#FF00AA

I can’t play [the original] Portal at night. The game has this pervasive, soul-destroying feeling of solitude. The Aperture Science Enrichment Center is incomprehensibly enormous, and yet moving through it we meet not a single living thing.

Many good points in this article. Portal 2 still gets a 9 out of 10 from me, but it did lose some of the qualities of the original. (Oh, hey, I just remembered that I used to write game reviews. Ah well.) Thing is, it had to — nobody would finish the game if all eight hours of it were as angst-inducing as the original Portal’s couple of hours. And one of the primary metrics of good game design, especially at a company that relies as much on playtesting as Valve, is how many people actually finish the game. Hence the less solitary experience, and the lack of reflex-based puzzles.

But I’m confident that the free DLC announced for this summer will ramp up the difficulty. We’re done with the game, we’ve seen the entirety of the story; it’s time to set those level designers free.