A masterclass of the medium and in my opinion without a doubt the greatest puzzle game of all time. It took everything from the original and ramped it up and tuned it to perfection. The puzzles are more varied, more inventive, more clever, bigger, better, with more viable options, new items to use to solve them, and still boasting amazing physics that feel damn near perfect. It succeeds yet once again in making you feel smart when you get the aha moment.

The story in the first game was ok but the story in Portal 2 is so much deeper and nuanced. We get to see some of how Apatuer Science was created and what led it to becoming what it currently was. GLaDOS is back and funnier than ever and new robot Wheatley is hilarious. The humor is on point from beginning to end.

This is phenomenal game and deserves all the praise and more that it has received over the last decade.

Jogar Portal em 2023 me fez lembrar como os jogos antigos continuam sendo superiores aos atuais, desde criação de ambientes à carisma de personagens, tudo é tão bem produzido que da prazer pensar em visitar os “idosos” ou talvez isso seja crédito total para a Valve por conseguir pensar fora da caixa.

É perceptível que Portal 2 tem melhorias significantes em relação ao seu título anterior, começando pela presença constante de personagens que conseguem facilmente transmitir diversão e muita personalidade (não é estranho pensar que essas IAs conseguem passar mais informação que grande parte dos protagonistas atuais?).

Os desafios também se tornaram bem mais simples e diversificados, porém mesmo com uma adição considerável de mecânicas qualquer processo repetido de maneira intensa se torna repetitivo em poucas horas e esse é o maior problema do jogo. Mesmo sendo dividido em três principais “regiões” se considerarmos o mesmo sistema sem variação de cada um junto com a duração dos ambientes, o resultado final é obviamente um jogo prolongado que se torna extremamente chato.

Novamente, a única coisa mantendo a atenção do jogador são os diálogos de duas inteligências artificiais desengonçadas e a forma como cada pequeno comentário faz o jogador se sentir em casa ou como se estivesse conversando com amigos de longa data. Uma pena não possibilitarem mais conversas ou interação fora do início e fim de cada sala de testes.

A evolução aqui ocorre de uma maneira assustadora, pois os desenvolvedores conseguiram manter o que tinha de positivo no primeiro e melhoraram os pontos fracos ou em falta e isso é algo que deveria acontecer repetidamente em outros jogos, mas sabemos que não é a realidade. Por isso, digo que Portal 2 deveria ser considerado uma referência para quem deseja produzir jogos de puzzle e ao mesmo tempo para os desenvolvedores observarem como uma sequência pode ser produzida sem o desespero de quebrar ciclos e muito menos para revolucionar ou mudar o que gera renda, porque no final tudo o que mais queremos é algo divertido, marcante e com identidade própria.

Despite having no written word of it on this site, I kind of LOVED Portal 1. I'm not really a big Valve guy so I didn't actually play the Portal games until a few days ago, but I was really surprised by how much I liked them! I knew they were very well regarded but still, I really really liked it.

Now, while I do think Portal 2 is really good, I do think there's been a bit of a trade-off that makes me like it less than the first. The writing, specially early on, is definitely not as strong as the original. I didn't find it as funny or clever when compared to the original (though it gets better).
I feel like some test chambers were underwhelming and gel as a mechanic isn't very entertaining and deceptively limiting. With such a free-flowing fluid you'd think that there would be more freedom to its uses, but the application of their properties never feels genuine. It's too "game-y", if you don't mind me being pretentious. And while I know the chambers are narratively presented as tests with a fixed solution, I feel like the inclusions of the gels weren't very satisfying most of the time (though the dynamic music they made for them was really good). In gameplay it feels too fixed. Also the white gel is lame lol!

