The Potato is a Lie: Thoughts on Portal 2

WARNING: This posting contains SPOILERS for both the gameplay and story of the single-player campaign for the recently-released Portal 2. I have tried to put this on my blog as a separate page only accessible by clicking a link in a normal post, but if you still stumbled upon this page by accident and don't want anything ruined for you, please leave now. Also, please pay no attention to how terrible I am at writing spoiler disclaimers.

Right off the bat, let me say this: Portal 2 is a good game. My year of anticipation with forty dollars hanging on my bedroom wall was thoroughly worth it. I will add on this extra point: I wish there was more in this game. More on that later. (I'll repeat once again for the record, I haven't started the multiplayer campaign yet.)

I'm happy that the plotline picked up right where the original Portal left off (if being carried away in the "Party Escort Position" is really a logical connection... Oh, you don't remember that? Play it again, they added that update to the ending like a year ago). I thought the addition of characters like Wheatley and Cave Johnson were good fun, even if certain bits (such as Wheatley turning evil) were a bit predictable after you started playing. The plot was still 94% well-written and had that classic dark humor in all the right places. (For those curious, I say it was only 94% well-written because I had to deduct 5% for the set of levels GLaDOS built but couldn't help you on. Even after listening to the developer commentary for that scene, it still didn't make sense to me. The other 1% comes from the moon bit in the finale... A hilarious way to go out, but crossing a bit too far into the realm of absurdity.)

One more note I'm going to shoehorn in here with an edit: "Want You Gone" certainly isn't the next "Still Alive," but it's still quite good. It's catchy, but somehow not as memorable. Did "Still Alive" just have easier lyrics or something? The format for both songs was about the same (verse, chorus, verse, slightly different chorus, verse, another different chorus, repetition of last line until end), so it's either something in the basic melody or lyrics that sets those two songs apart.

But if you strip away the story and the humor, what's left? A game. I'm again happy to say that for the most part, the gameplay was just as awesome as the original. However, I do have to file two somewhat broad complaints about the gameplay, which I will spend most of the rest of this post discussing. The addition of such elements as multiple gels to paint surfaces for various effects was quite fun, as well as the Hard Light Bridges and Excursion Beams (which, let's face it, are pretty much the same thing, except one forces movement). My first major complaint is that even though we got a longer game in the single-player campaign (most reports are 8-10 hours, I clocked in at 9), I still think we really could have gotten more for our money.

Let me put it this way: In Portal Original Recipe, we were introduced to the "concepts" of portals, turrets, buttons, and those energy ball thingies whose name escapes me. So, four new concepts, introduced and employed in a game that lasted, I dunno, 2-4 hours? Sounds about right. In Portal Extra Crispy, we added three gels, two (sketchily similar) beams, Aerial Faith Plates, and the Thermal Discouragement Beam/Redirection Cube combo. That's seven new concepts, plus three carried over from the original game (the energy ball is essentially replaced by the TDB/RC combo), and you're looking at ten concepts across 8-10 hours. You could say that the two games have roughly the same rate of gameplay "concepts" per hour of play, but there's something that still bothers me about this. There's only so many ways you can mix and match the four basic concepts in Original Recipe; there really should have been more if we had ten concepts in Extra Crispy (and as a result, more gameplay time), but we didn't get that. After coming away from eventual catastrophes like Assassin's Creed that got me 25 hours of gameplay on the repetition of very few concepts, I'd have expected a lot more from Portal 2.

But perhaps this is incredibly unfair to the developers. One definite link between both Portal games was that I walked away from both wanting so much more. On the flipside, maybe if I had gotten more as I so lustfully desired, I might get bored of the ten concepts, no matter how they were mixed and matched. I know Valve puts a ton of time into playtesting their games and getting feedback on these sorts of things. I'm willing to trust them if they told me they weighed the possibility of adding more content into the game, but scrapped it due to player fatigue. (No such statement exists as far as I know, but I'd imagine that would be their reasoning. I'd hope it, anyway.)

The second major gripe is somewhat hard to describe, so I direct you to this Nerf Now! comic which sums up my thoughts pretty well. In Portal 1, part of the puzzle is figuring out where to shoot portals to get the exact result you want. In Portal 2, that's stripped down so that there are so few places to shoot portals that all you need to do is find them and you can already piece together the full solution in your mind. Granted, that's not necessarily easy, considering some portal-able panels are hidden around tricky corners or long distances away (a trick milked a bit too often in the spaces between some test chambers). Still, I'm not comfortable with how the focus shifted from careful planning to hidden-object game. Again, this is probably another deliberate decision by Valve, especially considering the gigantic nature of some areas, but you can't help but wonder if even a few red herring walls might have changed things a bit.

That all said and done, I still believe Portal 2 is a great game and worth playing. Is it worth $50? That I might argue against. But undoubtedly what the game slightly (and only slightly) lacks in terms of gameplay is more than made up for in storyline, humor, and the sheer enjoyment one gets from the game. (And also keep in mind, I've yet to touch the co-op mode!) I look quite fondly back on that day over a year ago when I heard about plans for Portal 2, when I pulled that infamous $40 out of my wallet and put it in that dedicated envelope which I've flaunted a little too often on this blog.

As the bizarre ARG-influenced countdown clock for Portal 2 ticked down to about 12:30am on Tuesday night, I imagined Gabe Newell and his Valve staff standing around sipping champagne as the game officially unlocked for players around the world. (Apparently, I wasn't far off in my speculation.) It's a well-deserved glass of pat-on-the-back goodness, because the game and the build-up to it were brilliant and continued the incredibly high standards we've all come to expect from Valve. Cheers to you guys, and... well, someone's gotta ask it... any plans for Portal 3?