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Portal 2: Sequel Failed Successfully

Epsilon-1 Gamma on 25/01/09

PREFACE

So, I absolutely adore the Portal franchise of games. Most notably, the second one is certainly up there among my favourite games of all time. However, with time I have also developed certain criticism, and noticed quite a bit of missed potential with Portal 2, which I wish to discuss here.

IDENTITY CRISIS

Portal 2, as many of you reading this likely know, a puzzle game with story. Or is it? Because what I feel is that Portal 2, unlike the first Portal, is a story game with puzzles, and that I feel is one of its most notable failures.

To understand the failures of Portal 2 in this regard we must first examine its predecessor, which practically perfected the concept of a puzzle game with story.

Portal 1’s story is and never was the main focus, it instead exists to provide context for the puzzles you are solving, and acts as a reward to push the player to challenge themselves through the puzzles. Due to this the storytelling methods employed are more so implicit than explicit, even going as far as the colour scheme and art direction of the game.

The atmosphere of Portal 1 from the very start drives home the overarching concepts of the story: you are a lab rat in a research facility for a weird AI, and things aren’t as they seem. All this with only a few words, and without taking the player’s attention away from the puzzles.

Not only this, but explicit story content is also implemented more so implicitly. Hidden areas outside the AI’s control are cast in warm brownish tones, while the controlled environments of the test chambers feature a bluish and cold scheme. Subtle hints such as this alongside environmental storytelling serve to provide the seeds for the player to draw their own conclusions and theories regarding the story, while the focus of the game remains on the puzzles.

And then there is Portal 2, which throws a waterfowl with all that. Portal 2 leans very heavily into being a story-based game, essentially becoming a story game with puzzles, flipping the formula on its head. And story games with puzzles usually do not work.

First off lets approach this from the perspective of someone interested in puzzle games, such as Portal 1, and not opposed to a bit of storytelling either. For such a player, Portal 2 caters much too hard to those looking for a story game: the puzzles aren’t particularly challenging and keep introducing new mechanics as gimmicks, and story is very explicit and in your face throughout the experience. Even environments are designed more towards story than puzzles, often featuring much more visual noise than Portal 1’s, distracting from the solution.

And now lets look at it from the other side of the coin, a fan of story games such as myself. For those players, Portal 2 retains too many of its puzzle elements, and the puzzles feel like a slog that gets in the way of the story, which I am far more interested in than the puzzles. Ironically this effect is further emphasised by the puzzles not being too challenging in order to cater to story players too, as they aren’t even that rewarding to solve like in Portal 1.

NOT-SO-SUBTLE LOSS OF SUBTLETY

With the gameplay identity issue covered, it is time to move to what I feel is a much bigger failing of Portal 2 over its predecessor: The story. While iconic, it also just doesn’t quite hit me the same way as Portal 1, especially after retrospective examination like this.

The most blatant issue with the story is the loss of all subtlety, especially in the humour. Portal 1, for context, had very subtle dark humour which like the rest of the story was largely in the details. Things such as slides left visible of Aperture trying to contend with Black Mesa, GLaDOS being offered as a de-icing system, the voice lines of the sentry turrets, companion cube stickers over human women’s faces in the Rattman Dens, etc.

This cynical flat humour is largely gone in Portal 2, instead being replaced by much more blatant and childish jokes, often shoved directly in the player’s face. Wheatley’s entire character being the most obvious one, being that he was quite literally designed to be a moron, as stated out loud by GLaDOS. And even when there are points of environmental storytelling or similar, Portal 2 doesn’t leave space for player discovery and interpretation, as characters tend to point everything out as if the player was incapable of figuring things out on their own.

On the note of GLaDOS, even she feels like a completely different character in Portal 2. Portal 1’s depiction of her is cold and calculative with a side of sarcasm, only resorting to directly insulting Chell when getting desperate in the final boss fight. Meanwhile, in Portal 2, she often feels like a middle schooler; constantly calling Chell stupid, human garbage, fat, etc. with a “healthy” side of fatphobia and what to me feels like slight ableism that was missing from Portal 1. While I like her depictions in both games, and do appreciate the toxic lesbian tension between her and Chell in many parts of Portal 2, I do feel she lost quite a bit of depth between the games in this regard.

Hell, the same theme continues even to Aperture itself, and the puzzle elements. Portal 1’s depiction was surprisingly grounded by Half-Life universe standards: There were weird sci-fi elements such as the high energy pellets and floating platforms, but it all felt very concrete and grounded. Portal 2 meanwhile ditches that, painting Aperture as essentially this untapped god-facility of arbitrary “science”, filling it to the brim with weird sci-fi gadgets and shenanigans from tractor beams to holographic bridges to magic gels that make you run faster.

This not only makes the puzzles less interesting as they focus more on just introducing a new gimmick rather than getting more challenging, but also dilutes the feel of Aperture as a setting to what is essentially the Mary Sue of environments. Nothing matters anymore, because everything is possible, and that is simply boring

LESSONS LEARNED

I do feel these are things one might learn from for example for fangames or fanfiction or whatever one might be working on, and so I would like to detail what I would do differently with Portal 2.

First off, focusing on the gameplay. My main issue, as mentioned, is the bad balance between puzzles and story. The obvious solution one might think of is to either shift entirely away from story to a more Portal 1 style puzzle game, as puzzles are inherently tied to Portal as a franchise. However, I think there is a better solution that allows maintaining the stronger story focus. That is, taking a page out of INFRA’s book, and putting more emphasis on environmental puzzles.

There are a few of these especially in the Old Aperture segments, and in my experience those felt like they got in the way of the story the least, as they felt like solving a puzzle that is part of the story, rather than in its way. For example, solving a puzzle to enable power to an elevator or to navigate a collapsed tunnel or similar feels much less tacked on and artificial than a puzzle for a puzzle’s sake like Portal 2’s test chambers tend to feel. Aperture with its weird architecture and environments would also cater well to this kind of design, and certain community maps indeed play into this very well.

Secondly, the storytelling. This is the more glaring issue to me, as I mentioned, but also the one without as obvious of a remedy. The most obvious change I would make is changing how characters are written; for example, change GLaDOS’ insults to more indirect jabs, and her personality to a colder and more indifferent direction as in Portal 1. This would also play well into a more complex character growth arc during the old Aperture sections, where it would emphasise her coming out of her shell and the implied feelings she has towards Chell.

Wheatley meanwhile could be written as less directly a bumbling idiot, and rather as his flaws being conveyed through poorly thought out choices or similar, allowing the player to deduce on their own that he’s not the smartest tool in the shed.

For other aspects of this, what I think would be in order would also be shifting more exposition to environmental storytelling. As an example, rather than having Cave Johnson in old Aperture explain everything out loud, leave slide projectors or documents or whiteboards littered around for the player to discover and interpret.

CONCLUSION

Overall, Portal 2 is still a great game and has its revered status for a reason. However, while a technical improvement over its predecessor, as outlined in this article it does suffer from certain issues that don’t quite make it as interesting to me as Portal 1, and I do not feel those issues are talked about enough, instead often even being taken as strengths. That’s about all I have to say on this matter, thank you for reading, reader.