The other side of this trade comes in the form of more action set-pieces, which I thought were pretty well implemented. Organic enough to not be distracting and a good change of pace from all the puzzles. I thought they were neat :)

But it's that sacrifice of consistency (which is something that I think Portal 1 has as one of its strongest points) which sets it back for me. Really really good doe, just not as good as 1

9.5 | Em poucos minutos de jogo, Portal 2 prova-se muito mais bem humorado que seu antecessor, e, ao decorrer do jogo, prova-se imensamente melhor nos mais diversos aspectos.
Primeiramente, quanto ao sistema de portais, continua ótimo e extremamente funcional.
Sobre sua história, é simplesmente maravilhosa. Ela é bem humorada do início ao fim, traz boas reviravoltas e realmente te prende. Sem falar do final, que para mim foi épico.
Outro ponto que acho importante ressaltar são os puzzles. Embora eu não tenha gostado tanto do primeiro Portal, confesso que seus puzzles eram magníficos. Mas, aqui eles conseguiram elevar tudo de bom dos puzzles ao extremo. Tem vários puzzles que te fazem pensar por muito tempo, e não por terem sido de forma mal feita, pelo contrário: foram muito bem elaborados, ouso dizer que esse jogo tem presença de alguns dos melhores puzzles dos videogames.
Também vale ressaltar sobre a trilha sonora, que é muito boa. Combina muito bem com cada situação do jogo.
Enfim, Portal 2 é um prato cheio para os amantes do gênero puzzle/escape room, super recomendo, não acho que vá se arrepender.

Valve just get it, I don’t even like puzzle games but Portal is different - literally and figuratively. It just sucks me in. Its not one thing though, it is many things, all stacked up on top of each other. Portal 1 is really good but felt like a short demo into what could be done with the portal mechanics and the game engine, Portal 2 on the other hand is the magnificent culmination of that - i’ve not even technically finished it yet, i’m just wrapping up single-player and i’ve not even touched co-op or any mods yet, but it is a near perfect game through and through.

Even when I am scratching my head through portal 2’s challenging puzzles, there’s a constant drive that I feel that is the kind of rush that only great games can deliver. Plus even when i’m struggling and getting a bit frustrated, I can appreciate great design and recognise when something is just me. Many of Portal 2’s resounding successes are down to valve’s state of the art, perfectionist approach to game design which puts the player first at all times, orchestrates the pace like an award-winning conductor and strives to give this constant, enrapturing satisfaction. Not to mention the eccentric and often dark sense of humour which has aged remarkably well as well as the excellent art direction and dynamic audio that seems to ‘follow’ the player through their various tasks and interactions with the environment. The banter between glados and wheatley in particular is so good that you could make an entire tv show out of just them talking and it would work.

One thing I loved about portal 1 and even moreso here is the distinction between the flat, futuristic, cold testing areas and the industrial underbelly that you explore. I also find it impressive how a game that is about as linear as it gets on the surface doesn’t actually feel all that linear, something you could also say about half-life. The reason being because there’s no real cutscenes, everything is from your perspective and everyone is going to have a different experience of the same set of sequences. Sometimes exploring an idea that you don’t expect to be the solution ends up being the solution because trial and error is part of the experience, sometimes I would really struggle to figure something out, other times it would just click. Even playing around and experimenting with ideas feels good in portal because it has such an interesting and unique core mechanic, there’s really not much else like it, then its combined with all sorts of fun new additions like the light bridge, gels and excursion funnels to form the basis for what could honestly be a near endless stream of clever puzzles. But that would definitely get repetitive, portal 2 never is, no one puzzle is too alike to another and when an idea is explored well enough, it takes a backburner.

It makes me excited to see what more the community have done with these things because as always, valve embrace player creation with their tools and though they rarely ever develop games anymore, their philosophy and spirit lives on through the passionate modders that never stop putting out great stuff. But when you give valve’s devs the tools and let them design the levels from scratch, something hits differently, its like having your meal prepped by a professional chef, its something else man.

Other things that I love about portal & portal 2:
• A protagonist that doesn’t say a word (just how it should be), can you imagine if they talked while solving puzzles or gave advice like its god of war ragnarok or something, fucking hell…
• Stephen Merchant, Ellen McLain & JK Simmons absolutely killing their performances
• This dynamic, ever-changing feeling of progression where you’re descending, then ascending through the facility and feeling lost in this immersive world (even though its practically impossible to actually be lost)
• Finally, the fact that the game makes you feel so fucking smart. Like i’m no genius at all but there’s parts in this game where I was just like yeah, i’m the goat, i’m the puzzle king (usually right before getting royally humbled)

Just deserving of all of its praise really isn’t it, plus its going to be immensely replayable and I just know i’m going to be able to get so much out of this game even after I finish single-player. Its mad how i’ve only just played it now, but perhaps even madder that its 12 years old and not even aged a day.

