No one asked for it, few people noticed it, but there it was: a ‘welcome back’ to the game with a reassuring display that Portal 2 had care and quality running through it like a stick of rock.įor a ‘best game ever’, Portal 2 has a strange effect on us. Updating with each level, it showed your progress with bespoke animated artwork in glorious HD. This is the Part Where he Kills YouĪnd if you wanted an example of the level of detail in Portal 2, then look no further than the menu screen. Simmons – just see Terence Fletcher in Whiplash – and you can see a little bit of that character come through in Cave Johnson. “I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down – with lemons!”. But later, as death takes hold of him, he goes on a rant, demanding that life takes the lemons back. “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, he says, as his body slowly dies from inhaling moon dust. The pinnacle of the Cave Johnsonisms is the lemon rant. Simmons gives Cave Johnson presence, as he acts like the disappointed dad over Aperture’s many, many failings. Cave Johnson is one of gaming’s best characters, and you don’t even get to meet him. They’re a step up from collecting text journals, but only one step. We will admit to groaning a little bit when we realised he was going to appear in audio journals, which – in 2011 – were getting old, off the back of too many BioShock clones. Some way through Portal 2, we’re introduced to the late founder of Aperture Science, Cave Johnson. Portal 2 has the confidence to take the piss out of you, and make you do something stupid near immediately. Most games hold your hands tightly in tutorial sections, worried that you’ll do something stupid. Congratulations, you have learned what the A button does, and you’ve humiliated yourself into the package. He asks you to speak, with the classic ‘Press A to speak’ appearing as a prompt for Xbox players, and once you press it – pure genius – you jump. Arriving in your room, Wheatley questions whether you have brain damage, so quickly spins up a cognition test. Picking a best moment of his is difficult, so we included two, and this is the first. Few people could have captured the robot’s turn-on-a-penny character pivots, from buffoonery, to sarcasm to pure evil. Sure, he was just about stretching his long legs over the Atlantic, and was beginning to get American recognition, but he wasn’t what you’d call a name. He’d written The Office and Extras but barely appeared in them, had a semi-successful stand-up career and a role in the film Hall Pass. Back in 2011, Stephen Merchant was a bit of a punt.
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