Portal & Puzzles

I will be talking about Portal 2 specifically.

Portal 2 is a fantastic game that is a joy to play. Of course, this does not speak directly to the matter at hand: puzzles. However, in my view, it is the puzzles combined with the story that make it such a great game.

In most of the game, you’re simply trying to get from point A to point B, and there’s something in between those points to overcome. In many ways, this fits with a traditional 3d platformer, you have to figure out how to get to the end of the level. However, with the addition of multiple mechanics, chiefly the eponymous portal gun, this process is very much solving a puzzle. What sets Portal 2 apart from other puzzle games, however, is how tightly the puzzles fit into the story. I have been told that Portal 2 does not accomplish this with the same skill at the original Portal, but I cannot compare. In any case, Portal 2 has a complex story with multiple chapters, and the writing is such that each level feels like it gets you closer to your goal (or not, when that’s the point).

Also of particular interest is how the levels change. At the start of the game, everything is falling apart and in ruin. It is only when you accidentally resurrect the antagonist of the first game, who then sets herself to fixing the facility, does everything become clean and ‘scientific’ again, increasingly so with each level. When you put a buffoon in charge of the station, you’re sent to the bowels of the facility to the areas not used for decades (or at this point, millennia). In your attempt to return, you move through levels that reflect the appearance of various decades, the 50s through the 80s, until you can return to the surface, where the buffoon has caused things to fall apart a bit. In each of these, the puzzles reflect the consequences of your actions and the state of the facility.

Portal 2 is superb at using level design to reflect various aesthetics and thus to create a cohesive story environment.