Portal 2 feels like the fully realized version of the original Portal. At it's core it feels the same, but the sequel just has so much more going for it, more personality.

In this game, Chell is no longer bound to the test chambers of Aperture Science like in the first Portal. After an incident in the story, she decides to take a little stroll through an abandoned salt mine and the backstage parts within the facility while she's at it. All of this while she is accompanied by three unique companions throughout the game. Speaking of the companions, the dialogue in Portal 2 is a big improvement over the one in Portal. In the first game, GLaDOS' comments happened every now and then, but here you pretty much have a narrator by your side all the time. This alone makes for quite the tonal shift in atmosphere to Portal, which had a pretty isolated and empty feeling to it - I can see how people prefer that, but personally I really enjoyed the extra dialogue and characters, since GLaDOS' remarks in the first game were one of the best parts for me. Back to the atmosphere in general, I think Valve did a really good job with setting an unique vibe for each individual area. My personal favorite is the salt mine, the vintage setting really landed for me!

As for gameplay, Portal 2 introduces a variety of mechanics to make the puzzles more enjoyable than the first game. Energy balls are completely gone this time and are replaced with light bridges, gravity beams, new cube variants and three different sorts of paint. Sounds like overkill at first, but those mechanics don't really overstay their welcome and they are really fun to play around with.

The narrative weaves those puzzles together in a logical way, while also delving into the background story of Chell and Aperture Science; there's some really good worldbuilding in there. The companions aren't one-note personalities and each one adds to the story with a different purpose, which makes them distinctive and memorable in their own ways.

Overall it's an amazing puzzle game, absolutely deserves the praise it's been getting. Had a good time with the main story, but the community maps are a nice treat if you're still in the mood for some more Portal action.

Okay, actual review time.

If you've been following the excellent saga that is 'random Irish guy writes shitty one-liners about video games' the beloved spinoff to 'random Irish guy writes shitty webnovels inspired mostly by video game plots as well as whatever was in the Spotify playlist that day' you'll know I wrote an actual review of Portal , and thought it was just okay. A decent demo of new tech with a fun enough plot even if the momentum based puzzles were a bit jank in areas. But everyone said Portal 2 was the great one and god damn they were right.

Right from the beginning when Wheatley wakes you up and the world starts crumbling around you as Glados notices your presence, in psychics showcases that to this day are extremely impressive looking, with dialogue that's genuinely funny as you talk to two parties who absolutely hate each other, going through more fun puzzles that feel more tightly designed than in one.

Then the big halfway twist happens.

I'm not gonna go too in detail on how you end up in the abandoned part of aperture, because I knew what the twist was and was still shocked at it. But the second half leads to the game's greatest strength.

atmosphere.

Every part of this game oozes atmosphere thanks to the more varied settings, getting to traverse with portals outside of the first games testing environments for longer periods of time. The prerecorded messages as funny as they are deeply unsettling. I do have a personal phobia of both abandoned places and the whole 'upload your brain into a machine' concept so maybe this whole thing spoke to me on a deeper level, but god damn if I wasn't creeped out the whole time. This has scared me more than basically any horror movie I've ever watched, and the plot and premise probably wouldn't be that hard to rewrite into a dreamworks film, which adds to the game's artistic qualities.

So in general, it's a masterpiece. You didn't need me to say that. Only flaw is some of the later puzzles last a tad too long, and the orange gel kept sliding me just besides my portal instead of into them (or maybe that's just me getting filtered by first person gaming again)

Going back to things you loved in your youth is always an uncomfortable gamble, because there's a 50/50 chance you'll either find a brand new appreciation for it in your old age or you'll suck air through your teeth every five minutes and murmur "Ah, jeez." to yourself.

