Review | Portal 2

Portal, originally released as a part of the Orange Box in late 2007, has become a fixture in contemporary gaming culture – so much so that the game’s once fresh and amusing icons and gags have become rote, unfunny internet memes that have long lost their resonance. Valve needed to find a new voice for Portal 2 while remaining true to the original tonal and mechanical vision.

To that end, Portal 2 is an achievement in writing and characterization. After being awoken from a multi-century old sleep cycle, the player meets Portal 2’s newest robotic character, Wheatley. Wonderfully voiced by Stephen Merchant, Wheatley quickly hatches a haphazard plan to escape, taking the player along. Wheatley, being a charming imbecile of a machine, is a great thematic foil to the calculating omnipresence of the original game’s antagonist, GLaDOS. Each character, to Valve’s credit, sees broad and fully formed character arcs – each playing off each other and the player. Valve expands the game’s universe by having the player revisit the old retro remnants of Aperture Science, introducing founder Cave Johnson in the process. Cave Johnson’s prerecorded memos to the player, voiced by J.K. Simmons, slowly creates a narrative that explains the origins of the portal gun, the laboratories, as well as GLaDOS’ origin.

The strength of Valve’s writing is in their ability to bring out and extenuate the human element of a narrative or set of characters. Portal 2’s fiction explores the interplay between the quantitative nature of science with the qualitative neuroses of human nature. Despite Wheatley and GLaDOS’ mechanical form factor, their human-like fears, hubris, and desires are what serves as their character faults. GLaDOS, recognizing her own dilemma, ultimately opts to abandon whatever humanity she had left – all in the name of science.

Valve’s Source Engine makes a return in Portal 2, bringing along a slew of advancements along the way. The engine’s new lighting and anti-aliasing technology are a welcomed addition to the 6-year-old engine. While Portal 2 may not be the most visually demanding game, its ability to perform and run exceptionally well is a testament to the engine’s scalability. What may be Portal 2’s greatest failing, however, is the lack of level-streaming. The incessant load screens are all too frequent and often times disrupts and breaks the pacing of the narrative and gaming experience.

Positioned as a full-price game, Portal 2 modifies, shifts, and advances the core gameplay mechanics and narrative devices in an exacting and measured degree – something that has become the hallmark of the studio. A solution to the puzzles often times requires a degree of experimentation with the fiction’s established rule-sets. Valve’s art design is able to imply solutions to puzzles with carefully considered mise-en-scène and positional lighting. The game gives the player just enough visual suggestions that make finding the solution to each puzzle highly rewarding. What serves as a testament to Valve’s internal metrics and play-testing, each puzzle feels incredibly tailored and handcrafted. Solutions to puzzles strike the balance between the obvious and the mind-boggling; a balance, for all intents and purposes, is difficult to construct. In turn, the created player experience makes for the player to believe they are indeed the cleverest person in the room. This designed positive feedback loop is, ultimately, what makes Portal 2’s mechanics so rewarding and fun. What is a disappointment, however, is the game’s lack of challenge rooms that increases the technical difficulty and complexity. Once a player has solved every test chamber, single player or in coop, they have seen the full extent of the puzzles.

Each test chamber revolves around one particular gameplay premise, either it be laser direction, catapults, barriers, bridges, levitation streams, or acceleration, bouncing, or transmuting liquids. Each mechanic is taught to the player in escalating degrees of difficulty, all concluding in an out-of-test-chamber test where the player must apply and mix learned mechanics. Portal 2’s level design and mechanisms are, at its core, predicated on a classic design trope. In a very fundamental way, Portal 2 is mechanically structured much like any Zelda game of the last two decades. This is to say that after the player learns an ability – or in the case of Portal 2, a mechanic – the game places the player into an environment that put’s the newly acquired skills to the test.

Portal 2 is an example of a game created with careful restraint and consideration. Everything about its narrative, design, and mechanics are the result of a studio culture that emphasizes player exploration, discovery, and improvisation – so much so that it leads the industry by example. Portal 2 is a bold example of how simplicity in mechanics and design, as well as intelligent writing, can make for an experience that is almost unrivaled this generation.