developed by Valve (Bellevue, WA)
project led by Joshua Weier
written by Erik Wolpaw, Jay Pinkerton, and Chet Faliszek

This was a total blast. A splendid performance through and through, a real pleasure, utterly charming.

So what is there to say?

Mediocrity inspires me to want to express myself — maybe as a kind of protest: “Dammit, my feelings do matter!” Mediocrity is obliviousness and obliviousness can be hurtful. But attention and care — the feeling that I’m in good hands — leaves me free to remain in my natural wordless state. Or at least my natural non-analytic state.

I think that’s at least somewhat true for everyone, because it’s fundamental to the nature of the mind. It’s why the word “criticism” denotes both negative response and conceptually sophisticated response. That’s what concepts are for: coping with problems. Whereas when someone is genuinely delighted, no matter how “smart,” they’re likely to lapse into The Chris Farley Show: “Remember when that thing happened? That was awesome!” Because what more is there to want from pleasure itself than simply to revisit it? Perhaps there is one thing to want: to render it more social, by asking “Remember when?” or reenacting it.

Of course you, dear reader, haven’t played Portal 2, so we can’t reminisce together. I can’t just quote it to you and say “awesome.” And I’m certainly not going to spoil it by saying “well, get a load of this!” and describing stuff. Because the surprise is an important part of the offering; it works like a wrapped present, and far be it from me to unwrap it for you just as a way of demonstrating my enthusiasm. You can just trust me: I am enthusiastic. I scarfed the whole game down in two days, because I wanted to.

One of the greatest charms of the original Portal was in the fact that it had no obligation to be charming at all. The collection of abstract puzzles — and despite the impression you might get from something like the trailer above, these games fundamentally are collections of abstract puzzles — would constitute a perfectly satisfying game presented “straight,” without any theatrics at all. So a great part of what makes the showmanship so engaging is that it’s all pure surplus. And I wouldn’t want to rob it off that status by advertising it as the main attraction. It’s not. The main attraction is puzzles. I love puzzles.

(To be fair, after finishing the first game, you bring different expectations to the second one, so you very well might experience it as a storytelling machine that just happens to be propelled along by solving puzzles. It’s to the game’s great credit that it works equally well that way. In fact you might say it explicitly invites you to switch your attitude back and forth, which you can do without experiencing any disorientation because both components have received equal polish.)

I’ve said elsewhere that I relish the sense of imaginary space into which puzzles place me. Proust talks about memories relieving us of the anxieties of time because they place us outside it; similarly, engagement with abstract entities in geometrical worlds relieves me of various anxieties of physical existence, because it occupies the part of my mind that needs to orient itself in space, but still keeps me comfortably outside reality itself. Puzzles situate me into my own imagination space, the unbounded, pregnant, hypothetical space in which my mind stretches out, cat-like, when it is most truly relaxed.

For me a lot of the joy of the Portal games — particularly 2 — is that they have a real intuition for the elastic, spooky, unreal quality of such imagined space, and they embroider their story whimsically on to that. Instead of trying to nail the puzzle world down on the plinth of some reductive fiction, they let it be what it is: the zone of all fantasy, about which anything said will be pleasantly absurdist. The storytelling is constrained at the center, by particular characters and relationships, but around the periphery it stretches off to infinity. It offers me the same exuberant rewards as Brazil, a movie that takes place in a series of charismatic spaces that, it tacitly acknowledges, can only coexist in an impossible world, which is to say inside someone’s head.

In a way, this goes all the way back to the ridiculously vast underground complex in Half-Life, which inaugurated Valve’s 15-year tongue-in-cheek relationship with cold war imagery — more specifically with particle accelerators, dams, mines, tunnels, bridges, power plants, and other engineering projects of mind-boggling scale. An interesting zone of comic nightmare emerges as this kind of real-world awe gets inflated and inflated until it overlaps with the fantastical awe of the infinite plane, where grid puzzles take place.

In the commentary included with the game, a developer says that when they first put a certain big door into the game, it came out about five times bigger even than planned, but they thought it was funny that way and left it in, joking about making it a selling point that Portal 2 contained the biggest door ever to appear in a video game. I don’t know if that’s in fact true; I remember some awfully big doors in, say, the original Tomb Raider (1996). But back then, environmental gigantism felt like it came of the designers being indiscriminate and/or lazy, and was generally something to be nauseated by, or awed by in a dangerous way, a private way. Here, the nightmare of the infinite is delivered with a knowing grin, a wink that takes it all in. I thought the enormous door was funny, because awe is funny. Because things, all things, real or imagined, are absurd. What could be more delightful than that?

Okay, so I’m spoiling this one thing: there’s a really big door somewhere in the game.

The only thing I can comfortably compare this kind of entertainment to, in its effect, is Pixar, which similarly manages to make you feel well cared-for while you’re invited to meditate on supernatural textural or spatial intensities. (Usually subtler ones than these, but then again think of the fantastical spaces of Inside Out — or for that matter the door warehouse in Monsters Inc., which in many ways is exactly like Portal.) But unlike Pixar, Valve feels no obligation to be edifying. Whatever is there is there because it pleased the developers, and then tested well, and no other reason. So there’s something very pure about the ride. No hugging, no learning, no nothing: just stuff they think you’ll like.

I was particularly delighted at all the moments that from a strict “gameplay” point of view were neither fish nor fowl — not really a puzzle, not really story, not really anything — because they always worked anyway. It always flowed. My imagination always felt at home.

This experience came as a real breath of fresh air after the artistic frustrations of BioShock, which sounded so much more promising on paper than it felt in practice. It is so immediately obvious to me that testing was a far larger part of the process of developing this game than that one. I always easily knew where I was, what I was doing, what it meant, how it felt. I recognize that that’s very hard to achieve. It takes discipline and confidence to tailor things to the way people actually are, and not the way they think they are. This game met me where I actually was.

There’s some really great voice work in this game, by real people, but talking about it, or them, would, I think, be spoilage. So would almost anything. So I’m going to stop.

I’m delighted just by the very fact that there can be an abstract puzzle game so utterly packed with inventive storytelling surprises that it’s a spoiler-bomb. I wish all puzzle games were like this, loaded up like a Christmas tree. Okay, maybe not all. But I at least wish this was a rich and well-populated genre — the puzzle game as second-person Pixar movie — instead of just these two games plus a couple of less successful imitators.

So far. There’s time yet. Let’s keep it coming, computer games!

I’ve known since the day I bought this that I had something particularly tasty in store for me, waiting in my backlog. I was right. I feel a little sad that I no longer have it to look forward to. But, you know, there’s a lot of other stuff out there. Onward.