Portal 2 is a unique oddity for me in that the 50/50 chance rolled 100/100 and I had both experiences, sometimes consecutively and sometimes concurrently. It's not helped by me being on a bit of a Valve kick and this was at the end of my replay list, which really highlights its status as their most oddball game.

Before I begin, it's absolutely worth restating just how much of a massive chokehold Valve had on nerd culture in the 2000s and very early 2010s. Having grown up around nerds and spent the vast majority of my education studying IT, the word 'cake' made me flinch up until around 2015. Even had I not actually replayed this game, I could likely recite the entire script because near enough every single line had been parroted and warped into some bizarre facsimile of humor by one specific corner of nerd culture.
I am not going to pretend I'm above the people I'm dunking on, because as late as June this year I made gauche "Grabbin' pills!" references while playing Project Zomboid and my last L4D2 runthrough with a friend saw me play necromancer to a host of jokes older than my nephew. Some diseases don't get slept off I'm afraid.

This Valve Mania was a precursor to a lot of modern developer worship cults, and like those it left a not insignificant amount of people with a general unwillingness to approach Valve games as anything other than holy relics. I, again, was one of those people for a time.

And... Having replayed all of their other singleplayer games till now? I get it. Even with flaws that're apparent as an adult, all of their games have airtight pacing, design that's still barely matched by a lot of their contemporaries, amazing unspoken player guidance and a phenomenal blend of narrative and gameplay - in part due to having the former take a backseat 99% of the time.

Except Portal 2, which stands as an oddball among their SP catalogue because most of those don't apply.

The original Portal is as close to a perfect game as the medium gets, really. Its pacing is sanded to a monofilament point, it discards more obvious handholding/directions with gentle nudges and intuitive signposting, the story runs concurrent with the gameplay but never usurps it, the comedy is rapidfire and laden with jokes that betray a lot about the setting as a means to not do exposition, and a slow but methodical rollout of mechanics that keep the game interesting until the credits roll. Plus, shirking the trends that were already endemic at the time, the game was set in this cold, sterile and lifeless testing facility that somehow looked more inhumane than the endless greybrown corridors of early FPS games.

It was a huge hit, and as humans are unfortunately prone to doing, people just wanted more. More Portal, in our mouths, Mr. Valve. Please.

We got Portal 2, which isn't what I'd call more Portal.

The intro alone signals to an observant player just how different they are.

Portal 1’s is hilariously brief. You awaken in a featureless bedroom and wait a moment. There’s a brief spiel by GLaDOS introducing the game, she glitches out, a portal opens and boom. In general, Portal 1 is really short for how much impact it had on the world; Undertale clocks in at a longer runtime.

Portal 2’s is overlong. Like Portal 1 before it, you awaken in a featureless bedroom. The announcer asks you to walk around, look around, and adjust the camera up and down. Then the jokes start. And they don’t stop. Jokes, jokes, jokes… Then Wheatley appears and I stare at my monitor, dead-eyed and slack jawed, wondering how I found this funny a decade ago.

I could write a really, really long spiel going through this entire game and tearing into just how obnoxious it is in every chapter, but it’d be repetitive even by my standards and I don’t really talk in circles so much as I do ouroboroii. There’s also no need, because the problems that start in the first chapter are the same all the way until the credits.

In the early 2010s, English culture began exporting itself all over the world thanks to social media. This mostly manifested as what I refer to as Gervais-isms; snarky, observational comedy carried out by overly bitter and unmarriageable white English dudes where most of the actual ‘humour’ comes from how fast they talk. It’s the entire foundation of BBC Sherlock for instance.

While this trend thankfully died a violent death, it infected a lot of works in its death throes. Portal 2 was one of them, sadly.

I will admit my biases outright before continuing: I cannot stand Stephen Merchant on any level, especially as a comedian. The trio he formed with Ricky Gervais and Kar Pilkington was a blight on the world and eventually gave birth to Hello Ladies, which reads more like an incel manifesto (as that is Merchant’s usual wheelhouse) than a sitcom. So it colours my view on this game pretty heavily.

