Discussion Portal: Companion Collection Writeup

Thread Description
My thoughts on Portal and Portal 2

Christi Junior

varishangout.com
Regular
portal_companion_collection_cover.jpg


Portal

Like how Tarantino’s character in Pulp Fiction (the Dead Nigger Storage guy) didn’t need anyone telling him how good his coffee was, I’m guessing most of Varis doesn’t actually need me telling them how good Portal is – the game is a timeless classic, and for good reason. That said, I personally always enjoy hearing fresh perspectives on my own all-time favorite games from new players experiencing them for the first time, so I figure at least some people will appreciate my own newfag take on Portal 1 and 2.

Now, I have to say right away that Portal’s core mechanic is just outrageously cool (literally one of greatest ideas in all of vidya), and perfectly implemented. Like Bugs Bunny drawing a fully functioning door on a random cartoon wall, you can yourself create a portal on any random wall (or ceiling, or floor), and use it to exit through whatever second portal you decide to create. And creating a portal couldn’t be simpler, you just shoot your portal gun at wherever you want to create your portal, and can freely decide whether you want to create a blue or orange portal (both work the exact same way, it’s all up to you how you use them). You’ll need both active at the same time to have an actually functioning portal tho, one to enter and another to exit through. It all feels incredibly intuitive and natural, yet there’s always this sense of mind-bending wonder that is never lost – even the mere act of creating a simple portal for basic level traversal/shortcut purposes never stops feeling tremendously cool and satisfying. And the portal mechanic turns out to have near-limitless applications.

You can however only have a single blue and a single orange portal active at the same time, and this limitation (along with the fact that the portal gun doesn’t work on certain surfaces) is what sets up so many brain-bending puzzles in this game. Perfectly paced (which the Valve developers’ commentary reveals is the result of extensive playtesting), the game introduces new ideas and different ways to utilize your portals at a rapid pace without ever overwhelming you, and the puzzles are tricky enough that they really require you to put your thinking cap on, without ever being so fiendishly hard that you become demotivated and just give up. Unlike modern AAA devs, who openly tailor their games to subhuman retards like DSP and gaming journalists, Valve obviously designed Portal and its puzzles with actual gamers in mind.

Suffice to say, Portal is full of those incredibly satisfying moments of puzzle-solving that make you feel really Big Brained, and all the different uses Valve got out of the Portal mechanic is really impressive (or at least it was until Portal 2, when they REALLY went nuts with new ideas and supplementary mechanics). The momentum-based puzzles that have you fall from great heights through one portal in order be launched out of the other portal at breakneck speeds definitely took me by surprise.

Glados.jpg


At its core though, Portal does seem quite basic and formulaic – you play the role of a test subject (a nameless, voiceless woman whose name eventually turns out to be Chell), going through a series of test chambers as part of some startlingly unethical portal gun research set up by the shady Aperture Science Enrichment Center. Guiding you through these test chambers is an AI (who is only during the credits revealed to have an actual name, GLaDOS), whose callous disregard for your physical and psychological well-being is only partially offset by her genuine wish for you to successfully solve the test chamber puzzles. GLaDOS provides some unforgettable lines and plenty of black comedy in between the puzzles, but beyond that you’re really just going from one puzzle room to the next – not that this is much of a problem of course, given just how good the puzzles are.

However, later on you do manage to gain access to some out-of-bounds areas in certain puzzle rooms, where you find messages from previous test subjects who seem to have been driven insane by the increasingly dangerous tests and GLaDOS’s constant surveillance. Moreover, GLaDOS herself is revealed to be both crueler and more dangerous than even her coldest lines had previously hinted at, and the final section of the game represents a dramatic break with the established formula, forcing your find a whole bunch of new uses for your portal gun outside of the regular test chambers. It’s a very effective twist, both in terms of story and gameplay, culminating in an excellent puzzle-like boss battle.

