Critical Play: Portal 2

I played Portal 2 for this critical play. Portal 2 is a puzzle-based game developed by Valve. There are single-player mode and cooperative mode for this game, and I’ve played both of them. In the single-player mode, the player controls a male character who is navigating the disserted science center by solving puzzles. In the beginning, the character wakes up in a room and receives intructions from a robot. The robot teaches the player how to move and what to do, and then sends the player to the science center. Portal is an important concept in this game, which is basically a gate to transfer you from space to space. Players will solve the puzzles mainly by correctly placing portals and making use of other available objects. To help players gradually get familiar with the mechanism, the game starts with buttons to open portals before the portal gun is given to the player. With the tutorials, this mechanism became easily understandable for me when I was playing this game for the first time.

There are different levels of difficulty in this game. As the player proceeds in the game, the puzzles will become increasingly challenging, and require more thinking process from the players. It was an enjoyable experience for me to solve these creatively designed puzzles. In fact, once you’ve learned the mechanism of the portal guns, the game won’t get too hard.

I also played this game with my friend in the cooperative mode. Each of us has a portal gun just like in the single-player mode, but we have to work together to solve the puzzles. Puzzles in the cooperative mode look more fun to me since there are more possibilities in the design of puzzles for multiple players. For example, in one of the scenes, we were initially separated, and each of us had access to different objects required to solve the puzzles. So we would have to think of ways to transport the objects between each other.