by Orion_NGC1976, HSM team writer

One day this past week, I decided before work to see what new games there were in the PlayStation Store.

Selecting the store required me to download the new version of it. I must say, kudos to Sony for doing a fantastic job on the new store; the new look is slick and modern. Navigation is very intuitive. Best of all, it now groups relevant information together. While viewing the details of a game you have selected, there are now trailers, videos and add-ons to go along with the usual preview, all in one convenient place. With this addition, consumers have all they need at their disposal to make purchasing choices.

(Anyway, this isn’t an article about the Store redesign, but I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to congratulate Sony on a job well done.)

While I was in the store, browsing the featured and discounted games, I noticed that Portal 2 was now in my price range of $20. I’d heard people say that they liked the game, but I hadn’t played the first installment and knew very little of its game mechanics. Perhaps, based on the cover, I figured that it was an adventure game with the added twist of being able to create portals. I decided to purchase it, and I set my PS3 to turn off after downloading.

Late that evening, I started it up. During the opening sequences, there was a robot on a monorail, sporting a British accent. As a frequent watcher of British television, I immediately recognized the voice of Stephen Merchant. He and Ricky Gervais were the creative forces behind the British television show The Office, which was also ported to American television. Merchant also played Gervais’ talent agent in the show Extras, and they both host a very funny travel program, An Idiot Abroad, which is currently on the Science Channel.

The robot leads the player to a room with buttons, pressure pads and cubes. It is obvious now that this game is different than what I was expecting. It was much more — it was a puzzle game. I am a big fan of the Myst series, and I was hoping that it would be of the same caliber of game.

The buttons opened portals that allowed the player access to the cubes to be placed on the pressure pads. Soon, I was off to the next area, where the player gains a portal gun; this allows the player to create a portal on the flat surfaces of the room. Above me, I could see my destination exit portal, so all that was needed was for me to create an entry portal on the wall. That was easy enough. After going through some corridors, I was in another area.

Redirected Lasers: Lasers redirected with a cube and portals.

I have to admit that I am a bit embarrassed at how long I wandered around in circles in that room. I kept creating a portal and stepping through it, only to be brought back to where I had started. I was limiting my thinking of a portal as a static doorway and I was trying to create a doorway through a wall into another hidden area. So, I thought if I stepped back through the portal I would only go back to the place from where I had come, even if I created a different doorway.

After a bit of time I realized that the portals were like wormholes, and I was changing the location of the other end of the wormhole with the portal gun. A light bulb went off in my head: so if I create a portal on the ledge that I needed to get to and stepped back through the portal, I would end up on the ledge? Of course, this was a very basic concept to the game, but the game stretches your mind to think in new ways.

As the player progresses through each chapter, new obstacles and elements are introduced that require one to think differently and stretch the limits of the imagination. There are catapult pads, lasers, laser reflecting cubes, hard-light bridges and gels (repulsion, propulsion and conversion) at your disposal to use. Each of these items can be used in several ways. A player can redirect a bridge to be used to cross over an area, or it could also be used to create a shield to block the bullets from turrets. Redirected lasers, by the reflecting cubes or by portals, can be used to destroy turrets.

Repulsive Gel: Repulsive gel is like Flubber, which makes all surfaces bouncy.

Portal 2 uses physics with gravity and momentum. So, the momentum generated by jumping off a ledge into a portal that exits on a wall could project a player across a chasm or onto an otherwise unreachable ledge.

Portals can only be created on certain surfaces, so this adds to the challenge of the puzzle. In one room, I needed a cube that was high up on a small ledge that had no surface that would accept a portal. There was wall at a right angle to it that could accept a portal. I used momentum to come out of that wall and knock the cube off the small ledge.

Portal 2 is much more than just deciding where to place portals and stepping through them. As the game progresses, the player must decide which of the elements at their disposal to use, in conjunction with each other, to achieve the goal.

As with the first Portal game, there is a storyline, with the same dark humor, that surrounds the player’s participation in the test puzzles. GLaDOS, an artificial intelligence, is also a main character in the story of Portal 2. Although it is interesting to listen to the dark humor of GLaDOS, the story is really secondary to solving the puzzles. They do however use the story quite well, as a vehicle to move the player to different testing areas within the game.

Portal 2 has two playing modes: single player and co-op. The second player in co-op play can also be an online player. With many games, co-op is just a second player with which to play or to compete against, but Portal 2 truly exemplifies what cooperative play means. The puzzles in co-op mode must be solved together as a team. One player can’t run ahead and complete the level without the other player. Which is one reason I stay away from playing with all the kiddies playing Little Big Planet online.

Co-op Playable Characters: P-Body and Atlas

The co-op puzzles require that you do them together. As with the single player puzzles, the co-op puzzles are challenging as well. Communicating with each other and coordinating what each player will do is vitally important. If the players are playing online without voice communication, there is a cue system that allows a player to indicate their wishes to the other player.

Whereas some games become uninteresting by reusing the same elements over the course of the game, Portal 2 stays fresh and challenging throughout the entire game by introducing new test elements as the player moves to a new area. Whether it takes a few minutes or half an hour to solve a puzzle, there is a real satisfaction in discovering the key to solving the puzzle. The game is highly addicting. The first night, I played Portal 2 for four hours, stopping at three in the morning, only because if I played much longer, I would have had to have gone straight to work without any sleep.

So, if you want a game that will get the gears in your mind spinning to test your spatial skills, instead of how fast you can mash the X button, then Portal 2 is definitely the right game for you.

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One Response to “Portal 2: A Doorway to Puzzle Solving”

1. riff says:

   November 16, 2012 at 8:52 pm

   very nice article Orion. It sound like an interesting game… not big on shooting games myself so this looks right up my alley.
   

   Reply