Portal 2 is a 2011 first person puzzle-platform game developed by Valve for Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The retail versions and PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions were distributed by Electronic Arts. A port for the Nintendo Switch was released as part of the Portal: Companion Collection in June 2022.
Like the original Portal (2007), players solve puzzles by placing portals and teleporting between them. Portal 2 adds features including excursion funnels (called tractor beams in files), lasers, light bridges, and paint-like gels that alter player movement or allow portals to be placed on any surface. In the single-player campaign, players control Chell, who navigates the dilapidated Aperture Science Enrichment Center during its reconstruction by the supercomputer GLaDOS (Ellen McLain); new characters include robot Wheatley (Stephen Merchant) and Aperture founder Cave Johnson (J. K. Simmons). In the new cooperative mode, players solve puzzles together as robots Atlas and P-Body (both voiced by Dee Bradley Baker). Jonathan Coulton and the National produced songs for the game.
Valve announced Portal 2 in March 2010, and promoted it with alternate reality games including the Potato Sack, a collaboration with several independent game developers. After release, Valve released downloadable content and a simplified map editor to allow players to create and share levels.
Portal 2 received critical acclaim for its gameplay, balanced learning curve, pacing, dark humor, writing, and acting. Like its predecessor, it has been described as one of the greatest video games ever made by numerous publications and critics.
Gameplay Portal 2 is a first-person perspective puzzle game. The player takes the role of Chell in the single-player campaign, as one of two robotsATLAS and P-Bodyin the cooperative campaign, or as a simplistic humanoid icon in community-developed puzzles. Characters can withstand limited damage but will die after sustained injury. The goal of both campaigns is to explore the Aperture Science Laboratory—a complicated, malleable mechanized maze. While some parts of the game takes place in modular test chambers with clearly defined entrances and exits, other parts occur in behind-the-scenes areas where the objective is less clear.
The initial tutorials guide the player through movement controls and interactions with their environment, and in the case of the cooperative campaign, interactions with the other player. Gameplay revolves around the use of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, which can create a pair of two portals on suitable surfaces through which the player or objects can pass through. Characters can use these portals to move between rooms or to "fling" objects or themselves across a distance.
Additional game elements not featured in the original Portal include Thermal Discouragement Beams (lasers), Excursion Funnels (tractor beams), and Hard Light Bridges, all of which can be transmitted through portals. Aerial Faith Plates catapult the player and objects through the air. The player must disable sentient, lethal turrets or avoid their line of sight. The Weighted Storage Cube has been redesigned, and there are new types: Redirection Cubes, which have prismatic lenses that redirect laser beams, spherical Edgeless Safety Cubes, an antique version of the Weighted Storage Cube used in the underground levels, and a cube-turret hybrid created by Wheatley after taking control of Aperture. The heart-decorated Weighted Companion Cube appears briefly. Early demonstrations included Pneumatic Diversity Vents, shown to transport objects and transfer suction power through portals, but these do not appear in the final game. Also available as iPad or Steam application. The typical objective of a test chamber or level is to use the portal gun and provided gameplay elements to open a locked exit door and progress to the next chamber.
Paint-like gels (which are dispensed from pipes and can be transported through portals) impart certain properties to surfaces or objects coated with them. Players can use orange Propulsion Gel to cross surfaces more quickly, blue Repulsion Gel to bounce from a surface, and white Conversion Gel to allow surfaces to accept portals. Only one type of gel can affect a certain surface at a time. Some surfaces, such as grilles, cannot be coated with a gel. Water can block or wash away gels, returning the surface or object to its normal state.
In the cooperative campaign, two players can use the same console with a split screen, or can use a separate computer or console; Windows, Mac OS X, and PlayStation 3 users can play with each other regardless of platform. Both player-characters are robots equipped with independent portal guns, a portal pair placed by either player is usable by both. Most chambers lack strict structure, and require players to use both sets of portals for laser or funnel redirection, launches, and other maneuvers. The game provides voice communication between players, and online players can temporarily enter a split-screen view to help coordinate actions. Players can "ping" to draw the other player's attention to walls or objects, start countdown timers for synchronized actions, and perform joint gestures such as waving or hugging. The game tracks which chambers each player has completed and allows players to replay chambers they have completed with new partners.
Portal 2s lead writer Erik Wolpaw estimates each campaign to be about six hours long. Portal 2 contains in-game commentary from the game developers, writers, and artists. The commentary, which is unlocked per completed chapter, appears on node icons scattered through the chambers. According to Valve, each of the single-player and cooperative campaigns is 2 to 2.5 times as long as the campaign in Portal, with the overall game five times as long.
Synopsis
Setting The Portal series shares a fictional universe with the Half-Life series. The events in Portal take place between the first and second Half-Life games, while most of Portal 2 is set "a long time after" the events in Portal.
