Culture

Platforms: PC, MAC, XBOX 360, Playstation 3, (5/5).
I can feel it, like ten-thousand drummers marching in a cool valley miles from my ajar bedroom window. An amazonian torrent of internet memes. So many memes. But to focus on the individual moments Valve has created in Portal 2 would be to ignore so much. It would be to ignore the mind-bending procession of ingenious puzzles linked by a superficially simple core mechanic.
 

It's an absolute crime to discount how genius it is for a game like Portal 2 to be so immaculately paced. Somehow, Valve makes a puzzle game feel like a Call of Duty style adrenaline action game, then a Day of the Tentacle style quirky, hilarious, adventure, and it even contains emotional character moments reminiscent of the best parts of Half Life 2. The perfect writing makes it impossible to ignore the believable arcs of said characters, and let me tell you, Extras' Steven Merchant hits his character, the spherical robot Wheatley, out of the fucking park. Portal 2 is here, and with it Valve has created what might be the greatest story-driven linear videogame of all time.
 

Portal's core mechanic is almost cool enough to carry a game on its very own, while remaining simple. You place an orange portal, a blue portal, and pass between the two. The puzzles are intuitive enough to make you experience fluid progress at some points, and ruminating IQ tests whenever Valve wants you to experience a different emotion. Puzzles are not there for their own sake, they are there as an aid to storytelling, which might be why Portal 2 is so remarkable. The game even offers a fully-fledged, separate cooperative mode in which two players each control a lovable bumbling robot to come up with even greater puzzles.