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layout: post
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title: 'Rambling Review: Portal 2'
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date: '2011-05-31T10:00:00.000-04:00'
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author: Anna Wiggins
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tags:
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- sexism
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- video games
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- Portal 2
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- Gaming
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- rambling game review
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modified_time: '2013-10-22T11:19:50.936-04:00'
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blogger_id: tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209116010564764361.post-7856932703356013777
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blogger_orig_url: http://www.stringofbits.net/2011/05/rambling-review-portal-2.html
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---
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<em>The Rambling Review is a new series where I review games, books, movies, and TV series, both new and old, in a rambling, disorganized style. It will contain scores, but they are absolutely and utterly meaningless. It is nominally inspired by Phil Sandifer's <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com">Nintendo Project</a>, but it is orders of magnitude less ambitious by design.</em><br/><br/><strong>This post contains spoilers for Portal and Portal 2. Please do not read if you have not played these games and intend to.</strong><br/><br/><a name='more'></a><br/><br/>Several years ago, a game called Portal came bundled with Valve's <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/sub/469/">Orange Box</a>. It was, along with Team Fortress 2, bundled with Half Life 2: Episode 2 as a sort of apology for how long Episode 2 took to release (which makes you wonder exactly what is going to come bundled with Episode 3, a title that is quickly gaining Duke Nukem Forever-like mythic status as a delayed release).<br/><br/>At the time, Portal seemed to be all anyone could talk about, to the point that it eclipsed the main title of the Orange Box (HL2: Episode 2). And everyone told me that I just <strong>had</strong> to play it. "It's a puzzle game, and it's hilarious!" Eventually I scraped together enough money to spend $50 for a 6-hour game (to this day, I haven't actually played Half Life 2... maybe some day. I did, at least, get some enjoyment out of TF2 after I'd had the Orange Box for over a year). I did not regret a single penny of that purchase. Portal remains, to this day, one of the absolute best games I have ever played. The pacing, the atmosphere (provided almost entirely by the sense of isolation and the slow realization that GLaDOS isn't just a quirky and humorous gimmick there for comic relief, but rather actually wants to kill you), the gameplay itself - Portal gets every single thing it does right. And it was practically a throwaway game - a little side project of Valve's that clearly wasn't given anything like the funding that went into, say, the Half Life 2 series.<br/><br/>Of course, praising Portal is a lot like saying "hey, Democracy is pretty good!" in the US<sup>1</sup>. It would take some effort to find someone who disagrees with me on the point. So let's move on to something a bit more controversial (at least among the people I know who have played both Portal and Portal 2):<br/><br/>Portal 2 is not as good as Portal.<br/><br/>Let's start with the characters. The voice acting in Portal 2 is superb. You couldn't ask for better. However, the inclusion of more characters lessens the psychological impact of the game. In this game we have the addition of the Emergency Testing AI, Wheatley, Cave Johnson, Caroline, several new turrent personalities. All of this makes this game feel positively vibrant with personalities; I rarely felt the sense of loneliness and isolation that crept in during the original game. The original Portal only had 5 characters, and 3 of them were silent (with one of them being entirely absent): GLaDOS, Chell, the turrets, the Companion Cube, and Rattman. Portal 2 more than doubles the number of characters. Sure, some of them are present only in pre-recorded messages (Emergency Testing AI, Cave, and Caroline), but they still feel more <strong>present</strong> than Rattman ever did, and they decrease the game's sense of isolation where he increases it.<br/><br/>Now, there's nothing wrong with this inherently. Not every game is or should be about creating a sense of isolation, and if they had tried to just do more of the same, the result would probably have been far worse. However, <strong></strong><em>atmosphere in general</em> is important for any game, and the emotional context and atmosphere created in the original Portal is powerful, and it drives the game forward. Portal 2, by contrast, relies on the progression of the narrative to drive the game forward.<br/><br/>This is the point where anyone who knows me just did a double-take. Did I just criticize a game for being driven by its story? It's tru
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