Remember how we primed you for Portal 2 with the news that The National had a song featured in-game? Well, even though the song was little more than an Easter egg hidden in an early level, Valve still wants to remind you that they're cool, so they just announced a contest: Make a video for "Exile Vilify," post it to YouTube with the tag PORTAL2NATIONALEXILE by 7/15, and you might win a guitar autographed by The National on top of a bed of Portal 2 swag. Here's a live version of the song to use as a control subject:

But Portal 2 is not just a delivery device for nerdy indie rock: It is also a game! And, as it turns out, it's a fun game!

If you played through the first Portal, it's hard to imagine you won't love Portal 2—and the less you know going into it, the better. It's bigger and richer and funnier (and about $30 cheaper than it was at launch), so make it happen.

If you didn't feel a tingle from all those bus ads featuring blue peds zipping around the county in April and May, don't feel bad. They seemed like fan service more than marketing, but Portal 2 is plenty of fun even if you've never seen its predecessor. You play a test subject in a science facility run by a homicidal computer, making your way from level to level using a gun-like machine that creates doors in walls and other surfaces while evading deathbots and insults about your weight, intelligence, and adoptive status. (That last part earned Valve a protest from an adoptive parent—no word yet from fat activists or advocates for the developmentally disabled.)

It starts simple, but gets more complicated as it adds different kinds of science-goo that can help or hinder your way out of each level. The story also gets much more complex, as you learn more about the history of Aperture Laboratories and work your way through its history. The logo treatments from decades past are by themselves worth paying for, and the voice acting of Stephen Merchant and J. K. Simmons is so good that it might make it harder for us to tolerate other games in the future. It's also just a fun world to look at, even if the puzzles are sometimes unbearably frustrating. Hang in there, because the final battle reaches a climax so ridiculously awesome you'll want to wipe your memory and play through it again.

Multiplayer is really good fun and a much-needed improvement over the first game. If you've got a big enough screen, it's best played on one console, though the flagging system makes communication pretty simple even if you're separated by hundreds of miles. The puzzles can be a little hairier, but if you stop, collaborate, and listen, all will be well.

There are a few caveats, but they seem petty or misplaced. The biggest one is just a problem with the genre: Some people can't or shouldn't play first-person perspective games. Oh well. (One of us gets a headache and occasional nausea from some of the worst offenders, but Portal 2 wasn't that bad for him.) Other issues include poor sound quality when GLaDOS (the homicidal computer) speaks, which is a holdover from the first game, and certain game elements that have to be discovered accidentally, which seems gratuitously cruel. Given that gratuitous cruelty is milked for huge laughs throughout the game, that may just be a commitment to the bit.

Worth buying? Yes, especially at just-past-new prices.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.