While playing through the latter part of the game I came across a few levels that stepped over the line between challenging and just plain stupid.
What do I mean?
To answer that you have to first understand that a puzzle game like Portal 2 is not designed to challenge your reflexes but rather your problem solving skills. Part of that is being able to look at the challenge before you, take inventory of your resources and ultimately figure out how to best use them to your advantage to solve the puzzle.
At some point you need to be able to figure out what you're trying to accomplish. You're playing a game in a world both foreign and impossible so the solution needs to be free of trickery. There is one map in Portal 2 that in particular crossed the line from challenging straight into the arms of stupid.
WikiGame Guides has a great video walk through of Test Chamber 16 in Chapter 8 here just navigate to "Test Chamber 16"...
Now I'm aware that this is the last "test" you have to do before the boss battle but I was more than
a bit annoyed by this level. Make it difficult but don't cheat the level design by hiding the solution. It's like trying to build a 3 legged stool and taking away two of the legs.
If the rest of the game were like this I would have dumped it about an hour in. While there are familiar elements there was no way I was going to figure out what it was I was supposed to be doing without some YouTube help or spending a week of my life on one level. Now we've moved from recreation to job and I sincerely doubt I'll ever earn a living out of figuring out Portal levels. Which brings up another question. How did this get by the QA testers? Did they just give up?
I enjoy a good challenge but I don't enjoy suffering through a developers bad joke or sloppy level design.
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