Paul’s Top 10: Portal 2

Written by Paul Lehman

We don’t often talk about puzzle games on the podcast, but it’s definitely one of my favorite genres. Usually puzzle games are pretty simplistic like ibb & obb or Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. The focus tends to be on the puzzle nature of the game, and then a series of levels or difficulties that you work through. What sets apart Portal 2?

Portal 2 is a bit of a unicorn in that it not only showcases what I believe to be the greatest puzzle mechanics of all time, but it is also topped with a massive cherry on top made of memorable characters, storylines, and humor. We all know and love GLaDOS, the villain in the original title, and her work in Portal 2 is just as memorable, if not more so. We meet Wheatley for the first time, voiced brilliantly by Stephen Merchant, who starts off as our ally to help us escape. Unfortunately, after we replace the core of GLaDOS with Wheatley, the power goes to his head and he becomes the big bad in the sequel as he attempts to eliminate Chell, the person that you control in the game. This forces the player to have an uneasy alliance with GLaDOS, as she promises to help set things right if you help her reconnect to the laboratory. This part of the game delivers some of the best humor, as Wheatley puts GLaDOS into a potato battery, and you are forced to carry her around the laboratory in the middle portion of the game.

I assume that everyone reading this is familiar with the gameplay and how the Portal Gun works in Portal 2 so I won’t go into that here. What I will say is that the step up in difficulty from the first, the existence of the co-op campaign, and unlimited content in the Steam Workshop is what makes this one of my top 10 games of all time. It’s memorable, you get a whole lot of bang for your buck, and you can enjoy it with a friend. Asking anything else from a puzzle game would be unreasonable. Plus, you get another song from GLaDOS when the game ends.