Portal 2

Steampowered Sunday #5

Okay here it comes… huge confession time.  Prior to today I had never actually played Portal 2.  I have owned it for ages, and picked it up when it was damned near free on a steam sale.  I always meant to play it, but something… namely an MMO usually happened instead.  Here goes confession number two while we are at it.  I didn’t think Portal was that amazing of a game.  I know shock and confusion all around…  but it fell into the “cute and cleaver” games category.  The whole portal gun thing was brilliant, but the concept of essentially a “puzzle shooter” was fun for a bit but I quickly got tired of it.

To be truthful I am not sure if I would have owned the original portal were it not for the orange box.  I got it as part of that, and even then it was probably a year before I fired it up and played it.  I mostly got the orange box for Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, and Portal for me was a bit of a footnote.  Based on the copious amount of cosplay and fan art out there… I can tell that the Portal franchise is a life changing thing for some people.  I was just not one of them.  For ages my friends have pestered me for owning Portal 2 but never actually playing it.  In a way I made a promise to redress that wrong during my Steampowered Sunday series.  Things happened… and I am finally getting down to playing it today for what would be week 6 if I had not skipped a week.

We Weren’t Even Testing That

For the last hour and a half I have been sitting here playing Portal 2.  While I still for the most part consider this game to be a novelty, so much about it has improved.  Namely the setting seems more enjoyable to me.  The sterile environment of the first lab was interesting, but watching the place fall down around me is far more enjoyable.  It has a Portal meets Fallout feel that I really enjoy.  Additionally the characters are so much more interesting this time around.  GlaDOS was a really cool character in the first game, but now that the gloves are off her lines are that much more enjoyable.  Then we add in Wheatley, which near the beginning of chapter three I have not seen a ton of since the first chapter, but I am figuring that will change soon.

The game setting is absolutely gorgeous and they have managed to pull off “believable decay”.  Things are broken and out of whack and it feels like they are legitimately so.  Like they used to work at one point and then just collapsed.  So often in a game when the world is disintegrated, you cannot piece it back together in your mind to see what it looked like before the fall.  Here the rooms seem to have all the right number of bits laying around to have been a whole unit at one point.  I am not really sure why this is important to me, but in the games where it is not this way there is a nagging feeling that something is just plain off.  Even in my beloved fallout series there are plenty of locations that have a chunk of the building broken off, but nowhere near enough debris to account for it.

There are two really cool stories going on at the same time, that are what if anything would keep me playing through the rest of the game.  The first is… GlaDOS seems to think you are the same person who destroyed her in game one.  If that is the case… how did you end up back in stasis.  The other thing going on that I want to know more about are the weird messages that get left to you through the chambers.  These are almost always well hidden, in a chamber behind an angled panel or something of the sort… just a bit off the planned path.  I’ve snapped a few of these so far but I imagine that when taken together they will make some additional story.

I’ve really let the place go since you killed me

I have no idea how long the game is, but at this point I saved out and gave up on the first of the light bridge puzzles in chapter 3.  This seemed like a good stopping point since it was the first time I had actually died.  I feel that maybe the puzzles are easier this time around, either that or I was simply lucky.  I was able to breeze through most of them to that point.  Since the first game was so popular I wonder if maybe they watered down the difficulty level a bit for mainstream success.  Not saying that is a bad thing necessarily, but it does give the game a feeling that it is just easier.  I remember in the first one I was having to retry levels pretty early on at least by the time I reached room 10.  It feels like I am further into the game right now than that.  Maybe the “real” game didn’t actually start until Chapter 2, and I am just counting all the training stuff at the beginning to make it feel longer.

The rooms I always do badly at are the ones that involve going out over massive pits of water.  I don’t handle platforming over open air that well, never really have in any game.  Those levels add extra anxiety to my movement and I think I screw up more often.  Namely on the light bridge I just could not see the hook point for a portal where I needed one.  I figure that room is one I will have to die a bunch on to be able to find the “secret”.  Generally speaking the key to every room is this one little nugget of information that you either see immediately or it takes a truly silly number of tries to finally find it.  I am by no means an observational genius, in fact I am usually good at overlooking the painfully obvious… so I am sure it is just a case of that at work again.

…there’s nothing to stop us from testing for the rest of your life

I have to give my friends credit in that Portal 2 is a much better game than the original.  However that said I still do not see it as this life affirming phenomena that everyone else seems to.  It is a good game, and has some interesting characters and an even more interesting setting.  The gameplay is novel, but there is a point where I feel like I am just done with it for a a sitting.  I am not sure if I will go back and finish playing through it.  The best thing about the Portal experience is that for the most part you can play a single level at a time without feeling like you are missing something.  I know I played through the first one over the course of about 12 gameplays.  When I couldn’t really play anything else that was too involved, like when I was waiting on something to cook… I would fire it up and figure out a level, constantly inching closer to the finale.

I have a feeling Portal 2 may just claim this slot for me, that game I play when I don’t have time to play something more detailed.  At the very least it did not instill in me that feeling of “omg I have to finish this”.,  I am happy to eventually beat it, but I am also equally happy not to.  The game however is really well done, and I can at least see why so many people love it.  I think I am just wired wrong for this sort of single player experience.  At some point I would like to check out the multiplayer game, as I have heard that it is a completely different animal.  I would imagine it plays a lot like forced where you can royally screw up your friends by not doing the right thing at exactly the right time.  For now at least I have to say it was an hour and a half well spent.