Having completed Portal 2 in co-op, I thought I should really play the single player too. I’d remembered the overarching plot from my first playthrough, and the end boss fight (including how to beat it), but almost none of the puzzles and areas were familiar. Or rather, were but in a fuzzy sort of “this looks like something I have a very vague recollection of” in terms of graphics more than anything.

So as with Portal, it was a nearly new experience and it still holds up well today. The new additions over the first game such as the bouncy gel and slidey gel are fun, but I seem to remember that those bits of the game, specifically in the Cave Johnson areas, made up a much larger proportion of the game than it turns out they do. As in, I was sure they took up at least 90% rather than the 20%-ish they actually do. Memory, eh? It isn’t how it used to be.

Cave Johnson is great, by the way. His audio recordings and descent into old man lunacy as they progress are hilarious. As is the rest of the dialogue, actually, with Wheatley being excellent and Potato-GLaDOS an excellent alternative to the unhinged normal-GLaDOS.

Portal 2 may not be as fondly remembered as Portal but it is still fantastic. If only Valve knew how to count to 3, eh?

Why yes, I did decide to play Portal 2 after Portal. And yes, I have played Portal 2 before. But! I haven’t played this Portal 2 before. I shall explain.

What I’d never realised before, is that co-op mode in Portal 2 is not Portal 2 with two players. No, it’s a completely separate game. Different levels, different plot, different player character(s), just all set in the same world as Lonely Boi Portal 2. With two players at the same time.

With two players, you get two pairs of portals. Although they’re not linked (so player 1’s two portals operate independently to player 2’s), they can be entered by either player. What this means, is that the level puzzles aren’t just twice as complicated, they’re exponentially more complicated to solve. That, and you absolutely must work more closely as a team than any other game I’ve ever played before. Yes, even more so than something like Overcooked, where one player can pick up the slack for the other – you can’t so that here.

To illustrate this, I present A Video.

And that was a pretty simple example.

I played through the game with my daughter, and coming up with solutions together was great. There’s a fantastic “point at somewhere and the other player will see the marker” feature, which is invaluable for “put a portal right there” moments. It certainly meant less marker pen on the TV, anyway. There are also a number of useless but fun emotes the two robots (Atlas and P-Body) you play as can perform, like dances and high-fives, and you can’t not play something like this without accidentally on purpose pushing, or portalling, your co-op partner into the acid or ineffectually shooting them over and over with your portal gun for no reason whatsoever.

An added complication with two players was that because you have two players, often the solution to get one player to the goal doesn’t match the solution for the second player, meaning that we needed two solutions much of the time. Things were made somewhat harder for us because, somehow, we started the game by playing through Area 6 without realising, and that’s the final set of levels in the game and certainly the most difficult. A bit of a baptism by fire, really, but it did mean we were absolute pros when it came to playing Area 1 immediately afterwards.

Such a great game, and also a massive shame there’s no follow up. More co-op games like this please.

It has been a while. I’ve often thought about playing through Portal again, especially since I have it on Steam and so could play it on my Steam Deck. So, naturally, I bought it for the Switch. To be fair, it was a bundle of Portal and Portal 2, and it was on sale for under £3. And you can’t own the same game on too many platforms.

Although it looks a little dated now, perhaps not as much as it would otherwise thanks to the graphic style and mostly “plain” areas, Portal still holds up really well as both clever and a game that makes you feel clever for solving the puzzles. I still remembered the overall plot, but had almost completely forgotten each level’s puzzles so in some ways it felt like playing a new Portal game. Which is nice.

It’s still funny, the cake is still a lie (or not), and I very much enjoyed it. Again.