Portal 2 preview

“Remember, you’re looking for a gun that makes holes. Not bullet holes. Don’t worry – you’ll figure it out.” Valve has a knack with pithy lines, but this one really gets to the nub of Portal. It may have come as a shortform component part of The Orange Box, but it left having inspired enduring memes and appearing to have created a whole new subgenre with its deft appropriation of the firstperson shooter as a story-led puzzle game.

It’s a line spoken by Wheatley, a robotic AI consisting of just an eye which rolls along a ceiling-mounted trackway and is voiced by a neurotically stuttering and burbling Stephen Merchant. He’s here at Portal 2’s beginning to save us from imprisonment in, well, what looks like a motel room. The first time we awoke, its brown ’80s décor, complete with yellowed palm-tree mural on one wall, was dingy. A long time has passed until this second waking, though – its now ruinous state only worsening when Wheatley somehow moves the entire space, setting our perspective tumbling before the walls tear apart, revealing that our room is in fact a container among many, many others containing test subjects in a vast, crumbling hangar: 10,000-odd, Wheatley says.

We’ve come to Valve’s new studio in Bellevue, Washington, to play the early sections of both Portal 2’s singleplayer story and cooperative modes. There’s not a lot we can imagine adding to Portal, which by its end had seemed to explore every dimension of its one-trick (but what a trick) gun, but that’s the challenge Valve has set itself for the sequel. And what other way to approach it than with one of the oldest in the book: an apocalypse. A bygone apocalypse, anyway.

Wheatley uses our room to smash through a wall, and we fall through its floor to land in a glass cubicle just like the one in which Portal began. Now, though, Aperture Science lies quiet and broken, destroyed in the aftermath of GLaDOS’ destruction at the end of that first game. A soft, male AI voice calmly intones: “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties due to circumstances of potentially apocalyptic significance beyond our control. However, thanks to emergency testing protocols, testing can continue… so science can still be done, even in the event of environmental, social, economic or structural collapse.”

Edge Staff