14 DAY TRIAL // Portal 2 has a very tough job ahead of it, needing to follow up on the huge success (pun not intended) of the original Portal, who surprised the whole gaming industry through its dark humor as well as refreshingly simple yet complex mechanics.
As you can imagine, this wasn't an easy job largely because there weren't a lot of options left for Valve, its developer, from a narrative standpoint, in order to motivate gamers to once again solve complex puzzles by thinking with portals and using the environment to their advantage.
Luckily for the huge amount of people who purchased the game, the developer managed to succeed in its endeavor by bringing back the old test rooms, changing them in a few major ways and making the whole experience feel refreshing once more.
Portal 2 takes place an indeterminate period of years after the end of the first one, so nature and various other disasters have taken their toll on the facilities of the Aperture science company.
Gone are the crisp labs that you went through in the original, being replaced with ones that are darker, more raw, and filled with marks that tell the story of the disasters that hit the facility.
You see broken walls, faulty machinery, lots of debris, plants and water that are invading the rooms as well as remains of things like companion cubes or turrets.
What's actually commendable is that Valve never tries to hide this, so players can freely check out the damage and imagine just what sort of things happened while the main protagonist, Chell, was sleeping in stasis.
You do get to travel through some of the older laboratories at the beginning of the game and it's only then that you realize just how much things have changed since the first game.
Valve could have easily brought back the old labs from the original, but the company managed to really showcase a new face of the Aperture Science facility with Portal 2.