Pretty Much Alive
review for Portal 2, 2-player first-person action/puzzle, available on Steam
Aperture Science is a big place. According to Portal 2, it was build out of a salt mine some 16 miles deep, stretching down from the top layers, and like a chunk of Antarctic ice, is layered in years - with "old Aperture" at the bottom, and the Aperture of GLaDOS being built on top of all that. With this said, it is Aperture Science that is truly the main "character" of Portal 2. GLaDOS is all well and broodingly hilarious and Stephen Merchant's Wheatley character is as irreverently charming as any British robot ever has been, but it is the facility itself - like Half-Life's Black Mesa, or Bioshock's Rapture, that steals the show. It helps, of course, that GLaDOS has been given free reign to rebuild the facility on-the-fly at her whim - the courses she builds can be dismantled and rebuilt at any point, and it makes Aperture Science less of an establishment, and more of a living, shifting laboratory of unimaginably sinister proportions. Joy.
