Mmm… Portal.
For those who have lived in a Siberian cave for the past decade, Portal is a game—a series of puzzles, really—that employ a first-person shooter engine but replace the usual bullet-shooting gun with a gun that shoots magical teleportation gates: shoot a blue gate onto a sufficiently large, flat surface, shoot an orange gate onto another, and objects (including you) can pass directly between them. The original Portal ran you through a deadly Skinner rat maze requiring the use of the portals to progress from test to test and ultimately escape, taunted the whole way by GlaDOS.
GlaDOS was the psychotic AI running the tests, equal parts HAL9000 and Nurse Ratched: cruel, petty, and transparently insincere, brilliantly scripted. Her voice transformed the game from appetizer-sized addon puzzle to phenomenon. The world loves GlaDOS.
Portal 2 had a tough act to follow. Inevitably, it failed to match Portal. The Valve guys did all they could, but… something’s missing. As a sequel, Portal 2 lacks novelty value. GlaDOS and two new personalities are still brilliantly scripted, but the shock value of GlaDOS’s passive-aggressive malice can’t be reproduced. The puzzles remain excellent, but players now expect to do cool and clever things; the shock that holy shit you can also do this with a portal gun can’t be replicated. Plus, as I predicted last June, there’s only so much you can do with a portal gun alone; the new puzzles have to employ a wider variety of puzzle elements to remain new, at some expense to the elegance that made the original so amazing. Matching the near-perfection of the original wasn’t merely grossly improbable because near-perfection is tough to pull off; it was impossible because we’d already seen it.
So “not quite as good†is a huge compliment here. As I say, the narration is swell and the puzzles clever. They retain the magic of making you feel smart for solving them, despite some very broad hints. The two-player screens add a rewarding new dimension without a loss of elegance. Definitely worth your time and money. Maybe not quite as worth your money as the $10 original, and, like its predecessor, over all too soon, but still…
Post a Comment