interesting to revisit this ten years later. the humour all feels incredibly of its time, although some of that For Science stuff was already played by the time it came out. it's still pretty funny, though, if you can power through that.

Portal 2 is a weird one to rate because it's technically much tighter than Portal, in a way that's both a positive and a negative; the surfaces onto which you can place a portal are often highly restricted or specific, so you can 'solve' puzzles just by repeatedly doing the next obvious thing without ever really understanding the overall test. that's a good thing in some ways, because it's a longer game, and getting stuck would be infuriating, but it also means that you never get the sense that you've 'broken' the game with a weird trick or an unexpected tactic like you did with the original.

the heart of Portal is rewarding player disobedience; when you broke out of the 'final' puzzle in Portal 1, it really felt like you were breaking something for a moment. P2 never manages to hit that high, since the cat's already out of the bag and players are expecting it, but it's still a great sequel and (excluding maybe one or two sections which drag a little) it's hard to think of any way it could be better.