I encourage you to read through the list of GLaDOS’ lines from the first game. and really take them in. Portal 1’s sense of humour is subdued, oftentimes difficult to pick out from GLaDOS’ otherwise normal dialogue, and when it’s obvious the game just moves onto the next line without clearly telling you ‘this is a joke’. Your reward for clearing each puzzle is a brief interlude by GLaDOS and then another puzzle.

In Portal 2, your reward is jokes. Sometimes you don’t even get a puzzle as a reward, just an endlessly white, beige or brown corridor where you spend the vast majority of your time scanning the walls for a single patch of portal-compatible surfacing. The jokes themselves are not only far greater in number, but greater in length. Portal 1 is about 3~ hours long, Portal 2 is twice that. 2x the length, 2x the jokes? That’s a fine and understandable metric.

Portal 2 is 2x the length, 10x the jokes and it’s…

This document has sat in my drafts for like three days now, after that ellipsis my brain just stopped because I could not put my figure on why the jokes sucked beyond “it’s very MCU-ish”, but I think I know now after spending two days playing XCOM 2 and Ultrakill ad infinitum.

Portal 1 is designed around the assumption that you like Portal.

Portal 2 is designed around the assumption that you like Portal’s humor.

Only, the humour in Portal 2 is not the humour in Portal 1. Portal 2’s comedy is grandiose, over the top, and assumes you always want more of it. It’s why Wheatley says stuff like “We’re escaping, that is what’s happening, we are escaping!” [No, really] for a full 5 minutes as you move in a straight line while barely engaging with the mechanics except to build a metaphorical bridge with portal spawning more simplistic than the first game’s onboarding puzzles.

Honestly, I could single out Wheatley as the sole offender here, but pretty much every character with a speaking role and more than five lines goes past the Joke Event Horizon at some point. The best part of this game is the first third set in the Current Aperture, because Wheatley is a minor character and most of it is devoted to either good ol’ Portal Puzzlin’ or the intense psychosexual nightmare yuri occurring between GLaDOS and Chell.

The worst part, though, is the middle section. Old Aperture.

Old Aperture makes me feel like a rat scurrying about a maze, solving puzzles for cheese. Except I don’t get cheese, I get snippets from a show where JK Simmons rambles to himself while stuck in traffic. The maze itself is a grim, brutalist remake of Splatoon where you don’t so much “‘think with portals’ as you think with adult colouring books.
Portal 1 had this fantastically lonely, sterile atmosphere to it that’s completely thrown out for 2, and it was meant to be replaced by the overgrown, decrepit Aperture you see in the first third.
This in itself doesn’t really work because the underlying design of Aperture changed between games, so it’s less “here’s the facility you love from 1 but fucked up” and more “here’s a fucked up facility”. It also doesn’t work because you spend the bulk of the game in Old Aperture which is primarily sewage, concrete and industrial warehouses followed by a redux of New Aperture which shows off just how much the underlying design changed. Really, this feels like a sequel to a completely different game.

But back to the Old Aperture griping for a sec, there’s something to be said about how mask-off Portal 2 is about its aspirations in this area. It’s not really interested in actually being a sequel to Portal 1 so much as it is competing with every other FPS game that was popping up around this period and also Valve’s other big series Half-Life. This was the game to make the Half-Life connection 100% canon and it shows in the way ‘Narrative’ as a game design element is so much more prominent here - arguably moreso than in the other series.

Much of what is only subtextual in the first game becomes decidedly textual in Portal 2, often to the game’s detriment as it gets repetitive early. GLaDOS referring to your stay in the ‘relaxation vault’ as a detention is Portal 1’s first clue that Aperture kinda sucks, but in Portal 2 there’s an uncomfortable volume of “HEY APERTURE SUCKS” text that feels extremely redundant, especially in Old Aperture. Yeah, the JK Simmons bits are mildly amusing, but they’re also excessive - for lack of a better word. “Aperture made testing products out of stuff that gives you lung cancer” is a bit unnecessary for a series where the first hour gives you instant kill sewage pools and GLaDOS reading off a health disclaimer that suggests the end-of-level fields can melt your teeth.

