This week we talked about environmental storytelling and the importance of showing rather than saying. While it’s true that many games tell their stories through extensive cutscenes, dialogue, and lore, some games put the story in the back seat, and let the player find the story themselves. During class, we looked at the games “Half Life 2” and “Firewatch” as examples of narrative architecture, with both of these games having a blend of narrative in dialogue and narrative architecture. Both of these games have masterfully designed maps that aid the story beautifully, helping with world building and telling the player so much about the game without saying anything. A good example of this blend in storytelling comes from another game made by Valve, “Portal 2”. The Portal series is a puzzle game series that was built in the Source engine, the same engine in which “Half Life 2” was built in, and features a world much different from the world of the Half Life series. The setting of the first “Portal” is an underground lab known as Aperture Laboratories, a sleek white series of chambers with puzzles built by the facilities AI overseer, GLaDOS. The game does not tell you much, other than that you are a test subject in GLaDOS’ lab, and that you must work towards the reward of cake (which turns out to be a fiery furnace in which GLaDOS tries to kill you, but to no avail). After seemingly destroying GLaDOS and escaping to the surface world at the end of the first “Portal”, “Portal 2” begins with the player back in a holding chamber in the lab. This chamber is modeled after a regular hotel room, but keeps the player character, Chell, in cryostasis until she is needed for testing again. It is revealed that Chell has been in this chamber for an extraodinarily long time (the exact time is never revealed, as the chamber states “You have been asleep for: 99999” before cutting out) before being broken out by an Aperture Core named Wheatley. Whaetley comes to player claiming that he needs help breaking out of the facility. When you first leave your chamber, you see that the facility has become run down without a robot AI keeping it efficient and clean. Everything is on the brink of collapse, nature has begun to reclaim parts of the chambers, and the sleek white walls have been dirtied by the sands of time. After accidentally reawakening GLaDOS, Wheatley and Chell are separated, and GLaDOS goes back to her old ways, using you for tests. Almost immediately, GLaDOS begins removing the trash from the labs and rebuilds test chambers with the old white walls from the first game. It is a return to normalcy, but it comes as a bit unwelcome in the context of the events of the first game and the second game up to this point. Once GLaDOS is defeated once again with the help of Wheatley, Wheatley is installed into the main control center of the lab. GLaDOS then reveals that Wheatley was an “intelligence dampening core”, made by Aperture scientists in an attempt to “slow her down” and “feed her bad ideas through the voice inside her head”. Wheatley becomes so enraged by being called an imbecile, that he literally pushes you down to the old Aperture labs, which was below the Aperture labs that GLaDOS had built the whole time, forgotten by time (and intentionally by GLaDOS). This Aperture is much less sleek, looking and feeling much older, using more primitive and dangerous technology, and reflecting the period of the crumbling company. As a last hope, Aperture scientists scraped together they could to attempt to save the founder’s life, Cave Johnson. Cave Johnson’s last request, however, was that they use his life saving AI upload on his assistant first, a girl named Caroline. GLaDOS then remembers her past, and becomes more sympathetic towards Chell. When you return to the original lab, you find that Wheatley has turned it upside down with his terrible ideas. For one, he neglects to cool the nuclear core of the lab, causing it to slowly melt. This is also reflected in the scattered buttons and walls of Wheatley’s test chambers. In addition, Wheatley creates cube hybrids with the game’s turrets, creating growling, walking abominations. Lastly, Wheatley attempts to kill Chell and GLaDOS, making it quite obvious that he is going to do so, and designing poorly designed traps.

I think this game is an excellent example of narrative architecture, and how a story can be driven by your surroundings. Not only is the environment imperative to solving puzzles, but it tells an entire story in itself, of a scientific facility slowly losing its way.