"...we're out of beta. We're releasing on time!" Preview

"Oh, it's you again? Well, hello! I've been extremely busy here, you know, over the past few years. Dead, yes. Because you killed me."

[cut]

The story of Chell, the main and only known live heroine of Portal, is sad and not without irony. After going through numerous trials, eliminating the equally primary and equally sole villainess, and even breathing fresh air outside the laboratory...

...manages to fall into a pose that called forth the "party escort bot." At least, that's what GLaDOS called him. And everything is the same as always...

Or is it?

Still Alive

The setup is fairly simple: we are awakened. To be a bit more precise, we are brought out of anabiosis. A convenient way to kill time, you know. For about a hundred years. And not to mention, after such a deep sleep, your head hurts, and there's also this round thing that won't stop talking...

By the way, meet him. The "thing" is called Wheatley, and he is a personality core. One of the many awakened at the end of the original game (they were the ones who had been "managing" (and not very successfully) the Laboratory all this time) and, by coincidence, our damned, damn chatty guide into the new old world. After a relatively short acquaintance, we return to the good old chamber with the Great and Terrible GLaDOS... where, under rather comical circumstances, we awaken her too.

"I think we should forget about all the disagreements between us. For science. You're a monster."

— GLaDOS

Vaguely (heh-heh) hinting that Chell owes her life a little, the iron lady "for science" voluntarily-coercively sends us back into the depths of the laboratory. And off go the droids through the pneumatic tubes!...

We do what we must because we can

It's unlikely that the modest group of students, who once created a small game about portals as part of a project, could even imagine that one day they would create, quoting Valve's head — Gabe Newell — "the best game in the history of the company." The best! Gabe is certainly quite the jokester, but far from being a fool. So, Counter-Strike and Half-Life are already nervously smoking on the sidelines. Just in case.

"Portal was a testing ground. Portal 2 is a game."

— Doug Lombardi, Marketing Director at Valve

The first Portal was a trial balloon, probing a rather unusual direction in the gaming industry. And it certainly succeeded! Portal could be hated, it could be loved, but very few could remain indifferent. The formula is simple: puzzle + action + dark humor = HUGE SUCCESS.

Portal 2 promises us the same, but more. Much more. The duration of the first part was criminally short, and it was mostly an experiment. Now, however, everything is serious: the development team has grown from eight people to a good thirty.

The Cake is a Lie

One of the first developers' statements regarding Portal 2, reduced to the most concise form, sounded like this: "We are tired of cakes!" Indeed, Portal relied on "three pillars": GLaDOS, the companion cube, and cake. All three were and remain symbols of the series, but at Valve, they wisely decided that repeating a joke doesn't make it funnier. And they went on the path of variety.

It's hard to say how strong the humor will be before the game is released, but what we have seen sets us up for a purely positive mood. Here, one could provide a handful of examples from just the first twenty minutes of gameplay, but perhaps that would be too harsh.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

For a good hundred years that Chell and Gladys shamelessly slept (though they had good reasons to do so), Aperture Science had become quite cluttered. With something green. Oh, wait, those are vines...

Yes, yes, it's unclear how, but a whole bunch of blooming and not-so-blooming greenery has burst through the ground. And this harms the neatness of results! So while we progress along the sallow and cracked walls, GLaDOS will impressively replace them with updated versions. But, frankly speaking, moving here is pretty difficult, and for an ordinary mortal — an impossible task. So what will help Chell survive in such harsh conditions?

One portal, two portals

Our main and only "weapon" is the portal gun. Its capabilities remain largely unchanged. However, let's repeat, just in case.

Suddenly, the portal gun can create portals. Two of them, in fact. An orange one and a blue one. You enter one and exit through the other. Then, "to speak in layman's terms," you can quickly rush back and, maintaining speed, hit straight in the face. Gravity, you heartless beast...

In addition to the portals, the portal gun has the already familiar repulsion... pardon, gravitational... in short, lightweight manipulator of a zero-level energy field. Despite its frightening name, it simply allows us to carry heavy objects like weighted cubes.

"Do not touch... anything whatsoever"

Of course, the surrounding space has also undergone its changes, and not all of them are pleasant. On the down side, new ways to kill yourself. Quickly sever your torso in half with a laser or squish Chell between panels? Sure, no problem. All for science!

There are special trampoline platforms ("faith plates"). If you stand on them or place something on them, that "something" will take off into the air for a long time, perhaps even into a wall.