I focus so much on the non-gameplay stuff because the gameplay front is… Odd, very odd, and I’ve been putting it off on purpose.
Portal 2 has an incredible amount of mechanics in the pot: Portals, buttons, light bridges, laser redirection, aerial faith plates, speed gel, bounce gel, gel that creates portal surface, gravity bridges, reverse gravity bridges, and probably something I’ve forgotten.

They aren’t very well leveraged, and the way they’re contributes to the game feeling like three overlong setpieces as opposed to a Portal game. The first third gives you a portal gun, light bridges, lasers and aerial faith plates. You go through tests that feel like a glorified tutorial on them, get 1-2 tests where you really have to apply that knowledge, and then the act ends.
You’re then shunted into Old Aperture, where the three gels come into play. As before, you go through some glorified tutorials, get two tests to apply that knowledge, repeat.
The last third is no different.

When this game was released I was still in academia, and playing it in 2023 makes me feel like I’m back in academia… In the sense that nothing in the game’s metaphorical curriculum actually matters, because once we know we’ve passed the potential fail state we’re shunted onto something new that has no real relevance to what came before, even in the graded final unit. Which is doubly fitting because the lecturer who taught me networking protocols, Sam, admitted he had only ever played two games: The first Portal, and Civilization V.

To dispense with metaphors though, I’d argue Portal 2 is overdesigned. There’s a lot here and, given how much screentime is devoted to straightforward interlude corridors where you’re talked to by either Potato GLaDOS, Wheatley or Cave Johnson, it all just feels extraneous. A vain attempt at making you hype for the next text chamber, without actually thinking about how to tie it all together. Much of the joy in Portal 1’s later chambers come from applying everything you know to get through the puzzles without stalling halfway through, from detaching your sense of space and accessible terrain from what’s immediately in front of you and viewing the chamber through the lens of where you could go with portals. This is, after all, what ‘thinking with portals’ even means.

Portal 2 doesn’t want you to think with portals. It wants you to think with aerial faith plates, gel and gravity.

The interludes… God, the interludes.

In Portal 1, deviating from the test chamber formula was a shock. Meant to throw the player off and put them in an unfamiliar, uncontrolled situation that both looked and felt weird. In Portal 2, it’s… Every few puzzles, sadly. I’ve said it numerous times, but the bulk of this game’s is spent in what I’ve been calling ‘interludes’; they contain no puzzles, just large spaces that require you to scan the room for patches of portal-compatible terrain, so you can make a very banal A-B portal to cross. These segments don’t really engage with any of the mechanics up above, which is especially jarring given many of them feel designed explicitly to do that. The game would feel a lot more cohesive if using the other mechanics in uncontrolled situations was more prominent, and not just something that happens in the last boss.

One last note that almost slipped the script: Portal 2 has a bit of an issue with signposting. Oftentimes it devolves into pixel hunts (again, interludes), or the way forward requires the game to flash a prompt on screen saying “HEY, YOU CAN INTERACT WITH THIS!”. It’s so very weird given Valve often excel at this, even in the VR space.

The unique thing about Portal 2 compared to other games I rag on incessantly is that the developers addressed every single problem I have with the game… Within the same game. It’s called Portal 2 Co-op and it fucking rules dude.
I played it about two years ago with my stepdad (because I know he would grief me and I him) and it was like peering into an alternate universe.

In co-op, none of my complaints exist. There are no dogshit interludes that get in the way of puzzles, so you and your partner can focus exclusively on the puzzles. The puzzles themselves leverage mechanics a lot more evenly, and in general just felt like they demanded more brain power than singleplayer’s relatively banal puzzles. The supporting cast are gone entirely, it’s just GLaDOS managing to blend her Portal 2 self with her Portal 1 self. It’s just, in every way, so much better. Sure, there are some levels that mirror Old Aperture and feature gratuitous gollops of gel, but they’re a sight better than their counterpart.

And this wasn’t even a post launch addition. It was in at day 0, the two co-op characters were a fixture of the marketing, and they’re on the cover art. If you play only Portal 1 and then Portal 2 co-op, you have a cohesive and well rounded experience.

