chaos386
.sa = bad driver!
I just played through Portal and Portal 2 for the first time. Portal 1 was free way back when, and Portal 2 was just on sale at 4,99EUR in tier 2 countries.
I'll cut to the chase: in my opinion, Portal is mechanically perfect. Without fault. Any meaningful change to its core mechanics and implementation would make it worse, or not quite Portal any more.
The implementation is particularly impressive. It has all the great qualities of the Source engine like the window-based menus, customizable FoV, etc, and the game runs beautifully. It's a really great example of design minimalism and polish.
Portal plays impeccably. It never gets in my way. It's never confusing. And there's no difficulty via obfuscation in Portal. Best of all, it's the perfect length. Get in, see all there is to it, and then it ends. Simple. Perfect.
But I have a problem with Portal. My problem is that I'm not a mechanical PC gamer any more. I've always veered towards great stories and the emotional side of gaming, and recently I have been pushed over the edge. And I'm sorry to say that Portal left me completely cold.
Rather appropriately, much like Aperture Labs, Portal is monotone and clinical. It's a tech demo. A one-trick pony. Two things can explain this: the game's development history, and the company behind it. Both explanations are rather weak. Indie games from small teams, even Half-Life 2 mods, have had amazing backstories and worldbuilding before. And Valve has employed some terrific writers, both in their past games and even in the making of Portal! Yet despite this, there was nearly nothing there. And that makes me sad. Sad for the lost opportunity, and sad as an emotional gamer.
Portal 2 is a difficult topic to talk about. Not because it's a complicated game, mind you. Because it isn't. The reason this will be difficult is that I disliked it intensely. And I'm going to pan it now. And I have never seen a fanbase for a game that is more committed to personally attacking people who dislike their favourite game, than that of Portal 2.
Portal 2 was annoying from the get go. The user interface took a serious nosedive and reeks of console. Menus are huge spacewasters. Not scalable. No dropdown menus. No FoV slider. The menu interface makes it look less like a Source-engine game and more like a Unity-engine game. I can go on. On first customization, you can't set anything without triggering helptexts first. Buttons and tips float in the gameworld and cannot be turned off. Reticle does not show portal-able surfaces like it did in Portal.
Once I got into the actual game, it got worse. The tutorial is the worst I've seen in any Valve game. Fifteen minutes, or more, utterly on rails. It's like the opening of Half-Life 2, except without the mindblowing environment. Without the exploration. Without the characters and the dialogue.
Then there's Wheatley, the most annoying video game character I've ever seen. I don't even think that's by design. The voice actor and Wheatley's mannerisms just rub me the wrong way. I'm afraid their delicate balancing act between quirky and annoying landed on the wrong side, and that's a terrible thing to happen for a game as linear as Portal 2. From the very start, that character was repulsive, ripe for making into an antagonist. By the end of the tutorial, I was actively looking for ways to kill him, or even antagonize him. And I never found either. Not in a game as linear as Portal 2. I yearned for the next puzzle, just so I didn't have to listen to Wheatley.
Glados is still an interesting character, of course. And well written, with her own quirks and occasional tidbits from the 50s-80s. I will say that I would've preferred a lot more exposition on her part. On Aperture, on me, on Wheatley, on what's happening in the world. I get it: the lack of exposition is a Valve thing. But the thing is, in Portal 2, there's hardly any "show" to replace the "tell".
The journey through time in Aperture's old facilities is probably the greatest worldbuilding achievement in the whole series. It is one of the lone nuggets of soul and emotion to be found in Portal 2. But even behind that brilliance loom two depressing problems, making it all just a little bit worse.
First, the voice acting of Cave Johnson. J.K. Simmons' performance was only average. It was close enough to the basic male civilian voice of Half-Life 2 that I thought it was the same actor. Even the 80s Cave Johnson, ill with radiation poisoning or something, sounds exactly the same as the 50s Cave Johnson, in his prime!
Second, the exploration of the derelict facilities -sequence was just too damn long. There were too few variations on the basic formula of Portal to warrant the immense scale of those levels. In fact, this brings me onto the biggest problem I had with Portal 2. Its length.
It took me nine hours to beat Portal 2. Granted, a person who's not dumb will probably finish it in eight hours or less. A smart player will finish it in 4-5 hours, according to HowLongToBeat. But here's the thing: it's not any more complicated than Portal. In fact, it's less so, because it's even more linear and even less reliant on exploration, trial and error. Any way you spin it, it's almost the same game, just twice or thrice as long. By the halfway point, I was losing interest. By the end of it, I was absolutely sick of playing it.
The stupid length and incredibly slow pace of the game might have been worth it, had the game been just more varied overall. All it needed was more freedom to roam, more things to see in the gameworld, and rewarding me for spending time in there. But no.
Portal 2 was significantly more challenging than the first game. But they did not do that by adding variety, making the levels much more complicated, or embracing freedom. They did it by removing freedom. Portal 2, particularly in the later levels, is like a hidden object game. You can usually count on one hand's fingers the tiles where they allow you to put a portal, and one of them absolutely will be the solution. The addition of the different gels, bridges and funnels are appreciated, but not worth an extra five hours of gameplay.
The endings of both games, particularly that of Portal 2, were of course short and sweet. I liked the Portal 2 ending. It's the distilled embodiment of the game, and the whole series: a lighthearted splash of something different, for gamers who don't take their games very seriously. Portal the series must have been very charming back in the day because of its quirks and its self-aware, very meta snark. No wonder it spawned all those memes.
In my opinion the 95/100 metascore for Portal 2 is a gross overrating. According to that number, it's the fifth best PC game ever made. Moreover, it's supposedly an order of magnitude better than the original Portal. That rating is ridiculous. The value of Portal 2 is roughly equal to that of Mirror's Edge (M 81/100). It's a pretty apt comparison: both games are immensely polished, both look good even today, both are built on a single gimmick, both railroad you like crazy, and their stories left me utterly cold.
OK.