin to contemplate unknown medical procedures involving memory removal, you should remember Portal 2 has a co-op mode. Rejoice! No lobotomies today. To play the co-op you will need a friend or at least an online one and you should have an understanding between you that you will still be friends at the end, as the puzzles instead of using just one set of portal will now require 2 sets, thus the difficulty may be a strain on your friendship. Accompanying you and your carefully selected friend is GLaDOS with her sarcastic taunts, you should however, not expect to find a full story here. This mode is purely about the puzzles.
You and your “friend” should prepare yourselves for some repetitive and frustratingly frequent load times. This may be as a result of Valve getting it’s (at this point rather dated) source engine to load all of the games new bigger locals, but it’s the placement of these load times that is the real problem. During a spine tingling chase sequence the last thing you want is another load screen to break you out of the immersion.
Portal 2 is refreshing at a time when the industry seems preoccupied with providing players with a never ending stream of bro-happy first person shooters. Even though the bar for Portal 2 to was set probably the highest it’s been for a video game in recent memory it manages to expand its scope and narrative to a state where it is now the young wackier sister of old more serious Half-life brother. Portal 2 will be a welcome addition to any collection.
