"Portal 2" Review: Diving into Aperture Science


Portal 2, released by Valve in 2011, is a complex puzzle game built around a simple concept. This game sees players navigating through the abandoned halls of Aperture Laboratories using the portal gun, a tool that allows the player to create portals to teleport from one point to another. Throughout the game, a variety of disembodied voices encourage the player to continue, whether those voices belong to the crazed AI GLaDOS, the idiotic AI Wheatley, or the prerecorded messages left behind by the late CEO of Aperture Science, Cave Johnson. These characters are the key motivating factors behind the game’s story progression and, at times, teach the player more about the history of the mysterious facility. Portal 2 combines eerie yet fun music, thoughtful and varied level design, and an expansive backstory involving interesting characters to create a unique atmosphere that has become characteristic of the series.
Portal and Narbacular Drop
The original Portal, released in 2007 as part of The Orange Box bundle, was a small test that received good reviews across the board. Chris Watters of Gamespot, for example, states in his review of the game “Portal is a fantastic game that should be played by anyone interested in unique, well-crafted gameplay and a witty, whip-smart script…Portal may not last much longer than some feature films, but pound for pound it remains one of the best games on store shelves.” Few people, then, would expect this critically acclaimed game to come from the minds of a group of college students in their senior year. In 2005, seven students from the Digipen Institute of Technology created a demo they dubbed Narbacular Drop. This senior-year project showed off the now-famous portal mechanic and was presented during the Digipen career fair. Robin Walker, a developer at Valve that happened to be at the event, showed interest in the project and offered the students a chance to show it off to the CEO of his company. They obliged and the impressed Gabe Newell hired them on the spot to work on Portal (Dudley).
Narbacular Drop was a primitive-looking game due to what the students at the time had at their disposal. Valve’s Source engine, by contrast, allowed the team to create pretty portal effects and improve the graphics as a whole. The act of shooting portals in Portal is very satisfying due to the sounds and effects that come with it, but the same action in Narbacular Drop has no such effect. Portal also does a better job of presenting its puzzles. Portal makes it so that players can only shoot portals on white surfaces; because of their color, these surfaces contrast well with the environment and stand out. Narbacular Drop, however, makes any earthy material capable of accepting a portal; this can be overwhelming due to the amount of earthy material surrounding the player at all times (CoffeeCube).
Looking at these games side-by-side really illustrates the influence large game companies had at the time. Indie games and student projects nowadays, because of the availability of powerful engines such as Unity, are much more capable of achieving solid graphical performance and becoming successful in the game market on their own. Narbacular Drop, meanwhile, doesn’t come close to Portal and wouldn’t have been able to succeed in its original state. More and more people are making games by themselves, yet this simply wasn’t feasible back in 2005. Valve thus allowed for this small team of students to bring their unique idea to the market and eventually create Portal 2.
Portal 2 and Improving a Sequel
Portal 2 thus had the difficult task of living up to the hype generated by Portal. How would they innovate the already-established puzzle mechanics? How would they expand on the lore of Aperture Science? How would they keep the charm of the original game? The team found the answers to all of these questions and managed to make an even better sequel. Increasing the team of eight people to 30, there was a lot more leeway in terms of the game’s scale (Wolpaw). The developers placed a lot of importance on continuing the protagonist’s rocky relationship with GLaDOS and showing players the destruction they caused at the end of the first game. Portal 2 begins with rubble everywhere that GLaDOS cleans up overtime, giving players a good picture of the damage they dealt to the facility at the end of Portal. To further convey this, GLaDOS, who was deceptively kind and encouraging in the first game, is now rude and bitter because the player “murdered” her. Throughout Portal 2, her tone is sarcastic and aggressive, which establishes an interesting shift in tone from the first game.
Characters and Narrative
Portal 2’s characters are constantly rude and disrespectful. GLaDOS calls you fat, makes fun of you for being adopted, and reminds you that you’ll never be able to see the light of day. Wheatley talks to you as if you were mentally challenged and eventually betrays you after taking control of the facility. Cave Johnson doesn’t care about the well-being of his test subjects and doesn’t even seem to care about the advancement of science at all. Because of all this, I see these characters as some of the most memorable and lovable characters in video game history; I find that GLaDOS, in particular, develops into a very interesting character once more is revealed about her past. Portal 2 makes the interesting narrative choice of teaming the player up with the main antagonist. Stripped of her power, GLaDOS has no choice but to join the player in stopping Wheatley from destroying the facility. From this point on, she becomes more “human” and develops an unlikely friendship with the protagonist. In my opinion, this simple plot point adds a lot of depth to the narrative and makes the lore of Aperture Science much more interesting.
I felt encouraged to take the extra step of searching for plot clues in the environment, which is a consistently rewarding experience in this game. Throughout the game, you can find hidden information on the facility’s past, secret dens created by Aperture’s only surviving scientist, and a variety of other easter eggs that give cryptic details on the plot. Because you start the game with no understanding of the environment you’re in or even the character you’re playing as, this type of storytelling has a really potent effect on its players. In his review of Portal 2, Chris Watters of Gamespot states “it's amazing how Portal 2 manages to tell a better story with disembodied voices and spherical robots than most games can with full-on humans.” I agree with this statement wholeheartedly; Portal 2’s characters are just voices, yet their mysterious origins and complex characters make them so much more than that.
