I realize I'm a little late in getting to this bus stop, but Portal 2 is brilliant.
Amidst relentless Steam sales for games that I've played (maybe) twenty minutes of, it somehow slipped under my radar. I bought it, I just hadn't really played it until approximately midnight of September 1, 2012.
It absorbed me so much that I didn't stop until about five in the morning, at which point I decided that I needed to eat something. Except I'm not eating, because I only want to gush about the game, Valve's attention to detail, and why I believe the next Half-Life game is probably taking so bloody long to finish.
But back to 2007 for a moment.
I had eagerly awaited the landing of Half-Life 2: Episode 2. I had just moved away to college, and using digital downloads as a means to acquire games was still a pretty new concept. I remember watching The Orange Box download, squirming until the moment I was allowed to hit 'Play.' I’m not sure which title I played first, whether it was Team Fortress 2, Portal, or Half-Life 2: Episode 2, but I do know that when I did launch Portal, I didn't stop playing until I had finished the game.
It was short, but also gloriously sweet. Such a unique concept, such a great implementation of ideas and challenges, and such a funny, funny ending (as we all know).
The thing that amazed me was that everybody began to love Portal like an aborted baby that plopped into their lap and needed love. Oh, yes, Team Fortress 2 has gone on to define the amazing ways in which a developer can continue to add content to a game and encourage folks to rack up thousands of hours, and HL2: E2 certainly had its share of praise, but Portal was this fantastic shining thing that you could play through with your girlfriend or your mom and giggle and scratch your heads and smile very much about.
I always kind of expected that Valve would incorporate the portal gun into HL2: Episode 3. I didn't know how they were going to balance it, I didn't know how it wouldn't totally break the game or whether there would be situations where you would be stuck with just the portal gun, but I felt deeply that this would be the next step.
Five years later and we haven't gotten a single word from Valve about the next stepping stone in the Half-Life series … but we do have Portal 2.
I guess I just assumed it would be more of the same. More clever puzzles, more funny quips from robots, perhaps some new ways to interact with the environment.
Well, it is all that. But it's so much more.
The game is an exercise—no, a thesis—on signposting in video game design. I'm not sure what else to call it, so I'm going to call it that. What I mean is that it's always gently pushing you in the right direction, so you don't get lost and frustrated. Valve has always been good with this, even dating back to the first Half-Life. If you jump down into a lower portion of a level, with the feeling that you won't be able to get back up, then you're almost always going the right way. Some would call this linear design, so I guess the contrast is open-world design.
And to be frank, I think open-world design is somewhat coloring my perception of many current, blockbuster games. You can go anywhere you want, do anything at any time, and avoid the main quest completely. True role-playing games. Whatever.
Portal 2 has so many subtle signposts that I just feel like I’m in flow when I play it. It feels like a game that has real direction, as if a director thought about each "shot," your motivations in that moment, and the terminal point. When you step up to a switch, you often see the cube or whatever it is falling from behind a pane of glass, and discover yet another impediment to your progress. When you step on a switch, a streak of dotted lights turn from blue to orange, directing you to what you need to see. When you run through the dark corridors that are the inner workings of Aperture Science, Wheatley the robot is on a track above you with a flashlight, showing the way.
And the puzzles themselves are fantastic. Areas which you can affect with the Portal Gun are clear: white, matte surfaces. Anything else probably isn't going to work, so I don't feel like I'm wasting my time looking for secrets that aren't there. It doesn't feel like walking along the edge of every surface in Resident Evil pressing A and looking for typewriter ribbons that are too small to see. New features, like the hard light bridges, force me to look at a room almost like a Sudoku puzzle in order to see how launching these beams can enable access to a new area (to note just one use of that brilliant mechanic). And yet at least at one point, I got so absorbed in using them that I almost forgot about the portals themselves and found myself in a forehead-slapping moment. Yet it never feels forced or asinine.
This is a world I want to be in. Portal 2 has some of the best non-player character design I've ever seen in a game. Chalk it up to amazing deliveries from the likes of Stephen Merchant and Ellen McLain, but don't forget that someone at Valve wrote those lines, coached and recorded the actors, and also considered the interactive nature of games with voice delivery. Not once have I felt like I was hearing repetitive lines. In fact, in at least one spot that I recently passed through, I actually stopped and turned around several times because Wheatley was still going on about something, and it was so damned funny that I just had to stay a little longer.
So there's characters, and there's story. There's a sense that you are someone, not just a cog in this great wheel but an instrumental piece of it. A little like life for me: I surround myself with the people that I have found to be the best friends I can possibly know, and I'm embarking on this story with them. For a single-player game, I don't feel alone.
Granted, it doesn't hurt that the world feels so alive, what with moving panels that jitter and try to fit into walls as you get close. The texture is remarkable. Sure, we've now come to terms with shaders, but it all looks right, and there's so much diversity in the cracks in the panels, the debris littered about, and the shadows playing off of great gears and pipes and robot arms. If the Source engine had felt dated five years ago, it doesn't feel dated here. Portal 2 is, aesthetically, marvelous.
I also must speak about the sound design's subtleties. Portal 2, to me, is taking a cue from Rez, that trippy on-rails music-heavy shooter from the Dreamcast era. In Rez, when you destroyed enemies they left behind a musical motif that would often build into the greater soundtrack of the level. I feel that this has been incorporated into parts of Portal 2: As you build your solutions to each puzzle, the music almost builds as well. More signposting that you're headed the right way, sure, but it's so subtle. I've always loved moments in the Half-Life series with music, but Portal 2 takes Valve's sound design to a whole new level. Kudos to them.
And that's the thing, really. The level of detail is so intricate that everything is a joy to experience. This game feels like the product of an entire team's imagination realized. It's like a Wes Anderson film with its grim humor and important body language and magical worlds, nonchalantly sneaking into theaters behind the backs of mega-movies from Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg, with their enormous crews attempting to make their movie the one that ends all movies.
We've probably all heard a thing or two about the way Valve works by now. How their desks are on wheels and they can shift from project to project at any time, how their hierarchical structure is flat, and senior staff will ask the young blood to give them projects to do to settle them in. How their employee handbook is like a wiki, a living document for a game development company always in flux, or how just because you may be capable of a job, it isn't necessarily the best job for you to be doing.
All of that is evident here. Portal 2 is a product of love, from people who love their jobs. It's the game they wanted to make not because they want to secure funds for their next project, but because they really want to share it with us.
God damn, it's a good game.
So while it could be years before we see the next Half-Life entry, I have no doubt that with all of the learning that went into Portal 2, all of the attention to detail, the techniques in place to establish flow for players like myself, and characters that feel as real as robots can be, that the next Half-Life is going to blow us out of the water.
But for now, I'm going back to play more Portal 2.