Chell and GLaDOS Have Unfinished Business

It was an extreme relief to me when Valve's Erik Wolpaw let it be known that Portal 2 was moving beyond the "cake jokes" of the original. This quote that Gamasutra got out of Wolpaw says it best:

"We didn't jettison everything, but I absolutely do not want to try and resurrect a three-year-old meme. That seems like it would be kind of sad. It's not a good idea."

With that in mind, I was already of the opinion that Portal 2 couldn't lose. But after seeing some of the single-player during a brief demo in a very dark room and playing through a handful of areas in the game's new cooperative campaign, there's a lot more going for Portal 2 than its refusal to dredge up a bunch of worn-out jokes.
     
Most of what we were shown took the form of new objects and abilities that take the puzzle-solving elements of the first game in additional directions. As you might expect, a lot of these new things have totally ridiculous names.

Take, for example, the "Aerial Faith Plate." It's a ground-based tile that acts as a catapult, launching you (or any cubes you happen to drop onto it) off to another location. Then there's the Excursion Funnel, which is a sort of tractor beam that catches items--like cubes--and trucks them along a path leading out from some kind of emitter, presumably. By using portals with the funnel, you can direct objects through portals and direct them around a level. The demo video showed a cube being raised up and along a very long path, where it was pulled out of the funnel at the end and used to proceed.

The Pneumatic Diversity Vent works with portals, as well, but this appears to be more of a disposal chute that sucks up anything put in its way. By slapping a portal underneath the vent and another one in a room full of turrets, you'll quickly clear a path as the turrets get sucked up into the vent and whisked away. You'll also guide bridges made of light through portals, extending pathways and, you know, solving more puzzles. There are also two types of gel that you can direct around with portals to "paint" various surfaces and change their properties. One type of goo increases your movement speed when you're running on painted surfaces while the other makes you jump higher.

All of this sounds like a lot to take in, and when we were shown a video of a lot of these various things put together, it looks crazy. It looks like the sort of thing that'd be way harder than anything you saw in the first game. But the developers at Valve claim that the goal is to introduce all of these new concepts to you at an easy-to-accept pace, which should hopefully leave you ready to take on the more challenging portions of the game. Of course, if you're not smart enough to figure things out for yourself, you could always bring a friend.

Portal 2 will contain a cooperative campaign that puts two players in the roles of a pair of portal-gun-toting robots. It'll contain levels that are completely separate from the single-player game, and it'll have its own story, as well. Each robot will be able to create two portals, so you'll have four different portal colors going at any given time. A big part of the levels I saw involved using the light bridges with portals to "catch" players that were launching off of catapults, which adds more rigid timing requirements than you might expect. Along with voice chat, the game also has an integrated set of communication tools that let you highlight walls and other specific spots. This is key for when you're telling your partner "no, shoot the portal right here."

With unique campaigns to play alone or with another player and the number of different elements being added to the world of Portal, Portal 2 looks like it'll have more than enough to justify its existence as a full-fledged retail game. It'll be out sometime in 2011 on Xbox 360, PC, and, yes, PlayStation 3.