Portal 2: Valve Wants You To Play It With Your Mum

So who are you going to play Portal 2′s co-operative mode with? Your mates (that’s a given), wives and girlfriends perhaps, or maybe your dear old mother? Because she likes puzzle games too and according to Portal 2 lead writer Chet Faliszek, this time she’s not going to be all thumbs on a joypad: “The easiest thing we could have done is to make the game more difficult,” Chet told 360 Magazine in a recent interview, “but instead of adding difficulty we added complexity and gave you the tools and the training to match, so you feel super-smart when you put all these things together. It’s always about training in Portal and we test that. If you can figure out the puzzle, you should be able to complete the puzzle. I shouldn’t be some dexterity thing, You shouldn’t have to be some super-jumper to be able to do this – you can do puzzles in a different way if you can do that, but the core puzzle should always be complete-able with the training that’s given to you. To the player, hopefully they feel the same level of smartness and ability that was in Portal. And it’s really through testing that we do that, we test and test and test, we want everyone to have their own experience by the end of the game.

“Portal is the kind of game that opens up to a wide variety of people and that was one of the reasons we wanted co-op was that we’d see some guy sitting on the couch with his mom; his mom would be telling him, “Place a portal there! Place a portal there!” She could figure out the puzzles because she had sat next to him and trained up. So now they’ve each got a controller in their hand and she might stare at the floor a little more than he does, but eventually they’ll get it together and they’ll be able to do the puzzles together then. She doesn’t need to be a ninja to do that, she just needs to be able to solve the puzzles and understand them. Your hands are just doing what your brain figured out to do and having said that, if you’re not very smart, the game is really long, really good value!”

You can read the full interview in issue 80 of 360 Magazine, on sale now!