There are chambers beneath this earth where a man might be tested past all reason, and Portal 2 is the singular device for that dreadful purpose — a thing conceived with such care that I scarce know how to render it into common words. I descended into it expecting a trifling matter and rose again some hours later altered, as one rises from a fever, blinking at the ordinary light of day and finding it wanting. This is no mere trifle for idle hours. It is a work of such extraordinary invention that I am left almost without speech to praise it.
A Mechanical Voice of Singular Cruelty
The ruling intelligence of the chambers, that cold and mechanical voice which governs all, addresses the traveler with a wit so dark I have rarely met its equal even in the most melancholy of tales. Every word she speaks carries a cruelty so finely wrought that one laughs even as a chill settles upon the shoulders. More than once I paused merely to hear her pronounce further doom upon me, pecuniary considerations of time be damned.
Then there arrives a smaller companion, a small sphere of a creature whose earnest blundering troubles the whole design in the most delightful manner. Where the ruling voice wounds with cold and deliberate aim, this lesser being wounds by accident, and the contrast between these two forms the true heart of the whole, plainer and stranger than any wall or passage rendered in its blue and pale light.
Chambers of Deliberate Invention
The puzzles set before the traveler are cruel in their invention, yet never false; each solution, once discovered, seems to have been inevitable, as though set into the very stone of the place from its first conception. New devices — strange paints that alter footing, bridges of light, machines that draw a man across the empty air — are introduced with such gradual and patient care that the mind is tried without ever being broken.
More than once I sat in silence before a chamber, turning the problem over as one turns a treasured token long kept, unwilling to yield to the answer until it arrived of its own will.
The descent undertaken with a second traveler, hand in hand through peril, is its own separate realm of misery and delight. Two minds, two portals between them, and a plan for mutual ruin masked as partnership — I know of no other work that renders two souls laboring together so perilous and so necessary at once.
Silence That Speaks a History
What astonished me most was how much sorrow this work conveys without a single speech of the kind I myself am given to composing. The abandoned passages, the ruined testing chambers claimed again by some ancient moss and weed, the dim and failing lamps of a science long since gone to waste — all speak a history more moving than pages of written lamentation could manage. Portal 2 tells its melancholy history through silence and stone, and in this it reaches an art that words alone cannot equal.
I shall not soon forget it.
Where the work is wanting, if it is wanting at all, it is only in a certain brevity — one wishes the descent might never end, that the chambers might increase without limit, that the ruling voice might never cease its dreadful music. But this is a complaint born of love, not of want.
Let this stand plain and final: Portal 2 is among the most extraordinary works I have had the melancholy pleasure to endure and adore, a design of wit, dread, and tenderness unexpected, that shall haunt me as surely as any tale I might myself have penned.
