Portal 2's single-player campaign has been vanquished. Questions have been answered. Robots were destroyed (and one saved). And plenty of science was had by all.
Before the nit-pickyness sets in I wanted to bask in the euphoric glow I got when I flung that last portal and solved the final test, so here's my favorite memories from playing Portal 2.
So long, Aperture Science... and thanks for all the memories.
You monsters.
Testing Smarter, Not Harder
While Portal 2 had some much bigger test chambers and more complex puzzles to solve, it was often the smaller challenges that really stumped me. Some of the added tools (repulsion gel, lasers) increased the challenge by forcing you to think in new and different directions, while others (propulsion gel, aerial faith plates) just made testing fun again.
One particular room that stumped me for a while had three lasers but only two reflecting cubs, and required you to get the lasers around a corner so they could hit the receivers and unlock the door. After trying several combinations of cubes I sat back, frustrated, and tried counting the lasers / walls / receivers / anything to see if there was something I missed. By accident I had two of the lasers passing through the same portal, and the solution hit me. I popped the door open by shooting three beams through the same portal, then did a victory dance because I was feeling just so damn smart.
Brilliant.
In the first Portal, there are really only two sources of information: the sociopathic computer GLaDOS, and the wall-scribblings of an unseen scientist who escaped her neurotoxic purge of the facility. Chel the tester is mute, so creating someone to tag along for most of the game and provide a running commentary was a much-needed improvement.
Wheatley is a ball of bumbling, panicked comedy that helps ease the player back into the testing process, then literally rips the floor out from underneath them after he gets what he wants. Later on his attempts at running Aperture Science and testing Chel are both hilarious and terrifying: my favorite moment was the "gotcha" trap in the last chapter (which is also appropriately titled "The Part Where He Tries To Kill You"). Having been lulled into thinking Wheatley's a complete (but dangerous) moron, the trap's cleverness shocks you, and even GLaDOS admits it was well-done.
Aperture Science started somewhere, and that somewhere was the blood, sweat and tears of the scientists hired by the visionary Cave Johnson, whose ghost still lingers in the recorded admonishments and encouragements deep in the oldest testing spheres of AS.
Cave may not have understood all the mumbo-jumbo, technie-moral-whosits of scientific testing, but he knew that if you threw enough Olympic medalists, astronauts, hobos, and employees at a problem eventually you'd get something the government would give you a big, fat contract for. And that's what counts in science.
Unfortunately, Mr. Johnson died from kidney failure before the dawdling, good-for-nothing eggheads he hired could figure out a way to get his consciousness onto a computer so he could live forever. But his decisions helped seal Aperture's fate, a fate any employee with a good head on their shoulders (and firm grasp of the futility of wrongful-termination lawsuits against corporate giants) would be proud to experience.
You gotta love a fight with an ending so over-the-top, the achievement description is simply: "THAT. JUST. HAPPENED."
(For those of you watching the video without playing the game, white portal goo is made from lunar rocks and when painted onto a surface makes it much easier to stick a portal to. That reaction you just had is called a science-gasm. Scigasm. #patented)
While this fight was as enjoyable and satisfying as beating GLaDOS in the first Portal, it was also significantly easier to figure out. The reason for that is an overall design decision for Portal 2 that some players believe dumbed down the puzzles: in Portal the first, you could throw a portal almost anywhere you wanted, which created a ton of possible solutions and combinations players had to think through. In Portal 2, there are far fewer options because the majority of wall space will not accept portals. That leads to a feeling similar to hand-holding, where you see one patch of white space by itself and think "Okay, I'm going to need to put a portal there at some point" instead of trying to pick the perfect spot yourself.
Still, the last fight and subsequent denoument bring closure, but not as many questions as the last Portal. How long was Chel really out for? Is she now out in the world of Half-Life 2? Is this the end of the franchise? Maybe: Chel's situation means there would have to be a damn good reason for her to seek out GLaDOS and Aperture again. And GLaDOS now has a lot of testing to do with her new subjects...
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