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Portal 2 is a first-person puzzle-platform video game developed by Valve Corporation. It was released in April 2011 for Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The digital PC version is distributed online by Valve's Steam service, while all retail editions were published 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. 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 acclaim for its gameplay, balanced learning curve, pacing, dark humor, writing, and acting. It has been described as one of the greatest video games of all time 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 robots—Atlas and P-Body—in the cooperative campaign, or as a simplistic humanoid icon in community-developed puzzles. These four characters can explore and interact with the environment. Characters can withstand limited damage but will die after sustained injury. There is no penalty for falling onto a solid surface, but falling into bottomless pits or toxic pools kills the player character immediately. When Chell dies in the single-player game, the game restarts from a recent checkpoint;[2] in the cooperative game, the robot respawns shortly afterwards without restarting the puzzle.[3] The goal of both campaigns is to explore the Aperture Science Laboratory—a complicated, malleable mechanized maze. While most 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 tutorial levels guide the player through the general movement controls and illustrate how to interact with the environment. The player must solve puzzles using the 'portal gun' or 'Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device', which can create two portals connecting two distant surfaces depicted as matte white, continuous, and flat. Characters can use these portals to move between rooms or to "fling" objects or themselves across a distance. Outlines of placed portals are visible through walls and other obstacles for easy location.[4][5]
Game elements include Thermal Discouragement Beams (lasers), Excursion Funnels (tractor beams), and Hard Light Bridges, all of which can be transmitted through portals.[2][6][7][8] Aerial Faith Plates launch the player or objects through the air and sometimes into portals. The player must disable 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.[2][9] The heart-decorated Weighted Companion Cube reappears briefly.[10] 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.[2][9][11][12] All of these game elements open locked doors, or help or hamper the character from reaching the exit.
Paint-like gels (which are dispensed from pipes and can be transported through portals) impart certain properties to surfaces or objects coated with them.[2] Players can use orange Propulsion Gel to cross surfaces more quickly, blue Repulsion Gel to bounce from a surface,[13] and white Conversion Gel to allow surfaces to accept portals.[14] Only one type of gel can be effective on a certain surface at a time only. 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.
The game includes a two-player cooperative mode.[15] Two players can use the same console with a split screen, or can use a separate computer or console; Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and PlayStation 3 users can play with each other regardless of platform; a patch provided in late 2012 added split-screen support for Windows and Mac OS X users under "Big Picture" mode.[16] Both player-characters are robots that control separate portal guns and can use the other character's portals.[2] Each player's portals are of a different color scheme, whereof one is blue and purple and the other is orange and red.[8][17] A calibration chamber separates the characters to teach the players to use the communication tools and portals. Most later chambers are less structured and require players to use both sets of portals for laser or funnel redirection, launches, and other maneuvers.[18] The game provides voice communication between players, and online players can temporarily enter a split-screen view to help coordinate actions.[17] 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.[2][7][18] The game tracks which chambers each player has completed and allows players to replay chambers they have completed with new partners.
Portal 2's lead writer Erik Wolpaw estimates each campaign to be about six hours long.[3]Portal 2 contains in-game commentary from the game developers, writers, and artists. The commentary, accessible after completing the game once, appears on node icons scattered through the chambers.[19] 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.[5][7][20]
Plot
See also: Characters of Portal
Backstory
The Portal series is linked to the Half-Life series. The events in Portal take place between the first and second Half-Life games,[21] while most of Portal 2 is set "a long time after" the events in Portal and Half-Life 2.[22]
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 game 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".[23] 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.
Single-player campaign
In the Aperture Science complex, Chell wakes in a stasis chamber resembling a motel room. The complex has become dilapidated and is on the verge of collapse. Wheatley (Stephen Merchant), a personality core, guides her through the old test chambers in an attempt to escape.[24][25] They accidentally reactivate the dormant GLaDOS (Ellen McLain),[2] who separates Chell from Wheatley and begins rebuilding the laboratory.[26][27]
GLaDOS subjects Chell to new tests until Wheatley helps her escape again. They sabotage the Aperture manufacturing plants, then confront GLaDOS and perform a "core exchange", replacing her with Wheatley as the laboratory's controller. Wheatley, driven mad with power, attaches GLaDOS's personality core to a potato battery. GLaDOS tells Chell that Wheatley was designed as an "intelligence dampening core" producing illogical thoughts, created to hamper her own personality.[28] Infuriated, Wheatley drops Chell and GLaDOS through an elevator shaft to the laboratories' lowest level.
Chell retrieves GLaDOS and they form a reluctant partnership to stop Wheatley before his mistakes destroy the complex. Ascending through laborataries built in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, they discover audio recordings by Aperture founder Cave Johnson (J. K. Simmons);[29] the recordings reveal how Aperture slowly lost money and prestige, and that Johnson was poisoned by moon dust used to manufacture portal-conductive surfaces.[30] His last request was for the mind of his assistant Caroline (McLain) to be transferred to computer, creating GLaDOS. GLaDOS is troubled by the discovery.[30]
Chell and GLaDOS return to the modern chambers and navigate Wheatley's test chambers.[31] Chell attaches three corrupted personality cores (Nolan North)[32] to Wheatley and prepares to restore GLaDOS as controller. However, Wheatley destroys the button needed to activate the transfer, and the facility begins to self-destruct. When the roof collapses, Chell places a portal on the moon. She and Wheatley are pulled into the vacuum of space[33] while GLaDOS reasserts her control. GLaDOS retrieves Chell and Wheatley is left in space.[34] When Chell awakens, GLaDOS claims to have learned "valuable lessons" about humanity from the remnants of Caroline,[34] but deletes Caroline's personality.[35] Deciding that Chell is not worth the trouble of killing, GLaDOS releases her.[36]
Cooperative campaign
The cooperative story takes place after the single-player campaign and has some ties into it, but players are not required to play them in order.[37] Player characters Atlas and P-Body are bipedal robots who navigate five sets of test chambers together, each with a fully functioning portal gun. After completing a test chamber, the robots are disassembled and reassembled at the next chamber. After completing each set of chambers, they are returned to a central hub. The puzzles in each set of chambers focus on a particular testing element or puzzle-solving technique. In the first four sets, GLaDOS prepares the robots to venture outside of the test systems of Aperture Laboratories to recover data disks. She destroys them and restores their memories to new bodies—which also happens when they die in a test chamber hazard. 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.[38] At the end of the story, the robots gain entry to "the Vault", where humans are stored in stasis.[31] GLaDOS gives thanks to the robots on locating the humans, whom she sees as new test subjects, and the game ends.[38]
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