Cake! Cake!!

Um… well, actually, no. No more memes here. (As Gabe N. put it, “if you were sick of memes, I was sick of them way before you”.) So what can we say about this new game? Well, I think Zero Punctuation put it quite aptly: “Is it good? Yes. Is it as good as Portal 1? No.”

It’s still surprisingly short. The graphics are much more complex than before, but still not especially pretty to actually look at. (Although I did like the retro section quite a bit.) The single player campaign (the main bit that I care about) has quite a bit of story and not much puzzle to it. Which is a pity, because the story didn’t really do much for me.

In Portal 1, you’re being ordered around by an evil genius supercomputer who eventually drops all pretence of subtlety and tries to murder you. You manage to escape, and continue your way through the backstage areas of the facility. There are some great moments in there, where you think to yourself “how the hell am I going to get over there?” And then you realise you’ve got a portal gun, so it’s actually kinda trivial.

For example, you come up to some machinery, and it looks like a standard timing puzzle where you have to run past the lethal killing blades at just the right moment… except, wait. You can just teleport straight past the whole lot! Ha, that was easy! There’s even a room where you’re surrounded by deadly sentry guns, you have no weapons at all, there’s nowhere to hide… and yet, it is possible to defeat them all, just using portals. (Not easy, mind you!)

At the end of the game, you confront the evil genius, and kill her. Except… she’s somehow not dead. That part never made any sense to me, but whatever. And then the rather fantastic and unexpected musical ending.

In Portal 2, you wake up and meet a new character. I’ve played the entire game through twice, and I can only find one reference to his actual name. If I hadn’t read so much background material, I could well still be wondering what the heck is name is — which would make the change to the Aperture Science logo rather baffling. But whatever.

His name is Wheatly. And Jesus Christ is he annoying! Anyway, with his help, you escape into the derelict test facility. The graphical quality is rather lower than I had expected. Certainly there’s no sense of exploration to it. They might as well have not bothered and kept the original game’s sterile look; you’ll spend so little time actually looking at it, it doesn’t really matter.

Inevitably, you end up waking GLaDOS. Now, given that she was just in the middle of trying to murder you, right before you killed her instead, you’d think she’d be pretty mad. Actually, she doesn’t seem all that bothered. Which is weird. Instead of immediately killing you, which she surely could, she just starts testing you again. OK, well I guess that’s fitting revenge…? Wait, WTF?

After a while, Wheatly manages to break you out, and you go set about sabotaging the weaponry of the main control center, and then go back there and replace GLaDOS with Wheatly. Which you might think would be the end of it, except that then Wheatly starts turning into a megalomaniac too. So then you end up in the ruins of the old Aperture Science facility underground. And you find GLaDOS, and now she’s supposed to be your unwilling ally. Which doesn’t work especially well…

Basically the whole story is just a little bit weak. GLaDOS is such a compulsive liar that you can’t take a single word she says seriously, so she might as well not talk at all. Between the big story arcs and epic vistas, there’s not much actual puzzle left. (Then again, Portal 1 had far too many jumping and climbing puzzles.)

Oh well. The gel is quite pretty to look at, at least. And I quite liked the antique look of the old facility. And the final ending was at least good: fire a portal at the moon, and all the air in the room is sucked out into space. Heh.

Zero Punctuation also claimed that all the real fun is in the co-op mode. Of course, for that you need a partner. I have to say, I’ve really enjoyed playing with FlipC. Especially since I found out that my microphone does work after all. Certainly a lot easier than waving and pointing. I wonder how many puzzles there are?

Zero Punctuation also predicted that the co-op mode as “no reply value”. I fear they may be right…