Still, despite everything I just said, I do have to give Portal 2 credit for something that probably wasn’t even intended:

GLaDOS’ dynamic with Chell is delicious. To keep it brief: GLaDOS spends all of Act 1 trying to hate and belittle Chell for various things (her weight/face/bone structure/parenthood/apparent lack of morality/lack of speech/etc) but it’s just… It’s all a veneer, one that quickly shatters when Wheatley enters the picture. Wheatley, unlike Chell, can’t withstand GLaDOS’ emotional abuse and lashes out destructively. In turn, GLaDOS realizes that Chell is her only source of companionship, which reduces her to a pitiful creature who tries to rationalize why Chell should empower her again, a far cry from her usual domineering self. I know some Portal fans have spent a decade arguing it’s an act, but it’s really obvious given that her first words after the finale are “Oh thank god, you’re alive” followed by Want You Gone, which is a breakup song to the letter.

It’s… Shit dude, it’s the most accurate depiction of a mutually abusive relationship I’ve ever seen which is doubly impressive since Chell is so mute she doesn’t even have a credited VA. It’s all helped by Ellen McLain’s legendary performance, which to this day is still the best voice acting I’ve heard among the thousands of games I’ve played.

In the end, though, there’s only one real takeaway I can have from this game, and that is:

It’s really obvious why Valve stopped making single player games until Alyx. They’ve made it abundantly clear that innovation is their philosophy and an inability to meaningfully innovate killed a lot of potential sequels/games in their studio. Portal 2 is their one exception, and it shows. This game was by no means bad, and it was a huge massive success that put the company on the map for a whole new generation of people.

But it’s decidedly not much of a Valve game.

It is absolutely a 2010s videogame, though.

The original game came out when I was a compsci undergrad minoring in applied physics, so you can imagine how badly the patter stunk in the intervening time-space; the sequel only exacerbated the situation, and by the end of my degree I'd developed a debilitating cake-based neurosis. Not really the game's fault, but I still hold it accountable.

Replaying it again after all these years, I was prepared to hold my nose and dive through all that unpleasantness - but to my surprise, the Redditisms just felt quaint and harmless, a playful reminder of a time when that corner of the internet wasn't a testing platform for Mossad COINTELPRO programs. The simple joy of the game almost made me ashamed of all the ways I've blithely scorned the earnest energy of /r/ifuckinglovescience shit, but alas, there's still a solid hour where you're trapped in an industrial colouring book, dutifully shading wee squares of orange and blue in order to receive reward-pellets that take the form of a Stephen Merchant podcast recording; excruciating stuff from a developer that usually wedged narrative all the way down the back of their gameplay's comfy couch. It's no surprise that this was Valve's last single-player effort for a decade - as espousers of the "always step forward" philosophy, I doubt they could stomach any more competition with the succeeding decade's first-person rollercoasters.

The original game was far more merciful, and the co-op mode's main purpose here is to remind you of that fact. This was my first time through it, and I relished almost every moment - especially the parts where you can invite complex chain-reactions of misfortune upon your companion. Aside from a few sections where you're returned to the colouring book with four squares instead of two, there's a much tighter focus on the square pegs, round holes and triangular hammers, with concepts often being combined in far greater depth than they were in the single-player. Perhaps it's a limitation of this game's (unshowing) technical age, but I'm still disappointed that neither campaign offers a testing chamber that combines light bridges, gravity wells, colour goos and laser grids... I feel like you could - as Wheatley tries to do at the end - mash up some really cool shit with all the toys in this ̶o̶r̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ ̶ white box. It's still fun!

When I first put together this list of games I wanted to replay at some point, I thought of tossing in Portal 2 as well, I mean, it had been over 10 years (god I'm fucking old...) since I had last played through it. At this point, I must have forgotten how to solve at least a big part of it... right...? RIGHT...?

Well, in the first 2 hours or so I realized that, when it comes to hyperfixations I had in the past, my brain is better at preserving information about them better than I actually thought, because I found myself going from puzzle to puzzle with relative swiftness, with only a couple of them in the late game giving me trouble. So, why did I stay?

