The best games of all time are the ones that can endure in the public consciousness. While technology might advance and developers might craft wilder creations, the ones that generations of players can discover or revisit for years to come are thanks to the underlying strength of their design. Valve has a couple of games that benefit from that commitment to strong design, with the likes of Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 being among the best examples of their respective genres.
The best game Valve has ever made, though, remains Portal 2, the perfectly conceived and deeply hilarious platformer puzzle game. Debuting April 18, 2011, on PC before making its way to other platforms, Portal 2 builds off the already pretty impressive strength of Portal and delivers a flawless puzzle experience. Even 15 years later, it’s hard to think of games that benefit from tighter design, better comedy, or more effective execution than Portal 2.
It’s hard to think of other games that have become more acclaimed or revered in the gaming space than Portal 2. While the actual engagement and enjoyment the player pulls from the experience will vary on personal preference, Portal 2 is a nearly flawless game on a purely technical level. A first-person platformer puzzle game unlike any other, both Portal games base all of their puzzles around the central mechanic of the Aperture Portal Gun. Clever environmental puzzles challenge players in unique ways, all bolstered by the lessons that the developers at Valve took from the first game. It’s challenging without ever feeling frustrating, with the puzzles often operating at the player’s own pace. It’s effortlessly engaging, a delightful take on the formula it established in the previous game.
This allows the crisp graphics and clean aesthetic design to deliver a simple but engaging world that looks great for its time and remains impressive looking fifteen years later. To top it all off, the game tells two distinct but terrific stories, with the continuing battle between Chell and GLaDOS serving as the overarching plot, while the hilariously delivered voice memos from Aperture founder and CEO Cave Johnson (voiced by J.K. Simmons) deliver a constant stream of engaging comedy. While other games may be more ambitious on a technical scale or with a narrative purpose, there’s an effectiveness and efficiency to Portal 2 that’s hard to beat.
Given the success of Portal 2, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see Valve enter development on Portal 3 almost immediately. However, there has been no notable movement on a follow-up, with the company instead shifting more attention towards Steam as a platform and Half-Life as a franchise. Portal 1 and Portal 2 writer Erik Wolpaw has said in interviews that he had ideas for directions to take Portal 3, but believes that the studio didn’t have the team available to divert full attention to the game. There’s also likely an underlying awareness that the impressive response to Portal 2 didn’t necessarily need a follow-up.
The game was so well-received, and the work they did on it was tight enough that there may not have been any overarching interest in a sequel. Why complicate perfection? That’s not even counting all the games that were influenced by Portal 2‘s gameplay and presentation, with fan-mods giving players plenty of new challenges to test themselves against. If the entire development team doesn’t think there’s a reason to dive into the game world again, Portal 2 might have been so good that they didn’t want to risk having a weaker sequel potentially undercut the reputation of that game.
Portal 2 works so well because it’s so finely tuned. Even fifteen years later, the game is incredibly easy to return to and pick up. The puzzles are tricky enough that they’re still entertaining to untangle even if you’ve played the game before, while the co-op mode opens up an entire other experience. The comedy is delightful, the characters engaging, and the narrative compelling. It all blends together to deliver one of the tightest gaming experiences I’ve ever encountered, a technically perfect game that is terrific in its underlying design and extremely entertaining as a narrative.
Fifteen years after the game launched and became a perennial favorite of the game community, Portal 2‘s success is hard to equate with anything else in the medium. It’s one of those timelessly designed games that works regardless of platform, thanks to the sheer strength of the execution. While other games might have been more ambitious, Portal 2 lands exactly where it was trying to land, delivering an experience that’s fun, funny, and thought-provoking. Revisiting the game is still a delight, and the anniversary of the original release is the perfect excuse to return to Apperture Industries for another run-in with GLaDOS.
