At it's heart, Portal 2, Valve's 2011 first person puzzler, is a dystopia. In the tradition of dystopian fiction, it takes a negative trend from the society of the time, and asks what that society would look like if the trend were brought to it's logical conclusion. Dystopia always starts with a question. "What if our fixation with security led to nation-wide surveillance?" "What if our understanding of DNA allowed us to design human beings?" Or in the case of the Portal series, "What if scientific pursuits existed independent of moral standards?"
What separates the Portal series, and Portal 2 in particular, from other stories of science gone wrong is that instead of simply criticising, it examines the paradoxical nature of the dilemma through its gameplay.
The player controls Chell, a silent protagonist, as she awakes to find the Aperture Science facility, in which she is prisoner, crumbling around her. The game's narrative moves forward on the relationship between Wheatley (Stephen Merchant), a personality sphere, and Chell, as they set out to escape the facility before it falls to the ground.
Like in it's predecessor, interaction with the game-world is done almost exclusively with the portal gun. Mechanically, this turns the facility into one big puzzle, forcing the player to use portal placement to reach areas that are otherwise inaccessible. Narratively, this communicates to the player Chell's weakness and vulnerability. Her escape from Aperture is not possible through any skill of her own, but depends entirely on one of their inventions. Valve makes this clear in the moments between puzzles, when the player walks at a slow crawl through the high-ceilinged, stark white, desolate hallways. The scale of the games areas always read as oppressive. They work to reinforce the idea that Chell is insignificant amidst the marvels of science around her.
Contradictorily, Portal 2's dialogue is pure comedy, and in the vein of Monty Python or theMuppets, is always self-consciously aware of the absurdity if its situations. The script is tight and well crafted, accomplishing a rarity in video games of being both dialogue heavy yet feeling like every line is a keeper. Similar to Python's Life of Brian, it is comedy with an edge. The jokes come fast, and especially in the case of rogue A.I GlaDOS (Ellen McLain), the intent always seems to be not just funny, but funny yet true.
While the series' original instalment was certainly funny, Valve really revels in it this time around. Great comedic characters shine when put in situations outside their comfort zones, and Valve gets a lot of mileage out of their small cast. There is a good deal of character growth, even in characters like GlaDOS, who may have previously seemed limited in their versatility.
GlaDOS remains victim of her nature and is determined to continue testing, though the test facility falls around her. Valve seems to use her as a stand in for the world of science at large. Her dialogue is full of misunderstanding and redundancy, and Valve 's humour always serves to undercut and reveal the true nature of the position she represents.
But what makes this all work as a game is that this scientific allegory is fun throughout. The marketing slogan, "Now you're thinking with Portals," is apt for the brain exercise you must commit to when considering the rules of the game world. The puzzle design is strong, and Valveexpertly introduces new elements to puzzles exactly when you're becoming comfortable with the existing ones. The procedure of deconstructing a complex maze down to a clear path is the greatest joy in the game.
Following the precedent set by the Half-Life series, Valve has once again set the standard for how these ideas should be presented throughout a game. The action never breaks on account of the dialogue. There are no cut scenes, which adds to the feeling that you are a participant in this story, rather than solving a puzzle and the story happening to you.
The world of Portal 2 is rendered in such a way that neither the serious nor humorous moments of the game feel out of place. The sterile science facility is coloured with splashes of Nickelodeon-eqsue slime, which allow you to enjoy a bounce around in the monument of human self-destruction.
The power of Portal 2 is in the merger of all of these things, and the implications they have for each other. No matter how absurd the worldview of GlaDOS is revealed to be, Chell lives in a world so changed by it that she relies on its creations to survive. When the ideas held by what GlaDOS represents manifest themselves, people become depended on them. Populations have surrounded themselves with various technologies, and entrenched them in society so that escaping them isn't as easy as just rebuking them.
Valve can't answer the questions the game raises, but the problem like the game itself is a puzzle. They do well in illuminating through puzzles the puzzle we are all in.