Portal 2 is Valve's follow-up to one of the most celebrated surprises in gaming, and it turns a compact cult hit into a full-length puzzle adventure. Armed with the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, you return as Chell to a crumbling testing facility, face a reawakened GLaDOS and solve your way through a much larger, far stranger set of test chambers, before teaming up with a friend for an entirely separate co-op campaign.
A Story Told Through Test Chambers
Chell wakes from a long stasis to find Aperture Science Labs overgrown and falling apart. Her first guide is Wheatley, a jittery personality core with big ideas and very little sense, and their escape attempt quickly brings GLaDOS back online, as passive-aggressive as ever and holding a grudge. The story then drops far below the modern facility into the abandoned test spheres of Aperture's early years, where Cave Johnson's recorded announcements reveal how the company became what it is.
It is one of the funniest scripts in the medium, with the writing and voice performances carrying as much of the experience as the puzzles themselves. The original score responds to what you are doing in the chamber, and the optional developer commentary offers a look at how Valve built and tested every room.
New Tools, Smarter Puzzles
The portal gun is still at the heart of every solution, but Portal 2 layers new test elements on top of it and keeps finding fresh ways to combine them.
- Hard Light Bridges and Excursion Funnels
- Light bridges become walkways and shields wherever you aim them through a portal, while Excursion Funnels carry you, cubes and everything else across gaps in a slow tractor beam, often reversing direction in the middle of a puzzle.
- Aerial Faith Plates and Thermal Discouragement Beams
- Faith Plates fling you across chambers on precise arcs you can redirect through portals, while the laser beams must be bent with Discouragement Redirection Cubes to power receivers and clear out any turrets standing in the way.
- Repulsion, Propulsion and Conversion Gel
- Blue gel bounces, orange gel speeds you up, and white gel lets you place portals on surfaces that would otherwise refuse them. Painting a room with them turns familiar spaces into entirely new problems to solve.
The advanced physics behind these systems makes for a much larger game without making it punishingly hard, and the difficulty climbs at a pace that lets each new idea settle before the next one arrives.
A Co-op Campaign With Its Own Story
The two-player mode is not a bonus round. It is a complete campaign with its own test chambers, its own story and two new player characters, the robots Atlas and P-body, sent through Aperture's Cooperative Testing Initiative by a GLaDOS who is happy to play favorites. Each player carries a portal gun, so four portals are in play at once, and every puzzle is built around that.
- Ping and countdown tools let you point out surfaces and time your moves together, which matters a great deal when one wrong portal sends your partner straight into a pit of toxic goo.
- Play online with a friend, sit side by side on a shared or split screen, or bring someone into your session through Remote Play Together, so there is always a way to find a testing partner.
- Success depends on thinking cooperatively as much as acting together, and the best moments arrive when both players spot the same solution at once and pull it off on the first try.
Build and Share Your Own Chambers
Once the campaigns are done, the Perpetual Testing Initiative keeps the testing going. The in-game puzzle maker gives you Aperture's own building blocks, from cubes and buttons to light bridges, gels, faith plates and turrets, and lets you design chambers for a single player or co-op puzzles for you and your friends. Steam Workshop hosts a vast library of community test chambers to download and play, so there is always another room waiting.
The original Portal was named Game of the Year by over 30 publications, and Portal 2 built on that with more ideas, more characters and more wit in every hour. If you have ever wanted a puzzle game that respects your intelligence and still has you laughing out loud, step back into Aperture, pick up the portal gun and see what GLaDOS has prepared for you. She has been waiting.