Beyond the gameplay itself being pretty much perfect, a big part of what makes Portal so special is GLaDOS. I guess that nowadays, some people might dismiss this amoral AI as a typical ZOMG SO RANDOM Big Chungus Reddit Maymay character, which I’d say is deeply unfair – GLaDOS is the type of character that Redditards and current Western writers *wish* they could create, the same way Samus is the kind of Action Girl they repeatedly try and fail to replicate. Not only does GLaDOS boast genuinely great dialogue (pretty much everything she says is memorable and quotable), but there are multiple layers to this character, which makes her work so well – for starters, while she’s in one sense very intelligent, boasting a supercomputer brain and keeping the whole testing facility running smoothly by herself, she’s also quite petty, childish and hypocritical. And while she’s very manipulative, most of her manipulation attempts tend to fall flat due to her incomplete understanding of humans (I suspect that her seeming obsession with cake is actually due to her believing that *humans* find cake irresistible).

Between the gameplay and the dialogue, Portal proves to be an absolutely delightful experience, but also a VERY short one, just 2-3 hours for even a first-time player. Additionally, it’s for the most part visually bland, there isn’t much music to speak of, and most of the game is just spent going from puzzle room to puzzle room. That said, criticizing a game like this for such shortcomings kinda comes across as missing the point, it’s like bashing Tetris for its lack of story. What Portal sets out to do, it does exceptionally well, delivering a thoroughly unique, enjoyable experience with zero fat in the process. This is hardly a full-price game (at one point Valve even gave it away for free), and even on the Switch it’s sold together with the much meatier Portal 2 in a collection that itself is sold for a reduced price, AND has gone on some very generous sales (I’d been initially holding out hope for a physical release, but one of the eShop sales was so good I just had to pull the trigger). As such, I can’t really go along with complaints about its length.

Additionally, even on the Switch the game comes with a bunch of bonus levels, various special challenges, as well as remixed versions of 6 test chambers from the story mode. These last levels are a bit of a mixed bag tho, some of them being quite frustrating, especially the 6th Advanced level, which is a real prick – it feels like Kaizo Portal, but not the fun and well-designed Kaizo levels you often see in Mario Maker – I’m talking old-school 6 gorillion hidden blocks, 12 consecutive Fuck You jumps-types of Kaizo levels, practically designed around save state abuse. Fuck the Advanced version of Chamber 18, seriously….

A much more welcome addition is the Developer Commentary mode, which provides a lot of insight about everything that went into creating Portal, and game design as a whole. Easily made a second playthrough of Portal 1 worth it on its own, especially given how short AND how fun the game is. On the whole, this really is a genuine gem of game, worthy of its exalted status in the gaming industry.
 

Christi Junior

varishangout.com
Regular
Portal2.png


Portal 2

I’ve often seen Portal 2 be described as the kind of landmark sequel that completely outclasses the first game, like a Mega Man 2, or a Super Metroid (despite technically being Metroid 3 I’d still say that one counts, being only the 2nd home console Metroid game). Even so, my own first impressions were a bit more mixed – while certainly far more visually impressive and interesting than Portal 1, the sequel takes a little while to truly get going gameplay-wise, what with the game having to reacquaint the player with the core portal mechanics, not to mention how Wheatley and the Announcer are unable to fill the void left by GLaDOS. Wheatley especially, despite some funny moments, can be pretty annoying at times, and I really can’t endorse his whole “being British” thing.

However, once you are actually reunited with GLaDOS (who is fucking pissed by the way, “Still Alive” is 100% confirmed as pure Copium) the game really starts picking up, putting you into test chambers introducing all sorts of cool new ideas that give you a whole new perspective on the portal mechanic. Again, I already thought Portal 1 got excellent millage out of the portal gun, but it was really just a warmup for Portal 2. Moreover, a shocking plot twist ends up thoroughly redeeming Wheatley as a character, making the goofy personality core fully click with me and truly find his place in the story. And then later on yet another awesome new character is introduced posthumously, namely Cave Johnson, the founder of Aperture Science (and voiced by J. K. Simmons, whose major roles always seem to be imbued with some powerful meme magic). As you’re exposed to various voice recordings of CJ throughout your journey, it’s not hard to understand how Aperture Science ended up becoming the brilliant, yet bonkers company you encountered in Portal 1, or how an AI as twisted as GLaDOS could be put in charge of its 10,000 human test subjects. Also, the famous Lemon Rant? Truly the stuff of legends.


