lol fuck this game and fuck you if you like it. dead serious, there's nothing worth treasuring about this pro-abuse, pro-gaslight, pro-manipulation story that legitimately thinks the prioritization of a shitty, sociopathic bitch's life is worth more than, or just as viable as, the lives and safety of an entire town full of innocent people. Chloe Price is the absolute worst, the Vriska Serket of video gaming, a megalomaniacal and self-interested monster of a person that never gets the comeuppance she truly deserves due to the game giving her way too much sympathy, bias, and empathy. Just because she's an alt girl that dyes her hair doesn't magically absolve her of being a massive piece of shit, and Maxine is such a doormat of a protagonist that she also never properly brings Chloe to task for being the biggest bitch in Oregon. Since Max is the soulless audience surrogate, her attitude on Chloe is supposed to reflect our own, which means the game expects us to care and go along with Chloe's manipulative antics.

When the game isn't battering you with its terrible characters or its rancid dialogue, it refuses to properly explain or clarify how Max's powers work, leading to a long grocery list of confusing moments and plotholes and shit that just doesn't make sense. The time travel bullshit adds nothing to the overarching narrative, and that's not even getting into how the game approaches its 'moral choices', or rather, how it doesn't approach those supposed 'choices' you can make because all of them will be invalidated by the end. It doesn't matter if Kate Marsh kills herself or not, because her survival actually depends entirely on the final choice in the game, a choice that renders all other moments where you're made to make a "choice" completely irrelevant.

god this game is fucking bad. What sucks is that it kinda had the chance to be good. Take away the time-travel powers, make Kate the deuteragonist instead of Chloe and make Chloe the main villain that tries to sabotage and manipulate Max and Kate's friendship in the hopes of keeping Max all to herself, and bam, you have a much clearer and healthier cautionary narrative about the horrors of toxicity and gaslighting. Make Chloe the JD / Gary Smith to Max's Veronica / Jimmy Hopkins and the story instantly works a lot more. But, no. Chloe is beauty and the beast all in one, except she isn't even all that hot, she looks like trailer park skank garbage, and she's more than a beast, she's the fucking Bom from Can of Worms. wretched game. amazing how inFamous: Second Son approached the exact same 'indie alt punk aesthetic set in the rainy northwest' template and did it far better and far more timelessly than Life is Strange tried to a year after Second Son came out. grgnrhgrrnghrngh

Portal 2 is a game that means so much to me. It's a game I genuinely believe is as close to perfect as one can possibly be. From its writing, to its gameplay, to its visuals, everything about it is just fantastic.

I've never been able to recover from the time a friend played it for the first time and he said "Oh so you probably based your entire personality around this game in high school" because he was 100% spot on. I even had a Portal 2 backpack in high school. All four years.

Playing it again with the developer commentary is also a great time, highly recommend it.

A masterclass of the medium and in my opinion without a doubt the greatest puzzle game of all time. It took everything from the original and ramped it up and tuned it to perfection. The puzzles are more varied, more inventive, more clever, bigger, better, with more viable options, new items to use to solve them, and still boasting amazing physics that feel damn near perfect. It succeeds yet once again in making you feel smart when you get the aha moment.

The story in the first game was ok but the story in Portal 2 is so much deeper and nuanced. We get to see some of how Apatuer Science was created and what led it to becoming what it currently was. GLaDOS is back and funnier than ever and new robot Wheatley is hilarious. The humor is on point from beginning to end.

This is phenomenal game and deserves all the praise and more that it has received over the last decade.

Portal 2 feels like the fully realized version of the original Portal. At it's core it feels the same, but the sequel just has so much more going for it, more personality.

In this game, Chell is no longer bound to the test chambers of Aperture Science like in the first Portal. After an incident in the story, she decides to take a little stroll through an abandoned salt mine and the backstage parts within the facility while she's at it. All of this while she is accompanied by three unique companions throughout the game. Speaking of the companions, the dialogue in Portal 2 is a big improvement over the one in Portal. In the first game, GLaDOS' comments happened every now and then, but here you pretty much have a narrator by your side all the time. This alone makes for quite the tonal shift in atmosphere to Portal, which had a pretty isolated and empty feeling to it - I can see how people prefer that, but personally I really enjoyed the extra dialogue and characters, since GLaDOS' remarks in the first game were one of the best parts for me. Back to the atmosphere in general, I think Valve did a really good job with setting an unique vibe for each individual area. My personal favorite is the salt mine, the vintage setting really landed for me!

As for gameplay, Portal 2 introduces a variety of mechanics to make the puzzles more enjoyable than the first game. Energy balls are completely gone this time and are replaced with light bridges, gravity beams, new cube variants and three different sorts of paint. Sounds like overkill at first, but those mechanics don't really overstay their welcome and they are really fun to play around with.

The narrative weaves those puzzles together in a logical way, while also delving into the background story of Chell and Aperture Science; there's some really good worldbuilding in there. The companions aren't one-note personalities and each one adds to the story with a different purpose, which makes them distinctive and memorable in their own ways.

Overall it's an amazing puzzle game, absolutely deserves the praise it's been getting. Had a good time with the main story, but the community maps are a nice treat if you're still in the mood for some more Portal action.