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"Ah, is that you again? Well, hello! I've been quite busy here, you know, for the last few years. I was dead, yeah. Because you killed me."

[cut]

The story of Chell, the main and only known living heroine of Portal, is sad and not without irony. Having gone through numerous trials, annihilating the equally main and equally sole villainess and having already breathed fresh air outside the lab...

...she somehow manages to fall into a pose that summoned the "party assistant robot." At least that's what GLaDOS called him. And once again, everything is the same as before...

Or is it?

Still Alive

The premise is quite simple: we are awakened. To be more precise, we are brought out of stasis. A convenient way to pass the time, you know. For about a hundred years. And not only does your head hurt after such a deep sleep, but there's also this round thing that keeps babbling...

By the way, meet him. The "thing" is called Wheatley and he is a personality core. One of many awakened at the end of the original game (they were the ones who "managed" (not very successfully) the Lab all this time) and, by the way, our damn, damn talkative guide into the new old world. After a relatively brief introduction, we return to the old good room with the Great and Terrible GLaDOS... where, under quite comical circumstances, we awaken her too.

"I think we should forget about all disagreements between us. For the sake of science. You monster."

— GLaDOS

Vaguely (heh-heh) hinting that Chell "owed" her a bit for her life, the Iron Lady "for science" voluntarily-coerced sends us back into the depths of the laboratory. And here we go, droids through the pneumatic tubes!..

We do what we must because we can

It is unlikely that the modest team of students, who once created a small game about portals as part of a project http://www.gamer.ru/portal/narbacular-drop, could even imagine that one day they would be making, quoting Valve's head — Gabe Newell — "the best game in the entire history of the company." The best! Gabe, of course, is quite a joker, but far from being Mulignö. So Counter-Strike and Half-Life have already started nervously puffing on the sidelines. Just in case.

"Portal was a testbed. Portal 2 is a game."

— Doug Lombardi, marketing director of Valve

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

From Portal 2, we're promised the same thing, but more. Much more. The duration of the first part was criminally short, and it was an experiment overall. Now, however, it's serious business: the development team has grown from eight people to a good thirty.

The Cake is a Lie

One of the first developer statements regarding Portal 2, if shortened to the maximum brief and succinct form, sounded like this: "The cakes are getting old!" Indeed, Portal was held up by "three pillars": GLaDOS, the Companion Cube, and the cake. All three were and remain symbols of the series, but Valve wisely decided that repeating a joke doesn't make it funnier. And they went for variety.

Before the game's release, it's hard to say how high the level of humor is, but what we've seen sets an exclusively positive tone. Here you could bring up a handful of examples from just the first twenty minutes of gameplay, but that might be too cruel.

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away Laboratory...

For a good hundred years that Chell and Gladys have been shamelessly snoozing (though they had respectful reasons for that), Aperture Science has gotten quite cluttered. With something green. Oh, wait, are those vines...

Yes, yes, it’s not quite clear how, but a whole bunch of flowering and non-flowering things have broken through to the surface. And this harms the finesse of the results! So while we will be moving along the pallid and cracked walls, GLaDOS will dramatically replace them with updated versions. But, frankly speaking, movement here is quite difficult, and for an ordinary mortal, it’s an impossible task. So what will help Chell survive in such dire conditions?

One portal, two portals

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

Suddenly, the portal gun can create portals. Two of them. An orange one and a blue one. You enter one, exit from the other. And then, "speaking in layman’s terms," it could quickly fly back and, maintaining speed, hit straight in the face. Gravity, you heartless creature...

In the portal gun apart from, in fact, portals, there is also a familiar gravity well... pardon, a gravity manipulator... in short, a lightweight manipulator of zero-level energy field. Despite its scary name, it simply allows us to carry heavy objects like weighted cubes.

"Do not touch... anything at all"

Of course, the surrounding space has its changes too, and not just pleasant ones. On the sad side, there are new ways to kill yourself. Cut half your body off with a laser in a hurry or crush Chell between panels? Sure, go ahead. All for science!

Special springboard platforms ("faith plates") have appeared. If you stand on them or place something, that "something" will take a long flight somewhere far away and for a long time. Possibly even into a wall.