Now we can control gravity a bit. The game features "transportation funnels." Roughly speaking, it's something like a one-way lift beam. There are also projected bridges. Both of these pass freely through portals.

The turrets we already know from the first part remain just as cute and deadly. How can you hold a grudge against those cuties with thin voices? And never mind that they shoot...

The ways to eliminate our lethal opponents have increased significantly. For example, you can burn them with that same laser by using special "redirecting" cubes. You just place one in front of the beam and... KILL IT WITH FIRE!

As an option, you can lift them with our "elevator" and then drop them. Or place a portal under their "feet." Or, with a scream of "It's Science!", kick them with gusto. Finally, esthetes can heed the turrets' pitiful pleas and set them free. Straight into the pneumatic tube. On the other end, depending on luck, they either hit the floor and tumble over or get tossed into the incinerator. Just make sure not to accidentally get sucked in with the victim...

Finally, the last innovation that came to Portal 2 along with the developers of the mini-game Tag: The Power of Paint — gels. If you spill them in any way (they go through portals and obey transportation funnels), they will produce curious effects: on the "propulsive" (orange) gel, Chell will run like crazy, and on the "repulsion" (blue) gel — jump like a coffee-drunk grasshopper. Moreover, in the latter case, no one will ask her desires — the gel repels everything that touches it. In theory, we will meet another gel that will stick objects to itself.

In my humble opinion, the gels in the game seem somewhat superfluous, and their technical implementation is rather crude — at least, that's the impression the videos give. However, first impressions can be deceiving.

...on the other hand, the sight of jumping turrets justifies the presence of gels for at least seventy percent.

Despite all this variety, the developers swear that they have managed to find a balance between difficulty and intuitive solvability of puzzles. All we can do is pray that this is really the case — for it is precisely here that the most vulnerable point of the entire game lies, and if there is a failure... no, let's not even think about it.

One white, another white, two cheerful droids!

You probably noticed that living beings in the Portal duology get... little attention. Since the release of the first part, there's been doubt about Chell's "humanity," reaching up to the assertion that she is an android...

Be that as it may, the situation changes little in the second part. Chell will become somewhat more noticeable to the player, mostly due to the fact that she will be actively addressed. From the cast of voice actors, one can assume that Wheatley will not be our only interlocutor. What form these interlocutors will take — unknown. But it's very unlikely that they'll be humans...

The role of "hardware" in Portal 2 is enormous. Moreover, exactly half the game will be played as a robot. The thing is that Portal 2 is not limited to single-player gameplay. Half the game consists of a completely separate storyline, narrating the adventures of two robots: Atlas and P-body. They are the Blue and Orange. They resemble personality cores, clad in turrets.

I think you may have already guessed that Portal 2 features a co-op gameplay mode. The storylines are indeed entirely separate and even more so — they occur at different times. GLaDOS, disillusioned after her death in people, began experimenting on more "reliable" robots. The action of the co-op mode takes place somewhere between the first and second parts. To the question of how this is even possible, since we grossly smashed Gladys at the end of the first part, recovering her only in the single-player half of the second, the game writer Eric Wolpaw mentioned Schrödinger's cat, thus hinting that GLaDOS this whole time was neither alive nor dead. An interesting statement.

However, our heroes don’t have much time to think about that: tests await. And they are much more complicated here and require a certain degree of subordination and, of course, collective brainstorming.

Interesting: Atlas has blue and purple portals, and P-body has orange and red. Notably, they can create portals through each other’s portals. This fact eliminates a whole range of various theories about how exactly portals work in this game world.

Due to the increased complexity, mortality increases sharply. Fortunately, the assembly of a new body takes mere seconds, so you won’t have to replay the level. The game also incorporates a whole range of cooperation tools. For example, in online play, it features "picture-in-picture" (in local play, it will be a split screen). There’s also the option to send various signals to your partner through the contextual menu. By principle, the latter somewhat resembles the voice command system from Left 4 Dead. In particular, you can dance or (somewhat more usefully) place a special marker to grab attention somewhere on a wall or some object.

\**

Even before its release, Portal 2 had already received numerous awards. Indeed, everything that has been shown to us is breathtaking and makes us believe that perhaps this genuinely will be Valve's new triumph and its "best game in the history of the company." If all the innovations, combined with what was already there, can gather into a unified, continuous line — we risk getting a "game of the year." Or at least a serious contender for that title. All that’s left is to hope for this and await the game release on April 21. Then everything will become clear.