BREAKING NEWS: I’m back

That’s right, after a very long (even for me!) absence, I have crawled out of my hole in the wall to write about something rather important to me. This is part I, where I will be broadly going over the game before I go into specific parts.

BACKGROUND

I have been a libre software advocate for many years now, but there has always been one big exception for me, and it’s the same one as most almost-libre users: gaming. I have a Steam account, and a GOG account, and I purchase and run proprietary games, even if they have DRM.

collective gasp

Now that I have that off my chest, I’m going to talk about my gaming history.

For as long as I can remember my ADHD and OCD have forged quirks in my personality, and I’m not sure how much interplay those two have on the specific one I’m about to mention, but ever since I was a kid I would have a small group of things at a time, and absolutely obsess over them. When I learned to play the guitar, I was exclusively a guitar player for months. When I got into Star Wars (back when it was mostly good), I was a Star Wars fan first and foremost. My mom could tell you how when we got a VHS from Blockbuster, that if I liked it I would watch it OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. And after some period of total fixation, I would suddenly switch to a new thing and repeat the process.

I have potentially the smallest Steam library of anyone I know who is around my age, but I still have the same condition most gamers do; 70% of my games I either haven’t played, or haven’t played to completion, and I only consistently play 10% (which is 7 games).

Perhaps even more interestingly, all 7 of those games are either single-player exclusive, or I exclusively play the single-player mode. I’ve found that when I play solo, I have more time to explore the world, to learn speed-running strats (although I’m definitely not a speed-runner), and I will inevitably enable dev mode or mod the game so I can explore it even further. There’s always been something really fascinating to me about other worlds, that are atmospheric and have a lot of detail and thought put into them.

All of this is building up to the main point I want to make:

When I played Portal 2 all the way through for the first time, I was absolutely blown away. The characters felt real, the world felt immersive (mostly), and the story had me going the whole time. Now, as an adult who has played through it many times (I currently have almost 100 hours on Steam, I couldn’t begin to count the time I’ve spent playing it on other people’s computers), I want to write down my thoughts about what is potentially one of (if not the) most important games of my youth.

UP FRONT

It’s a great game, simple as.

THE BREAKDOWN (PART I - SYNOPSIS)

I included a spoiler warning, because I will spoil the stories of both Portal and Portal 2, but honestly if you haven’t played them yet and care about spoilers, why? Portal 2 has been out for over a decade at the time of writing this. If you just need a quick answer, yes, it is absolutely worth every penny of the $9.99 the game costs on Steam.

In the original Portal, you solve puzzles using the Aperture Science Portal Gun while being “guided” (I use that term loosely) by the AI GLaDOS through an Enrichment Center testing track, but then she tries to have you baked to conclude the testing. You escape by using your Portal Gun, find your way to her, and then use her own rocket turrets to destroy her, freeing you from the facility until you get dragged back in by a Party Escort bot.

Valve released a comic in the lead-up to Portal 2 that depicts what happens between these games: a character named Doug Rattmann, who survived GLaDOS' initial attempt to kill everyone at Aperture because of his paranoid schizophrenia, and who was responsible for covertly moving you up in the testing queue so that you could defeat GLaDOS so that you and he could escape, but who also remains entirely unseen in the game (although you see his messages in hidden locations throughout the game), leaves with you, but sees you get dragged back into Aperture by the Party Escort bot, and he decides to follow you to save you. While attempting to do so, he gets injured by a turret, and has to divert power to your stasis chambers so you can survive, although there will not be a set date for you to wake up (as he puts it, “the long sleep, or the long sleep”). He then climbs into a stasis pod and presumably dies.

• Chapter 1: The Courtesy Call

All of this is the context for the beginning of Portal 2, where you wake up in the stasis chamber, and are given a wellness exam that consists of looking up, looking down, looking at a painting and listening to brief classical music, before returning to sleep. The next time you wake up, it has been a very long time (the bot that wakes you keeps repeating the number “9” until it gets cut off), before you meet Wheatley, who is trying to recruit a human to help him escape Aperture. He leads you through the facility until you make it to GLaDOS' chambers (where you see that she has a new design), and then accidentally re-activates GLaDOS, who is only extremely bitter at you for killing her, and restarts you testing again, this time forever.

