Valve has released its E3 2010 demo showing all of the new Portal 2 goodies, and the physics-based puzzler will probably break your brain.
Let’s be honest here – there are a lot of people out there who didn’t get to go to E3 2010 to see all the latest games. The Escapist certainly did (except for all of those manning the fort at home, ahem ahem), and as such it remains our duty to tell you about everything we saw on the floor and whether it was good or bad.
But why tell you when we can just show you?
Valve has released its awesome-looking Portal 2 E3 demo – which was enough to win the favor of Steve Butts – in multiple parts over the course of the last week, and it seems to be shaping up as a nice successor to the beloved first game. The trailers show a ton of different new mechanics showing up in the sequel. Above, you can see Wheatley, the new Aperture AI who is slightly more helpful to the player than our nemesis GLaDOS.
It’s when we start getting into the puzzle elements, though, that my brain starts to hurt. For cryin’ out loud, I had enough trouble getting my head around the idea of “Goes in Portal A, comes out Portal B.” All of these new elements – let alone the new elements put together – are going to give me a freakin’ aneurysm or something.
The Excursion Funnel, as you can see, acts as an antigravity tube of sorts.
The Aerial Faith Plates are springboards that propel anything that hits them into the air (or in whatever direction you please).
Here we see the Thermal Discouragement Beam, which is pretty much a big goddamn laser that you can use to your benefit, or (more likely) to be killed by.
The Pneumatic Diversity Vent sucks and blows. No, seriously. It also looks to be a great way to get rid of multiple turrets at once.
Repulsion Gel is like the Aerial Faith Plates in that it bounces things, except given its liquid nature you can use portals to spread it along.
And finally, we have Propulsion Gel, which makes you go really, really fast. Perfect for those times when you need to get past the non-OSHA-compliant parts of Aperture’s laboratory.
It’s making my brain hurt just thinking about them.
