Critical Play: Portal 2

Introduction

Portal 2 (2011) is a puzzle-platform game developed by Valve and released on PC, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360. Like its lauded predecessor, it features a portal gun which players use to generate portals they can pass through. The portal gun is put to good use in the game’s myriad puzzles, many of which are ingenious in their own right.

Types of Fun

Narrative

In its single-player campaign, Portal 2 places players in the role of Chell, a test subject of the deteriorated Aperture Science Laboratories. The player explores the facilities while the supercomputer GLaDOS attempts to rebuild it. In doing so, the player is subject to dark humor, clever writing, and superb acting. This narrative focus was present in Portal, but Portal 2 dives deeper, looking into the history of Aperture while simultaneously exploring the megalomaniac personalities of its main cast of characters.

The narrative also complements the game’s puzzles. By making the player character a test subject, the game provides a diegetic reason for doing puzzle after puzzle. Players never question why they are going through room after room of manufactured puzzles because it’s abundantly obvious in the plot: a narcissistic supercomputer is forcing you to do so.

The antagonistic relationships between the player and the other characters in the story supports the humor the game has to offer as well. In many a case, the player will struggle to solve a puzzle only to be ridiculed and insulted by a character. This might sound like an awful time, but the writing ensures that it is funny, which provides for a surprising surge of encouragement. Players are emboldened to solve puzzles by the funny criticisms they are subjected to.

Challenge

Beyond the portal gun, several other puzzle mechanics were added to Portal 2, such as physics-altering gels and light bridges, but they primarily exist to add variety to the sorts of puzzles that the portal gun can solve. These additional mechanics allow the game to sustain a much longer playtime than its predecessor, yet they are introduced in an incremental manner that typifies a balanced learning curve.

At the beginning of the game, players are challenged with puzzles that are quite simple, focused almost entirely on the portal gun alone. However, in this simpler phase of puzzles, they are frequently encouraged to think outside of the box and break rules they might assume to be true.

The early encouragement of ingenuity in Portal 2 is essential to the player’s ability to solve the later puzzles, where additional mechanics vastly increase the possible search space for solutions. Because of the early priming, players are prepared to be creative with the tools they are given, which supports a fruitful gameplay loop of encountering a puzzle, trying varied and creative approaches to it, finally succeeding with one of them, and then feeling like a genius for seemingly bending the rules of the puzzle.

Fellowship

Surprisingly, Portal 2 added a 2-player cooperative mode to its offerings. In the mode, players adopt the roles of two robots, Atlas and P-Body, who must effectively cooperate to get through puzzles with one another. The gameplay remains largely the same, with each player receiving their own portal gun.

The most fascinating aspect of this mode is how the puzzles change; where the single-player campaign features puzzles primarily concerned with cleverly finding the right sequence of things to do, the cooperative campaign features puzzles primarily concerned with coordinating the two players to do the right things at the right time.

When viewed from the perspective of one player, each puzzle now features a new moving part that thinks entirely on its own and does what it wants. In this way, communication is absolutely essential to the cooperative play experience. In my own experience, players learn how to work together quickly, or they’ll put the game down before it gets too stressful.

Conclusion

Portal 2 is interesting in its scope, and it’s easily the most complex puzzle game that I’ve ever played. That being said, it fully delivers on the experience it promises. Lovers of either challenge or narrative are almost certainly guaranteed a good time when they play this game. While the co-op experience is a little more dependent on the people involved, it’s still a stunning work of puzzle design, and there’s no doubt that the single player experience is in a class of its own.