BUMP!
Anyone here still play the Portal games? I just finished a playthrough of the Portal 2 singleplayer campaign today, for the first time in quite a while. I must say, the ending never fails to make me well up…

Also, since I stopped playing to go to bed last night during Chapter 6, I got to experience the
PotatOS Lament menu screen. After eleven years, and some time spent learning Latin… I have to say it's just as unsettling and incomprehensible as it ever was!

I know, there's an unofficial transcription / translation that's been doing the rounds for much of that time (it's in the description of the video I linked) but I'm nowhere near convinced of its accuracy…
I'd forgotten just how intriguing the journey through the underground bits really was. You're basically watching the history of the place unfolding, even while using your portalgun to get around all the dilapidation, but all the locked doors and sealed-off bits clearly show you that there was orders of magnitude more stuff going on than the bits you see.
Still, certain bits of it leave a bad taste in my mouth… Little things… Things I could be told I'm nitpicky over… Like the way they apparently had portals going back to the fifties, even though the first game gave the impression they were a more recent innovation. OK, that's a retcon, not so bad… But, much more glaringly, there's the fact that you're going through "Science spheres" built from the 50s to the 80s, and then suddenly everything changes drastically in the 90s, and the notice you pass on your way back up states that the entire underground section was sealed in 1961 – which clearly isn't true because the bit you were just in dates from the 80s!
At that point (if you notice these things, which in fairness are easily missable), you're left wondering how much of what you've seen can actually be trusted, and how much is just more lies (since GLaDOS and Wheatley fill you with their crooked words all the time you're in the modern section). At that point, it starts to remind me of Rayman Origins (gasp!) – just as in Rayman one can say "
everything's just a dream", in Portal one can say "it's all lies" – and I'm not satisfied with either of those conclusions. Of course, Portal 2 later introduced the Multiverse, which made it even easier to wave off the contradictions, and even harder to keep an interest in the history, since apparently there are now infinitely many different histories…
There's also the whole Caroline-GLaDOS thing – in the commentary they actually say that because they used the same actress for the two characters, initially as a shortcut, they got this idea for an "origin story"… I don't see why an "origin story" was needed in the first place, and I don't believe I'm the only one who felt that way. Again, it reminds me of Rayman Origins, with the Magician thing – while obviously the Caroline-GLaDOS thing in Portal was much better executed than the Magician thing in Rayman, they both feel like something we could have done without…
Oh shoot, that looks like a rant, doesn't it?

Welp, I still love Portal 2.

And I still like Rayman Origins too.

I guess if the developers had gone a little bit easier on the intrigue in each case, they could have wound up being more interesting overall. And they still can be really interesting if you overlook certain inconsistencies!