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Oh, wait. I did that. Last week. It worked pretty well.
Huh, okay. New item on the nonexistent to-do list for this week: "Write to-do list for next week."
Okay, on with the review.
So I finished Portal over the weekend. (Yes, I know I'm late, that's going to be a theme of this series.) Then I went straight into playing Portal 2 because the ending of the first game was so flipping fantastic.
The near-seamless transition into the second game was beautiful, though there was a slight disconnect in the immersion at first because some of the controls and effects felt ever so slightly different (movement was a bit too responsive, the portal gun no longer fires "bullets" but instead opens the portals with a near-invisible projectile, etc). Regardless, I was very impressed.
*ahem*
Pause for dramatic effect and topical disassociation.
...
So I finished Portal 2 this afternoon.
Yeah, it kind of grabbed hold of me.
Now, I've been a big fan of Portal since before I ever even played the game. The concept of a puzzle-based shooter was innovative, sure, and I love me some semi-teleportation. But when I heard of the snarky AI who was trying to kill you (and, even better, heard some samples of her dialogue), I was hooked.
I say all this to explain why, when I finally got to play the game, it felt more like going through the motions for the majority of the game rather than encountering a polished gem of an experience like the rest of the world. I readily admit that Portal is an excellent game that rewards careful thinking over spastic reflexes (my favorite kind of game, as we probably established last week), while simultaneously blending the gameplay with its setting and tone in a near-seamless manner. It just didn't blow me away like it did the rest of you.
(Until I got to the end of course, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible to not feel accomplished after that.)
Portal 2, however, I came to off of the high I received by finishing Portal 1. I also came to it without any prior notions (aside from a somewhat-common complaint that the transitionary portions were a bit confusing).
As I'm sure you've no doubt gathered, I loved Portal 2. And that's true, but I need to qualify that statement.
Portal 2 is an amazing game when considered in conjunction with Portal 1.
This is how sequels are done. Especially for video games. The experience is larger, but the gameplay remains as tightly focused as ever.
Let's try to break it down a bit, shall we? (Minor spoilers throughout, I suppose.)
1. From the get-go, you can tell this game is going to be different. I could, of course talk about that introductory sequence where the bedroom changes from pristine to post-apocalyptic and how that basically serves as the transition in tone from the first game into the second, but I'm not.
Instead, I want to talk about that sequence where the AI tears your apartment free from whatever dock it was resting in and transports you through a veritable hive of apartment units to reach the testing chambers.
Within the first few minutes of the game, the walls around you are broken down and you get to see a hint of the expansiveness of this game. You can practically feel the increase in budget that the developers received as you look out to see never-ending spaces around every corner and massive objects stretching out of sight.
The game feels BIG.
And yet, for the majority of the game, the actual action, as I said before, remains tightly focused on the room-based puzzles.
But I want to come back to this sense of bigness before we move on to the element of focus I mentioned above.
Initially, I was impressed, sure, but I also thought they were merely showing off. I thought, "Oh, wow. That's really cool. But it's also to be expected. This is a 'full-price' game so it should have a 'full-price' budget. Sure." Beyond that, I didn't think they'd do much with it.
As I'm sure was the case for many of you with the first game, I was pleasantly surprised. As the story progresses, the conflict grows and the relationships established in the first game deepen. You delve into the history of the labs and thus our understanding of the world expands as well. The stakes are higher and the eventual climax -- though slightly ridiculous -- also manages to be huge without sacrificing any of the tight gameplay and character focus that we've come to expect from the previous game.
That's what's so incredible about both Portal and Portal 2, everything in these games compliments everything else in some way. Just like a well-plotted novel will tie theme and setting and character and foreshadowing all together for a satisfying resolution, so too does Portal tie environment and mechanics and character into one another for a tight experience.
Okay, I think that's enough jumbled thoughts about the gameplay experience, particularly as it pertains to size.
2. Let's talk about character. Or, more specifically, character-driven plot.
See, this is an especially important thing for video games, as the player is the character. And if the player doesn't feel like they have an impact on the world, it marginalizes their experience. I talked last week about how satisfying it was to hear the Joker and his goons reacting to my actions as Batman in Arkham Asylum. How that made me feel powerful and important and, this is the kicker, more like Batman. Even if the overall direction and plot of the game is more-or-less linear, it's still possible to create an experience that feels organic and player-motivated.
That was actually an issue I had with Portal 2 at first. Through the initial sections of the game, as you're following Wheatley through the corridors to escape the facility, you do a lot of running around and listening to this incompetent British AI tell you what to do. It's especially annoying once you've gotten the fully-functional Portal gun, because then your stuck in these areas with surfaces that you can't create portals on, and you feel really restricted -- like you're on a rail shooter or something.
"I'm holding the omnipotent power to bend space-time to my will, and you're taking it away from me! RAWR!!!"
*ahem*
Sorry about that.
Like I said, I was a bit miffed. But as the game progresses, the environments become more and more controllable. Which is an interesting way to create a feel of player progression. In the first game, you learned more tricks with the physics engine. The same is true in this game as well, of course, but you're also given more tools to manipulate the environment with (the gels and such), and I thought that was an innovative way to add to the experience of Portal 1 without making you go through all the same puzzles again.
But it's also the story that makes you feel influential. And here's how.
*SPOILERS*
When you defeat Glados (again) and deposit Wheatley into the computer, everything kind of clicks in the experience up to that point, and the game really blooms. He delivers a speech about how you've been bossing him around the whole time (which you know is utterly false, and thus drives home his defining character trait: intentionally obtuse) and then smashes you down a maintenance shaft with Glados. Along the way, you and Glados have a heart-to-heart chat (well, she chats, you listen) before you land at the very bottom of the Aperture Science labs, deep underground. You then spend THE REST OF THE GAME contemplating how everything is all your fault before finally confronting the incompetent Wheatley in his lair.
*END SPOILERS*
It's brilliant, because it makes even the annoyances in the game an intentional part of the experience.
The more important thing this does, though, is it prevents the game from repeating itself.
3. Now, of course, the game wasn't going to repeat itself because this is set a long time after the first game and etc. etc. etc. You all saw the pictures. But it would've been really easy to just revive Glados and then make you go through a whole bunch of new test chambers in what would basically have amounted to a rehash of the first game. They would, of course, introduce a few new environmental hazards or Portal gun functions to make us think they hadn't completely phoned it in. And the environment would've probably received a bit of a cosmetic facelift as they used their semi-post-apocalyptic setting to add some natural elements to the test chambers. But the end experience could've been nearly identical to Portal 1.
Instead, because they aimed big with the depths (see what I did there?) they wanted to explore with the character and world development, they were able to give us an entirely new experience without sacrificing that core focus of the gameplay. (There I go with that again.) I mean, this felt like a clear continuation of the previous game, as if the previous game had simply been Act 1 of a larger story. (For those of you who don't know, Acts 2 and 3 need to feel very different from Act 1 without betraying the promises you made or sacrificing the elements you established in Act 1. Basically.)
That's cool. The sequel reminds us of what was awesome about the first game without cheapening our experience by unnecessarily/lazily recycling old gameplay or ignoring prior story developments.
This is an awesome game, and it works so tightly with its prior installment that I really do think they should be considered in tandem from now on. But that's probably a discussion for another day.
Until next time, I'm Joshua Kehe.
I have another blog where I'm talking about NaNoWriMo this month. If you're interested or curious, please come over and take a look. I promise I'll be friendly. :)
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