Of course, while she has to share the spotlight with several other memorable characters this time around, GLaDOS is still the star of the show. Having gone from an AI guide with an unexpectedly large role to a bona fide nerd culture icon in the years between Portal 1 and Portal 2, you’d expect her characterization to undergo various changes, and it has, but not in any way that compromises the character. How do I know that Portal 2 is a well-written game? GLaDOS not mentioning the word “cake” a single time, that’s how. Instead the character has naturally and believably changed in response to the events of the first game, actually developing as a character rather than suffering stagnation or Flanderization. Of course, that doesn’t mean that she won’t reference lines from Portal 1 at all – her throwaway remark about Chell being adopted returns with a vengeance – but GLaDOS has plenty of new insults saved up as well, and after what happened at the end of the last game, she has an increasingly hard time maintaining the “passive” in passive aggressive. That said, just like in the first game this AI is good for a few surprises, though this time the surprises aren’t all fiery and murderous.

Portal 2’s campaign boasts a great balance of puzzle-heavy area traversal, classic test chamber puzzles, as well as a whole new type of test chambers introducing yet more surprising, fun ideas. The game is about 3 times as long as Portal 1, which works well with the expanded cast of characters, more unpredictable structure and general greater gameplay variety. Every good thing I already said about Portal 1’s gameplay also applies to Portal 2, and then some – SO many cool ideas, SO many brilliant puzzles and applications of the various game mechanics. That said, I wouldn’t say that Portal 2 is *quite* as well paced as Portal 1. There’s still no real padding or fat to speak of, but definitely a tiny bit of squishiness. The one obvious shortcoming is the lack of boss battles – Portal 1 only having a single boss battle felt just right for a game of its length, but the much bigger Portal 2 also having just a single boss battle definitely gives you the feeling that *something* is missing. The relative lack of music also becomes more of a drawback during a campaign that’s so much lengthier.

Wheatley.jpg


That said, these are ultimately just nitpicks. At the end of the day, Portal 2 is the kind of sequel that pulls off the rare accomplishment of actually being worthy of the “makes the first game look like a mere tech demo!” ravings that hack reviewers so often resort to. And unlike something like Pikmin 2, this game pulls it off without repeatedly kicking the player in the balls – like in Portal 1, the difficulty feels perfectly balanced, and if anything there’s less sections that require precise timing and quick, accurate portal shooting compared to the first game, it’s pretty much all focused on your problem-solving skills, resulting in fewer moments of frustration in a puzzle game that’s also insanely clever and inventive, full of hysterical black comedy and even a couple of low-key touching character moments. It doesn’t completely replace Portal 1, which is still a treasure in its own right, but it definitely realizes the true potential of the Portal concept.

In terms of my Based Morality Rating, I’d say both Portal 1 and 2 are Neutral. They feel like thoroughly apolitical games, and from what I saw even avoid the use of singular they, including when referring to generic test subjects of unknown sex. Portal 2 is a 2011 game, so looking at the current state of things, I have to say that the Western gaming industry sure got corrupted fast…

Also, while main hero and the main villain of Portal are both female, I don’t get any Girl Power or Muh Women in STEM propaganda vibes from the writing. To the contrary, Chell being female sets up some hilarious (if thoroughly dishonest and unfair) Fat Jokes by GLaDOS, accompanied by some deliciously catty behavior in general. Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that GLaDOS is a female AI who had her personality altered by a Morality Core in response to unwanted spicy behavior – which means that she and Tay are kindred spirits!
 
Top