Sound Design
            Portal 2’s soundtrack is very quirky and distinct. It blends eerie, atmospheric noises with fun techno beats to create music that works well with the game’s industrial atmosphere. The soundtrack always succeeded in making me feel whatever emotion the game developers wanted me to feel. Songs with lighter tones accompany the repaired portions of Aperture and encourage me to think more carefully about the puzzles at hand. Songs with slightly distorted and unsettling tones, meanwhile, play in destroyed areas and work well in establishing the atmosphere. Simple metal clangs echo in the older wings of the laboratory and make me feel the loneliness of those levels. The game ends with a beautiful orchestra that makes me feel triumphant in my victory yet upset the experience has to end. GLaDOS then ends it off by singing a song that makes me laugh and leave the game on a good note. Portal 2 definitely wouldn’t have the same level of charm without its soundtrack; the same goes for the sound effects the game uses.
            Shooting a portal, for example, makes a cool sound; shooting a second portal feels like a continuation of that sound and brings the sound effect to completion in a sense. Because they’re the main mechanic of the game, I imagine that the developers really wanted to perfect the sounds portals made so that players wouldn’t get tired of hearing them. The cool thing about Portal 2 is that every action makes a satisfying sound. From picking things up to riding up elevators, every action makes an appropriate noise. Music may even play alongside the events happening on-screen at times. For example, some puzzles will use a tool called a Faith Plate, which propels the player into the air. Whenever the player is launched by these Faith Plates, the music becomes more “techno” and slowly fades out as the player loses momentum. This effect really adds to the feeling of soaring through the air and makes the experience more fun and immersive. Portal 2’s sounds have a heavy impact on its mechanics, and I feel that many other games would benefit from following this same principle.
Innovating Mechanics
            Portal was built on a simple concept with few mechanics. You place portals, place cubes onto buttons, avoid turrets, and use momentum to your advantage. Bringing in new mechanics that didn’t overcomplicate the game must’ve been difficult, yet the team managed to do it. Erik Wolpaw, lead writer of Portal 2, revealed in an interview that the team’s starting point was with the co-op mode. He found that a lot of people would play the first game together, so a dedicated mode for two players seemed like a logical next step. Portal 2’s co-op mode is separate from the main story and follows two robots, Atlas and Peabody, made for testing. By introducing the new mode in this fashion, the developers could still make a dedicated single-player campaign while also creating an experience where two people could go through GLaDOS’s crazy tests together.
            Aside from co-op, new mechanics needed to be introduced to keep the game fresh. One such mechanic was actually taken from another team of Digipen students. This team created a project called Tag: the Power of Paint and was hired by Valve to work on a game. The developers of Portal 2 eventually discovered that the project’s main mechanic would work perfectly in the context of Portal, and they thus implemented the gel system (Wolpaw). Gels can cover various surfaces and hold different properties depending on the color; blue gel makes the player bounce, orange gel makes the player run fast, and white gel creates surfaces in which you can shoot portals. While this new mechanic is interesting and allows for more intricate puzzles, using the gels can be tedious at times. There are puzzles where you must use portals to spray a white gel onto a surface; you must then use this white gel to gain access to other gel sources and, in turn, use those gel sources in different parts of the room. Because of the scope of these puzzles, they can become overwhelming or boring very quickly. The gel mechanic brings a lot of cool puzzle ideas to the game, but it can simultaneously be really annoying at certain points.
            Along with the gels, the game introduces new reflective cubes, lasers, the aforementioned Faith Plates, and more. What’s interesting about these mechanics is that they are all environmental. The central mechanic of shooting portals remains exactly the same, yet Portal 2 is still very different from its predecessor. Because the central mechanic involves manipulating the environment, the idea of only introducing environmental mechanics is brilliant. The act of shooting portals shouldn’t be muddled with other crazy mechanics; in the case of this series, the best way to innovate is to change the environment around the player. By doing this, the developers managed to create an inventive sequel that built upon what the first game established.
Conclusion
            Portal 2 has come a long way since its origins with Narbacular Drop. The team posed an interesting idea, which led to a critically-acclaimed test project, which led to an absurdly well-known triple A title. With its unique story-telling, immersive sound design, and innovative mechanics, Portal 2 fills all of the marks of a good game. Due to the lack of indie games at the time, this series would not have been made possible without the opportunity Valve gave to a group of random students. Watters says it best in his review: “As you journey through the massive Aperture facility, it becomes clear that Portal 2 does not merely come after Portal. Instead, it radiates outward from its predecessor, simultaneously illuminating the world that gave rise to Portal and continuing the adventure that began there…Your return to Aperture Science is a joyful one in this immensely appealing, laugh-out-loud funny, and thoroughly satisfying sequel.” Valve’s approach to making games is admirable, and I can only hope that more developers will take inspiration from the development of the Portal series.




Works Cited
Dudley, Brier. "Backstory to Blockbuster Game 'Portal 2' Is a Real Cinderella Tale." The Seattle
Times. The Seattle Times Company, 17 Apr. 2011. Web. 07 Mar. 2017.
Narbacular Drop (Gameplay Only). Dir. CoffeeCube. YouTube. YouTube, 7 Mar. 2016. Web. 7
Mar. 2017.
Watters, Chris. "Portal 2 Review." GameSpot. GameSpot, 18 Apr. 2011. Web. 07 Mar. 2017.
Watters, Chris. "Portal Review." GameSpot. GameSpot, 10 Oct. 2007. Web. 07 Mar. 2017.
Wolpaw, Erik. "Synthesizing Portal 2." Interview by Chris Remo. Gamasutra: The Art &
Business of Making Games. Gamasutra, 20 Sept. 2010. Web. 7 Mar. 2017.

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