Because if there's something I didn't quite remember as well, was the humor being so phenomenal, it's great to see that after all these years, the comedy of this game still stands up to this day. Specially since this time around I caught on some jokes that as a kid pretty much flew over my head, like think about it for a moment, working for someone like Cave Johnson is like talking to a friend that always replies to you with the nerd emoji when you tell them something, the guy was a walking PR nightmare.

To anyone going for their first playthrough, you are in for a delightful experience, and I hope you enjoy solving these amazing puzzles while breathing in the amazing atmosphere of the game... unless you are breathing the asbestos of underground Aperture, in that case... I'm sorry about your lungs lol

It strikes me as proof that you just need to add superglue that makes you go at lightning speed to worm your way into a perfected game. The dialogue is even more effortlessly funny as before, and despite the plethora of new mechanics the game doesnt hold back from introducing, none of them ruined my day.

I still haven't found any cake... nor a way to make a 3rd portal bcuz they cant make a 3rd game if there arent three portals come on gamers... though if I was nitpicky (im not i have no flaws) there are 4 of them thanks to the brand new co-op campaign. The two robots you control in this campaign can do Fortnite emotes ⁉️(that is so Epic) and that gives them the edge over Shell, Chel, whatever her name is that we are not expected to remember.

Side note: Electronic Arts being featured on this page is insulting. Get em gone!!

Had to end my journey with the Portal mods with the real MVP, unmodded Portal 2. You know it's been too long since you've last played this when the surprises hit with full force all over again. I mean this story is fucking juicy, from the intimidating revival of GLaDOS, to the shocking take-over of Wheatley, and all the fantastic lemon-based rants in between. I absolutely adore this game, and I nearly forgot that it's one of my favorite games of all time! (Remind me to change my Backloggd Profile) Despite how excited I'd be if Portal 3 were to ever be announced, I genuinely think this game would work best if it never got a true sequel. The story is perfect the way it is.

Keep in mind that this review is focused on the single player for Portal 2. I've never played through the co-op mode cause I have nobody to play it with.

Portal 2 is the perfect evolution of its predecessor, but it still manages to stand out on its own.

The puzzles feel more complex compared to the first game, but are designed well enough so that even a ten year old kid can finish this game. Trust me, I know from experience.

Now, the thing that I love the most about Portal 2 is the humor. Probably the funniest game I've ever played, except for maybe Undertale.

Also both Portal games play well on the Switch. Hope the Half Life series get the same treatment one day.

Portal 2 is a game that means so much to me. It's a game I genuinely believe is as close to perfect as one can possibly be. From its writing, to its gameplay, to its visuals, everything about it is just fantastic.

I've never been able to recover from the time a friend played it for the first time and he said "Oh so you probably based your entire personality around this game in high school" because he was 100% spot on. I even had a Portal 2 backpack in high school. All four years.

Playing it again with the developer commentary is also a great time, highly recommend it.

Portal 2 is damn good, but is not quite the perfect experience, for me personally, that many believe it to be. It’s got phenomenal writing, puzzle design and physics, with the hilariously dimwitted Wheatley absolutely stealing the show. The new puzzle mechanics introduced throughout the experience help keep things fresh and understanding how to combine these is where the gameplay is at its best. Though the game has some minor pacing issues, especially in the drab corridors that connect the test chambers, the soundtrack is forgettable and a bit more visual variety would’ve added to the experience. However, these minor grievances are dwarfed by what this game absolutely nails, doing everything a sequel should. Now I’m just waiting for Cave Johnson’s scientists to finally make their breakthrough and blow up my house with lemons.

2011 Ranked

At the beginning of this year I chose 20 games to complete out of my backlog.

1/20 Backlog 2024
So apparently I first played this game on the 23rd of December 2011. Finished it today for the first time. Well, better late than never right?

Apart from some frustration with orange gel physics, this game is still exceptionally good. Particularly, the story, the writing and especially the voice performances thanks to some brilliant comedic time.

Yeah it's a masterpiece even though it's not really my preferred genre.