Portal 2 (2011)
Portal 2 is a 2011 platform video game made by Valve and Electronic Arts.
GLaDOS remembers you. Valve's sequel wakes Chell up inside an Aperture Science testing facility that has fallen apart badly since she was last in it, hands her the portal gun back, and gives the test-administering AI a personal reason to want her in the chambers again.
The tool is still two linked holes in the world. Shoot one on a floor and one on a wall, and your momentum carries straight through, so every puzzle is a physics problem you solve by rethinking where down is. The sequel keeps that idea clean and builds outward from it, and adds a separate co-op campaign for two players, which is where the design turns genuinely mean, because half of every solution belongs to somebody else and you have no reliable way to explain your half.
What people still talk about is the writing. Chell never says a word, so the entire game is carried by machines talking at her: GLaDOS and her passive-aggressive contempt, and Wheatley, a well-meaning idiot of a personality core who is nowhere near as helpful as he intends to be. It is one of the funniest things ever written for a game, and the comedy keeps opening onto something much sadder underneath about a facility built to test people who were never going to be let out.
Quick answers
What is Portal 2 about?
GLaDOS remembers you. Valve's sequel wakes Chell up inside an Aperture Science testing facility that has fallen apart badly since she was last in it, hands her the portal gun back, and gives the test-administering AI a personal reason to want her in the chambers again. The tool is still two linked holes in the world. Shoot one on a floor and one on a wall, and your momentum carries straight through, so every puzzle is a physics problem you solve by rethinking where down is. The sequel keeps that idea clean and builds outward from it, and adds a separate co-op campaign for two players, which is where the design turns genuinely mean, because half of every solution belongs to somebody else and you have no reliable way to explain your half. What people still talk about is the writing. Chell never says a word, so the entire game is carried by machines talking at her: GLaDOS and her passive-aggressive contempt, and Wheatley, a well-meaning idiot of a personality core who is nowhere near as helpful as he intends to be. It is one of the funniest things ever written for a game, and the comedy keeps opening onto something much sadder underneath about a facility built to test people who were never going to be let out.
When was Portal 2 released?
Portal 2 was released on 18 April 2011.
Who made Portal 2?
Portal 2 was made by Valve and Electronic Arts.
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Explore Portal 2 guides
Portal 2 in our writing
- Companion guide: First-Person Shooters: The Complete Guide to Gaming Down the Barrel
- Companion guide: Mad Scientists
- Companion guide: Robots & AI
- Companion guide: Valve: Half-Life, Portal and the Studio That Kept Rewriting the Rules
A few thoughts on Portal 2
2001: A Space Odyssey wrote the template GLaDOS runs on, a machine too calm and too courteous to trust, and the dread under Kubrick's computer is exactly the dread sitting under the jokes here. WALL·E is the other side of that coin, a machine you are asked to love in a facility humans walked away from, and it shares Portal's habit of doing all its emotional work without dialogue.
Martha Wells's Artificial Condition hands the narration to the AI itself, dry, reluctant and very funny about the humans it is stuck with. And The Orange Box: Original Soundtrack collects the music from Chell's first outing, including the song everybody still quotes.
Games with writing as sharp as Portal 2
Portal 2 lands its comedy and its melancholy through voices in your ear, GLaDOS and Wheatley talking while you solve the room. These carry that same confidence in story and character, letting dialogue and worldbuilding do as much work as the mechanics, funny or unsettling by turns.
Story-driven single-player games to play after Portal 2
Once Portal 2's credits roll you want another world worth finishing. These are the big single-player campaigns built to be played start to end for the story, generous with character and set piece, the kind of games people rank against each other for years.