Oh lord.
I want to be excited about this so badly, but this has just about everything I didn't want to see in Portal 2.
1. A companion who talks to you.
2. A storyline which already seems to be taking a page from Gordon Freeman's notebook
3. A companion.
4. Who talks to you.
Alright, so my only two things I didn't want to see were a companion and a plot, but still, those are some major additions. And that thing seems to be talking all the damn time. I just know that within about a half hour of playing this game I'm going to want to drop him down a cooling tower, and already I hope I have to murder him as part of another one of GLaDOS's mad tests.
Also, the storyline in Portal 1 was subtle, most of it literally hidden away. It revealed itself gradually, it came to a thrilling conclusion, it was a near perfect example of how to blend story with gameplay. It had none of Valve's usual bollocks of making you stand motionless while other characters talk about things (which I continue to maintain is just another form of cutscene, and one that is interminably worse), and instead everything you did was helping you make your inevitable way to the final confrontation.
In other words, Portal 1 was brilliant as a game, as a story, and as a starting point for some rather interesting discussion. (For example, is it possible that GLaDOS was not the only one who went crazy in that facility?)
Portal 2 looks like a sequel, with every negative connotation that entails. The big bad gets resurrected as a deformed and crippled entity bent on revenge, you get a, no-doubt, spunky sidekick who may or may not betray you, and will certainly annoy you, and instead of building an entire game around a single innovative mechanic, they've introduced 6.
Puzzle games work best when there is only one object with which you can solve the puzzle, and the trick is in finding out how. Not when you give the player a toolbox and expect them to know which tool to adapt to the puzzle room. In Portal 1 you always knew that somehow the Portal Gun would be involved in solving the puzzles. Now you walk into a room with no idea how to even start getting through it. I predict much trial and error gameplay.
