Portal 2
In Portal 2 you carry a gun that opens two linked portals: step into a wall, drop out of the ceiling. Yet at first the game had no portals at all. Valve built it around a camera that copied objects and changed their size. Playtesters liked the camera but missed the portals. In 2008 the portals came back.
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The portals got coloured gels. Blue bounces you, orange speeds you up. Valve found both in a student game, Tag: The Power of Paint, and hired its team.
There is plenty of talk. GLaDOS never misses a chance to needle you, and the robot Wheatley rattles on in the voice of Stephen Merchant, who spent about sixteen hours in the booth.
Valve even turned the release into a puzzle. Players worked through the indie games of the Potato Sack bundle to speed up a countdown, and Portal 2 unlocked almost ten hours early.
By the writer's estimate, the solo and the co-op campaigns take about six hours each. Almost every reviewer praised the writing and the humour, though one found the puzzles easier than in the first Portal. Players leave 98% positive out of 392,722 reviews. By our Recommended Score it is #2 of 4,736 games.
Liked it? Next, try Viewfinder, where photos reshape the world, and The Talos Principle 2, with puzzles spread over large open areas and arguments about philosophy.
System requirements
Minimum 2 GB RAM · 8 GB✓Steam Deck VerifiedMin & recommended
| Minimum | |
|---|---|
| OS | Windows 7 / Vista / XP |
| Processor | 3.0 GHz P4, Dual Core 2.0 (or higher) or AMD64X2 (or higher) |
| Memory | 2 GB |
| Graphics | Video card must be 128 MB or more and with support for Pixel Shader 2.0b (ATI Radeon X800 or higher / NVIDIA GeForce 7600 or higher / Intel HD Graphics 2000 or higher). |
| DirectX | 9.0c |
| Storage | 8 GB |
From the game’s Steam store page.
