Portal 2: How to create a sequel properly

 

        Portal 2 is a first-person puzzle game developed by Valve Software. It's a sequel to the popular game Portal that was released in The Orange Box, a collection of Valve games. Portal is a puzzle game that allows its players to create two portals(blue and orange). When you go in one, you come out the other. It allows for fun and interesting methods for solving puzzles. Originally released for PC, Portal and Portal 2 have been released on all modern consoles.

        While seemingly small compared to the wildly popular Half-Life 2, and Team Fortress, [artal quickly gained popularity with its easy-to-learn and fun-to-master gameplay. Portal allowed the player to learn mechanics on the fly without slowing down momentum. It gave hints of a larger world but never detoured from one of the core mechanics "speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out".

        Learning from the popularity of Portal, Valve set to work crafting a game that zeroed in on core mechanics while also broadening the world of Portal only hinted at in the game. Portal 2 starts you out right in the middle of story-driven gameplay, immediately showing the player how rich this world is. Before long the player has to learn the game mechanics and start traversing the landscape that is Aperture Science, the fictional company that hosts our player and game. As with Portal 1, the player has to learn by doing, there aren't any arduous tutorial levels, just smaller, more simple levels that allow the player to learn at their own pace. This was a staple of the original Portal, no hand-holding.

        However, this time around, as the player traverses the world they are introduced to an updated antagonist from the original game, GlaDOS as well as two new characters, Wheatley and Cave Johnson. These characters weave in an out of the gameplay, allowing our character to delve deeper into the lore of Aperture Science without slowing down for exposition dumps.You can see throughout your exploration that Portal 2 exists in a few different generations of time. There is the modern areas we saw in Portal 1, but soon the player is introduced to a retro, 60s design aesthetic that possibly travels all the way to the early 80s.

        Portal 2 allows players to enjoy a fully-realized single campaign but also includes and entirely separate multi-player campaign as well. Just as robust as the single-player, it's almost like having two games for the proice of one.

                Portal 2 is a great game that allows players to focus on gameplay, and only get deeper into the lore if they choose. It's a game that learned lessons from the original while building on it in an engaging and fun way.