This sounded like a recipe for disaster, so instead we chose to play on two machines in the same room, where we could talk to one another and set up strategies.Įven this did not work, although it was entirely our fault. Valve has included a set of nonverbal cues that two players can use to tell each other where to look or place portals. The co-op puzzles that must be solved by two people, each with their own set of portals, are just about as complicated as you’d imagine in your worst fever dreams. (It is always rewarding to read every single poster on the walls, however.) Besides a few small hidden secrets, Portal 2 doesn’t really reward players who check every detail. There’s a great deal of office furniture, computers and other such objects strewn about the game, but none of it ever does anything - it’s just a lot of sterile, duplicated, non-interactive environments. ![]() If anything, Valve might have clung a bit too tightly to the game’s de minimis design. Every word of Portal 2 has clearly been agonized over, not just for the maximum laugh factor but to truly build a believable, if insane, world, right down to the wonderful, Orwellian nomenclature (an instant-death laser is a “thermal discouragement beam,” etc.). It’s a welcome change of venue, executed with an eye for detail and comic panache. Simmons), once you leave the modern-day Aperture facilities and enter the company’s original digs, progressing through tests and environments that were supposedly conceived in the ’50s and ’60s. You’ll meet the founder of Aperture Laboratories, Cave Johnson (played by J.K. You’ll fall in love with Wheatley, a friendly robot with a heart of gold and the charming voice of actor Stephen Merchant. For the sequel, Valve retained the minimalist narrative - you still don’t talk, you don’t meet any other humans and you certainly never take a break from the gameplay to watch a movie - but spiced it up with more disembodied voices in your ear. In the original, this came from the biting, mocking wit of GlaDOS as she subjected you to involuntary scientific testing. The joy of playing Portal 2 is twofold, a combination of the game’s clever puzzle-solving and razor-sharp comedy writing. The joy of playing Portal 2 comes from clever puzzle-solving and razor-sharp comedy writing. A concept that had my primitive 2007 brain crying in agony is second nature now. I haven’t touched Portal in three and a half years, but after going through that game’s toughest puzzles, it’s easy to read all the signs - oh, there’s a wall that’s tilted at a 45-degree angle, meaning that at some point I am going to need to place a few portals, jump down a deep shaft and use the momentum to come rocketing sideways out of the wall. These additional elements were probably necessary, because it doesn’t seem like there’s enough steam in the original portals concept to carry us through another, lengthier game. It’s filled with moments that will have you slapping your forehead and thinking, “Oh my God, I’m such an idiot - why didn’t I see that before?” ![]() You might try all manner of convoluted combinations of wormholes and acrobatics, but every time, the answer turns out to be something elegant that you just didn’t think of at first. Just as in the original, the puzzles in highly anticipated sequel Portal 2 never require excessively complicated solutions. ![]() The game became one of the year’s most lauded and memorable releases, due to its pitch-perfect combination of innovative gameplay and sharp comedy writing, the likes of which are rarely seen even in the best videogames. Gamers solved seemingly intractable puzzles by using portals to join parts of a room together, creating a sort of Escher-like impossible geography. The 2007 game from Valve Software challenged players to bend the way they thought about game levels. It’s time to drop back into the world of Portal, the mind-expanding, physics-defying videogame where being stupid is half the fun.
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