Portal 2

Portal 2 is a 2011 puzzle-platform game developed by Valve for Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The digital PC versions are distributed online by Valve’s Steam service, while all retail editions are distributed by Electronic Arts. Like the original Portal (2007), players solve puzzles by placing portals and teleporting between them. Portal 2 adds features including tractor beams, lasers, light bridges, and paint-like gels that alter player movement or allow portals to be placed on any surface.

Description

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 robots—ATLAS and P-Body—in 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.

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. 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.[28] 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. 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.