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| By Marc N. Kleinhenz |
Being a sequel, Portal 2 is automatically assumed to contain at least a certain amount of carryover from its predecessor, retreading at least in part either in terms of narrative or gameplay (or both).
And while Valve’s latest does, indeed, lean a bit heavily upon its progenitor, it ends up being an expansive experience that, in a number of ways, couldn’t be farther from the original – particularly in regards to the story.
Whereas Portal featured an (ultimately futile) escape from Aperture Science’s labyrinthine testing chambers that culminated in the demise of its artificially intelligent overlord, GLaDOS, the sequel eschews this straightforward narrative simplicity and instead transforms its story into something of a revolving door of characters, themes, and locations, interchanging falls from grace with second chances and intermixing innocence with corruption.
Oh, and there’s humor, too.
The character of Wheatley is the player’s first exposure to this newfound storytelling fluidity.
The plucky personality core has as his only motivation escape, placing him on the same level as the playable character, Chell; that he only manages to bungle things up, inadvertently reactivating GLaDOS and placing the ramshackle Enrichment Center back under her merciless auspices, only reinforces this sense of identification (it was Chell, after all, who promptly [and retroactively] assumed the Party Escort Position after finally flinging her way to freedom, resulting in her recapture). Quirky, affable, and extremely Australian, he is instantly likable and easily one of the finest-written and -performed characters in all of gaming’s (admittedly not-too-illustrious) history.
All of which, of course, presages his fall.
After helping the player best GLaDOS, wonderfully stuffing her inside a potato in a bout of totalitarian revelry, he takes her place literally only to assume it figuratively, as well; he goes from clearing the way to the world outside to enslaving Chell within the bowels of the facility in five seconds flat, motivated by a drug-like addiction to testing and an insatiable compulsion to that splendidly amorphous entity called science. The hapless comic sidekick is now the deranged antagonist – but at least he still says things like “seriously” and “mate.”
It’s a reversal that incites yet another: GLaDOS, constrained to her potato battery-powered module, is literally strapped to Chell’s ever-present Handheld Portal Device and rides shotgun on a retro trip through Aperture’s oldest strata of testing chambers and research hubs.
As if having the disposed despot become a literally useless tagalong isn’t enough to (start to) humanize the character by showing a different aspect of her personality through vulnerability and weakness, inadvertently exposing her origins as the product of a mind-to-computer transfer – from Caroline, the former assistant to Aperture Science CEO Cave Johnson and the individual ultimately named as his successor – certainly is. GLaDOS goes from being a one-dimensional AI to a fully-rounded person, both physically and metaphorically, in the player’s eyes. And in hers, too – at the discovery of her humanity, she finds herself the sudden recipient of empathy, growing concerned for the physical safety as well as the emotional well-being of her former lab rat. It’s the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Too bad the end isn’t as warm and fuzzy.
Although ultimately successful in helping guide Chell in removing Wheatley, GLaDOS almost instantly deletes her newly rediscovered human memories once she is back in power, returning (more or less) to her default state. When combined with Wheatley’s banishment to a low orbit around the moon(!), the restoration of the status quo is complete: the latter (though now repentant) is confined in a seemingly inescapable environment, while the former returns to her habitual testing, this time with specially constructed bots as opposed to those too-pesky-for-their-own-good humans. The end of Portal 2, in other words, looks strongly like its beginning, just as Chell ended where she began in the first Portal; it’s apparently fairly difficult to get anywhere in Valve’s little slice of reality.
Except, of course, to the moon. Its inclusion at the climax of the game is not at all incongruous.
Think of Aperture, with its perpetual shuffling of musical chairs and giant reset buttons, as a kind of purgatory situated deep underground; reaching out to the heavens, then, not only completes this thematic motif, it also ends up becoming the ultimate expression of choice and direction from the one character who actually does decide and arrive at a final destination – with a reincarnated Companion Cube, to boot. Even Chell’s ascension to the surface of the planet, replete with a chorus of angelic robotic voices, plays on these celestial harp strings.
That Chell makes for one heavy-set angel can be overlooked.
For science.