Before Portal, Aperture Science conducted experiments to determine whether human subjects could safely navigate dangerous "test chambers", until the artificial intelligence GLaDOS, governing the laboratory, killed its employees. At the end of the first Portal, the protagonist Chell destroys GLaDOS and momentarily escapes the facility, but is dragged back inside by an unseen figure later identified by writer Erik Wolpaw as the "Party Escort Bot". A promotional comic shows estranged Aperture Science employee Doug Rattmann, who used graffiti to guide the player in Portal, placing Chell into suspended animation to save her life, until the beginning of Portal 2.
Plot Single-player In the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, player-character Chell wakes in a stasis chamber resembling a motel room. The complex has become dilapidated after what appears to be millennia of decay. Wheatley (Stephen Merchant), a personality core, guides her through old test chambers from the first game in an attempt to escape the facility after its reserve power is depleted. They accidentally reactivate the dormant GLaDOS (Ellen McLain) while attempting to restore power to the escape pods; she separates Chell from Wheatley and begins rebuilding the facility.
GLaDOS subjects Chell to new tests until Wheatley helps her escape again. They sabotage Aperture's production of turrets and neurotoxin to prevent GLaDOS from killing them, then confront GLaDOS and perform a core transfer; replacing her with Wheatley as the laboratory's controller. Wheatley, immediately driven mad with power, installs GLaDOS on a potato battery. GLaDOS tells Chell that Wheatley was designed as an "intelligence dampening sphere" to deliberately produce illogical thoughts and hamper her own intelligence. Infuriated, Wheatley inadvertently destroys the lift to the surface with Chell and GLaDOS inside, causing them to fall to the facility's abandoned lowest levels.
Chell retrieves GLaDOS in potato battery form and the two develop a reluctant partnership in order to stop Wheatley before his incompetence destroys the facility. Ascending through laboratories built in the 20th century, they discover audio recordings by eccentric Aperture Science founder Cave Johnson (J. K. Simmons). The recordings reveal how Aperture slowly lost money and prestige throughout the decades, as its pool of test subjects was altered from "astronauts, war heroes, and Olympians" in the 1950s, to homeless people in the 1970s, and Aperture's own employees in the 1980s. In 1981, Johnson became mortally ill after ingesting moon dust used to manufacture portal-conductive surfaces. His last request was for the mind of his assistant Caroline (McLain) to be transferred—by force, if necessary—to an advanced computer designed to store a human consciousness, which he had previously commissioned to save himself, creating GLaDOS. GLaDOS is troubled by the discovery that she is Caroline.
Chell and GLaDOS return to Aperture's higher levels, where they discover Wheatley's utter incompetence has brought the Aperture facility on the verge of catastrophic failure. Wheatley, after discovering Chell and GLaDOS had returned, decides to keep them alive as test subjects because the "franken-turret" cubes he created were ineffective at solving tests. GLaDOS later reveals that her body came built-in with a euphoric response to test completion that becomes less effective over time. Throughout the following chambers, Wheatley becomes increasingly frustrated with its dwindling effects.Valve (April 19, 2011). Portal 2 (PC/Mac/PlayStation 3/Xbox 360). Valve. Level/area: Chapter 8: The Itch.
Wheatley reveals that he has a "surprise" for Chell and GLaDOS, later tricking them into a death trap. He reveals that he had discovered the two robots from the Cooperative Testing Initiative, the game's cooperative campaign, making Chell no longer useful to him. She manages to escape from the trap right before its activation. The game's final levels are spent escaping from Wheatley's numerous attempts to kill them.
In the game's boss fight and ending, Chell confronts Wheatley and attaches corrupted personality cores (Nolan North) to force another core exchange and restore GLaDOS to authority. However, Wheatley demolishes the button necessary to initiate the transfer. As the facility crumbles, Chell places a portal on the Moon; she and Wheatley begin to be pulled into the vacuum of space. GLaDOS, having reasserted control over the facility, rescues Chell and abandons Wheatley to outer space. When Chell awakens, GLaDOS claims to have learned of humanity from the remnants of Caroline, but deletes Caroline's personality. Deciding that Chell is not worth the trouble of killing, GLaDOS frees her from the facility and gives Chell the burnt companion cube.
Co-op The cooperative story is chronologically set after the events of the single-player campaign, but players are not required to play them in order. Player characters Atlas and P-Body are bipedal robots constructed by GLaDOS. In the first four 'sets' of levels, the robots are sent on ventures into the depths of the Aperture facilities to recover and upload data disks. After completion of each mission, the robots are disassembled and are reassembled to complete the next.
At first, GLaDOS is excited about her non-human test subjects, but later becomes dissatisfied because the two robots cannot truly die, and at one point also gets uncomfortable with their close partnership. At the end of the story, the robots gain entry to "the Vault", a storage facility of thousands of humans placed in stasis. GLaDOS thanks the robots for their acquisition of new test subjects, and promptly destroys the robots.
Peer Review