Now we can slightly manage gravity. In the game, "transportation funnels" have appeared. Roughly speaking, they are something like a unidirectional beam-lift. Also, there are projected bridges. Both freely pass through portals.

The turrets familiar to us from the first part remain as adorable and deadly as ever. How can you get mad at these cuties with their tiny voices? And it’s nothing that they shoot...

The ways to annihilate our deadly foes have also greatly increased. For example, you can burn them with the same laser using special "redirecting" cubes. You slide one right on the path of the beam and... KILL IT WITH FIRE!

Alternatively, you could lift them with our "elevator" and then drop them. Or put a portal under their “feet.” Or kick them enthusiastically with the exclamation "It’s Science!" Finally, aesthetes can listen to the turrets' pleading requests and let them go. Right into the pneumatic tube. On the other end, depending on luck, they will either hit the floor and flip over or end up in the incinerator. Just make sure not to accidentally get sucked in along with the victim...

Finally, the last innovation that came to Portal 2 along with developers of the mini-game Tag: The Power of Paint — gels. If spilled in any way (they pass through portals and obey transportation funnels), they will produce curious effects: on the "propulsive" (orange) gel, Chell will run like the wind, while on the "repulsive" (blue) gel — bounce like a caffeinated grasshopper. Moreover, in the latter case, her wishes won’t be asked — the gel repels everything that touches it. In theory, we will meet another gel that will stick objects to itself.

In my humble opinion, gels in the game seem a bit excessive, and their technical implementation is quite rough — that's the impression that the videos give, at least. However, first impressions can be deceptive.

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

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

One white, another white, two happy droids!

You’ve likely noticed that there’s little room for the living in the Portal duology. The "humanity" of Chell has been questioned since the release of the first part, leading as far as claims that she is an android...

In any case, in the second part, the situation won’t change much. Chell becomes slightly more noticeable to the player, mainly because she will be actively spoken to. By the composition of the voice actors, one can assume that Wheatley won't be our only conversationalist. What shape these conversationalists will take is unknown. But it's very unlikely they will be human...

The role of "metal" in Portal 2 is huge. Moreover, exactly half of the game, we will be playing as a robot. The thing is, Portal 2 doesn't limit itself to single-player gameplay. Exactly half of the game is a completely separate storyline narrating the adventures of two robots: Atlas and P-body. They are also Blue and Orange. They resemble personality cores covered in turrets.

I think you've already guessed that Portal 2 has a cooperative gameplay mode. The storylines are indeed completely separate and even more so — happening at different times. GLaDOS, disappointed in people after her death, began experimenting with more "reliable" robots. The co-op mode takes place somewhere between the first and second parts. When asked about how this is possible given that we roughly broke GLaDOS at the end of the first part and only revived her in the single-player half of the second, the game’s writer Eric Walpole mentioned Schrödinger’s cat, hinting that GLaDOS has been neither alive nor dead all this time. An intriguing statement.

However, our heroes don’t have much time to think about this: the tests don’t wait. And they are much more difficult and require a certain degree of subordination and, naturally, collective brainstorming.

It’s interesting: Atlas has blue and purple portals, while P-Body has orange and red. Notably, they can create their portals through their partner's portals. This fact crosses out a whole series of various theories about how exactly portals work in this game world.

Due to the increased difficulty, mortality sharply rises. Luckily, assembling a new body only takes a few seconds, so there’s no need to replay the level from scratch. The game also includes a wide range of cooperation tools. For example, in remote play, it’s "picture-in-picture" (while local play will have a split screen). There’s also the ability to signal your partner in various ways through the contextual menu. In essence, the latter somewhat resembles the voice command systems from Left 4 Dead. In particular, you can dance or (which is a little more useful) place a special marker to attract attention somewhere on a wall or some object.

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Even before its release, Portal 2 received several awards in absentia. Indeed, all that we have been shown astounds the imagination and makes one believe that, perhaps, this is indeed a new triumph for Valve and its "best game in the entire history of the company." If all the innovations, combined with what already existed, can come together into a unified, continuous line — we risk getting the "game of the year." Or, at the very least, a serious contender for that title. All we can do is hope for it and wait for the game's release on April 21. Then everything will become clear.