Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Portal 2!

If you’re going to read one sentence in this review, here it is: Portal 2 is fucking fantastic.

Now if you’re the kind of person who likes easily digestible perspectives on games that give clear instructions on what you should do with regard to a game, regardless of your tastes, you know what’s up. Portal 2 is what’s up. Quick, buy it while there are still copies floating around the digital aether that is Steam. I’d actually recommend that, if you really like your video game experiences to be fresh, you run off and play through Portal 2 right now. I don’t plan on spoiling anything, but Portal 2 is such a rich experience that it benefits from being engaged once and then discussing it more than almost any other game I can think of.

But if you insist on staying, I’ll begin: Portal 2 is how you do a sequel right.

It keeps the format of the original Portal: stand-alone puzzle that builds on lessons from earlier puzzles, meticulously designed so that the levels slowly edify you as you experience them, even if you have trouble with puzzles. It keeps all of the humor of the original Portal: adorable robots running around, doing decidedly unrobotic things while providing you with scathingly witty backhanded encouragement in a science-ey, absurd environment. It even keeps all of Portal’s original characters, all three of them, and GlaDOS is still voiced by the indispensible Ellen McLain. In fact Ms. McLain is given even more to do, including a nice little easter egg that goes back to her operatic roots. But the cast, and the game has expanded.

Talent the like of J.K. Simmons and Stephen Marchant have joined the team in Portal 2, and while they certainly don’t eclipse McLain, to whom the series owes nearly as much as Swift, Falseik and Wolpaw, they bring their talents to the table and enrich the entire world of Portal through their contributions. That’s the theme here.

Every single piece that is uniquely Portal 2, every single new element and new challenge, contributes to the universe built by the original Portal game. There’s retconning, sure, but it’s forgivable by video game standards, and there’s no element of the retconning that actually reduces what makes the game great, the kind we see all too often in other, more clumsily executed sequels. Instead what was a tiny, mostly subtextually developed world has sprung into a vibrant cosmology, one that explores both how portals work, why they work, and where they came from. There’s no concern for the questions that players might’ve had. Instead Wolpaw and Falseik pretty much just do whatever they want which, let’s face it, is how they work best.

The end result is a cast of characters all of whom are as memorable, sympathetic, ridiculous and textually significant as GlaDOS. I’m already chomping at the bit to sit down and work on an essay about just how Portal 2 and its cast expand Portal’s treatment of feminism, and I’ve only played through the game once. I’m sure that, as time unfolds, there will be plenty of new material to draw on. I didn’t think they’d be able to layer more feminist analysis and symbolism into a game where you have a gun that shoots vaginas, but they did it, and I’m impressed. And they did it without forcing it upon players or sacrificing any of the game’s humor. They fixed the self-seriousness problem that’s been plaguing feminists since the Second Wave, and they did it without apparently trying.

But I’ve been dancing around the core of the game: the puzzles. Portal 2 is, for better or worse, more tied to the chamber model than its predecessor. The first Portal played nearly half of its life outside of the chambers, partially because it only lasted around two hours in the first place and half of that could easily be spent running the gauntlet outside of GlaDOS’ clutches. Portal 2 is a lot more interested in staying within clearly defined chambers and theaters of operations, moving you through locations and teaching you a variety of puzzle solving skills that you’re tested on every few “chambers.”

There’s some complaint about the puzzles being easier, perhaps too easy, and I’d agree with the former claim. There are a few brain busters, but I mostly breezed through Portal 2 without any of the horrible, epiphany driving locks that the first Portal gave me. Part of this can be owed to the scale of the game: Portal 2 is much, much longer than its predecessor. And more game means less attention to the individual portions of the game. It’s unfortunate but true that Valve, as good as they are at iterating various game elements together, can’t be expected to deliver the same remarkable quality on a ten or twenty hour project that they deliver on a two to four hour project.

But with this increased size comes diversity in the art and level design, as well as the puzzles themselves. The original Portal did some amazing things with a very limited toolset, and Portal 2 does quite a bit to expand the toolbox, providing players with toys that completely fuck up the rules of momentum that Portal introduced. Additionally, there are just plain more levels to see, prettier levels at that, with a more diverse and engaging sense of art and design to them. Portal 2’s design provides players with careful hints about setting and time, about in-game environment and object uses and about the thematic nature of the world around them. The end result is a world more visually rich and dense with information than the first Portal game, a title which re-defined subtext in games.

There’s an unfortunate and more noticeable drop in the quality of the commentary provided with Portal 2, something the original Portal did just about perfectly. The commentary mode in Portal 2 is divorced from a save function, sparsely populated with nodes and often incoherent or boring compared to the quippy, very real commentary that I’ve grown accustomed to from Valve. The menu used to navigate the commentary nodes is also divided from the game itself, and doesn’t seem well suited to the task. But it is just a bonus feature, one many people will never even use, not a big deal. Just a little disappointing to commentary hounds like myself who really liked the behind-the-scenes perspective Valve provided in previous games.

And I do need to offer a disclaimer here: I haven’t finished all of Portal 2’s co-op mode at time of writing. I’ve played some, and it’s fucking fantastic to be sure. But I haven’t sat down and finished every last bit of it yet, and I certainly haven’t checked the commentary out there. It’s quite possible that the commentary on the co-op levels kicks it up a notch and provides the sort of insight and evaluation that I miss (although I doubt it). It’s certainly true that the co-operative mode in Portal 2 is a value add, well worth experiencing, and filled with great little extras. With a friend or with a stranger, drunk or sober, Portal 2’s co-op is enjoyable. And while it could fizzle out or become frustrating at some point the chambers are so easy to navigate that it’s difficult for me to imagine.

I’m not sure I’d say Portal 2 is better than Portal. Portal is a great game, one of the few games I’d stammeringly refer to as perfect. It has goals, and it fulfills all of them wonderfully. Portal 2 has a different set of goals, and it takes care of all of them too, more or less. But it’s a different product, an attempt to grow what Portal created, and it does a great job of that. I’m not sure the two games can really be compared, or that it’s a good idea to try and define one as superior to the other. They’re both great, and Portal 2 gets what made Portal great and provides plenty more of it.