• Chapter 2: The Cold Boot

GLaDOS’ new testing track for you introduces new mechanics, and has you traveling through very weathered test chambers, all the while she threatens and insults you for killing her. (This chapter is mostly to teach the new mechanics).

• Chapter 3: The Return

You continue through GLaDOS’ testing track, but now Wheatley encourages you that he is working on a way to help you escape, so the two of you can take her down again. As you progress, the chambers are getting less and less weathered, as GLaDOS is repairing them as Aperture becomes fully operational again.

• Chapter 4: The Surprise

The “surprise” in question is GLaDOS’ promise to let you meet your parents, which is a lie she uses to beat you down over being an orphan as well. This chapter ends when you escape the testing track with Wheatley’s help in test chamber 21.

• Chapter 5: The Escape

As you escape the testing track, you are led by Wheatley to sabotage GLaDOS' turret production and destroy her neurotoxin storage. When you finally confront her, she tries to attack you with both before seeing that you have removed them as an option. An announcer reports that GLaDOS’ core is 80% corrupt, and that Wheatley, as an uncorrupted core, can be transferred into her body (which he immediately agrees to, and she immediately disagrees). You are given the option to break the stalemate by pressing the button in the Stalemate Resolution Annex, which initiates machinery pulling GLaDOS off of her body and putting Wheatley on. Wheatley then remarks about how small you are, and very quickly becomes corrupt, recalling the elevator he was sending you to the surface with before you reach the ceiling. GLaDOS then remembers that she knows him: he was “the moron [the scientists] built to make [her] and idiot.” Angered, he has her removed from her core and installed into a potato battery, before punching the elevator you and GLaDOS are now in into a pit.

• Chapter 6: The Fall

While you and GLaDOS fall the (multiple kilometers!) down the elevator shaft, GLaDOS fills you in some more about Wheatley (specifically punctuating that he was “the product of the greatest minds of a generation working with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived. And you just put him in charge of the facility.” After you hit the ground (which you survive because of your Long Fall Boots, as mentioned by GLaDOS, who gets carried off by a bird). At this point, you navigate (alone) to find the old Aperture Science Innovators testing spheres, which were built in the 1950’s to test various products (which become the new mechanics), and condemned in the 1960’s, then revisited in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

• Chapter 7: The Reunion

This chapter starts when you meet GLaDOS before starting the 1970’s Beta tracks, a control room to which she has been dropped off into and is being eaten by a bird. She tries to figure out a plan for the two of you to pull Wheatley out of her body while you solve puzzles, while also trying to figure out how she knows Cave Johnson and Caroline. This chapter gives you most of the lore about old Aperture, for the conclusion of which a sick and dying Cave orders his scientists to create a computer to put his intelligence in, and if he were to die before it’s ready to then put Caroline into it. Finally, you activate the pumps for all three gels to go up to the new Aperture, and use the shaft to ride up as well.

• Chapter 8: The Itch

In this chapter, you discover that Wheatley has created a cube-turret hybrid in order to solve test chambers in your stead, but he is relieved to see you have survived because it means you can go through testing. GLaDOS’ plan to beat him was to fry his brain with a logical paradox, because “no AI can resist thinking about them”, but the plan doesn’t work because he doesn’t understand that “this sentence is false” is a logical contradiction. As you go through, GLaDOS taunts Wheatley by constantly calling him a moron, which increasingly enrages him. Finally, he lays a trap in a test chamber to shoot you out of the chamber and take you to a screen, where he will kill you.

• Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You

In this chapter, Wheatley taunts you with several traps he has to kill you, all of which have a pretty easy solution mostly revolving around Aperture falling apart again (now that he has neglected to maintain it). Of increasing concern is the imminent threat of reactor meltdown, which is the source of the timer in the final boss fight. In the boss fight, Wheatley tries to make sure there are no places for you to portal, but fails to account for the large tube of Conversion gel that, when destroyed, creates portable surfaces all over his lair. After attaching corrupted cores on him, you get him corrupt enough to initiate a second core transfer (which GLaDOS agrees to and he refuses), leading you to portal into the Stalemate Resolution Annex again, but he has booby trapped it with bombs. You survive, but are too hurt to stand up, and right then a part of the ceiling collapses, giving you a view of the Moon. You then create a portal under him and on the Moon, which sucks everything in the room (including you and him) into space, where you hold on to him, until GLaDOS intervenes and pulls you in while knocking him aside. When you wake up, GLaDOS is relieved that you are OK, but immediately deletes Caroline (who was in her brain) and then decides that “the best solution to a problem is usually the easiest. And I’ll be honest. Killing you? Is hard. So you know what? You win. Just go.” At which point she lets you ride the elevator up, through a turret opera, and to the surface, after which she sends you faithful companion cube.

CHARACTERS

I love the characters in Portal 2. All of them have a special place in my heart. So let’s go through them in order.

• Wheatley

Wheatley is a lovable idiot, who is given way more power than he is prepared to deal with. During the first half of the game, he is like a puppy: faithful and always does his best, but his best isn’t always helpful. The transition at the end of Chapter 5 is very well done, and very saddening to see Wheatley suddenly go full maniac. In the last half he absolutely portrays the character of trying to kill you so he can fix everything (because that’s how he thinks it’s going to happen), and blaming you for everything failing, very well. I think the voice actor did an absolutely superb job, and I would be disappointed if anyone else was to play the character in the future.

• GLaDOS

GLaDOS has a large arc between Chapter 5 to 7, going from the all-but omnipotent AI controlling everything, who has a special hatred specifically to you for killing her, to allying herself with you for the greater good. It’s remarkable to see how different her personality is when she is detached from her body, and it goes to show the corrupting power of that massive amount of power. I think the ending is the best outcome one could hope for, that GLaDOS just lets you go because she realizes it’s going to be way too hard to kill you.

• Cave Johnson

Cave Johnson is an extremely charismatic businessman with a passion for science. He turned his shower curtain salesman position in the 1940s into a massive science foundation in the 1950s, although the company eventually suffered as Black Mesa began taking all of the government contracts and his products and testing methodologies destroyed the public image of Aperture. His cavalier and do-it-yourself approach is largely responsible for both the successes and failures of Aperture, especially as he rejects budget oversight (he routinely talks about overriding the “bean-counters”) and safety concerns. During Chapter 7 there are signs everywhere warning to alert your supervisor if you see any government officials or journalists. That said, he is still a likable character because of his charisma, and again I think there could not be a better voice actor for this role. He will always be Cave Johnson for me.

• Caroline

Caroline has very little dialog in the game. More is said about her than by her (mostly by Cave). If I recall correctly, she appears in two quotes: when Cave tells her “Say goodbye, Caroline!” she replies, “Goodbye, Caroline”; and when Cave starts to rant about Black Mesa, she tells him, “Sir, the testing?” to get him back on track. That said, the first line (“Goodbye, Caroline!”) immediately endeared me to her, although I have the least to say in regards to who she is.

ENVIRONMENT

Portal 2 is beautiful. Especially for the time, but even now most of it is absolutely gorgeous to look at. I absolutely love how worn and ancient everything looks. Maybe that’s just me, I love looking at ruins and the remains of massive structures and imagining what they looked like in their heyday (if you’ve read most anything on my blog, you know I almost always have a fondness for the older things).

There is, however, one main instance where I feel the game doesn’t look great; incidentally, it’s the first area of the game you load into: when the stasis chamber is being destroyed by Wheatley’s terrible driving, it feels like you can see too much of the limitations of the time, and the distance fog is doing too much of the heavy lifting of trying to make Aperture look massive, whereas other parts of the level do a better job (in my opinion).

CONTINUED IN PART II