‘Portal 2’ a difficult but funny puzzle game

The game "Portal 2" begins with you waking up inside a gray, steel factory as big as a city. The whole game will take place in this gray facility.

That must sound dull. But "Portal 2" is funny, and it's headache-inducing, because of very difficult puzzles. But it's not a bore.

The comedic story of "Portal 2" is totally weird: You're trapped in this factory, which is devoid of people except for you, a woman being treated as a guinea pig.

There is an evil computer (think HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey") whose main goal is to put you through a series of tests, to see if you can escape one gray room after another.

Each room is riddled with obstacles, moats and such. You escape each room by using a gun that shoots physics-style holes (rips in the fabric of space-time) through the walls.

So in a typical room, you must shoot one hole near you, another hole on a wall, then you walk through the first hole to teleport through the second hole. That description is a wild simplification of difficult mazes.

You dodge laser beams and robots firing machine guns. In some rooms, you must use special-purpose paint to create massive trampolines to bounce up to doors near ceilings.

Put bluntly, this is a physics-logic game. It reminds me of college math classes, which I thought were behind me.

Fortunately, the game makers added real character development and actually funny, silly humor. There are 13,000 lines of dialogue from Stephen Merchant, J.K. Simmons and Ellen McLain.

Merchant does a voice-over as your daft robot buddy, Wheatley, who says things in Merchant's self-conscious British tongue, such as:

"I can't see anywhere. I tell ya what. Plug me in and I'll turn the lights on. Let there be light. ... That's, uh, God. I was quoting God."

Simmons is quite funny, as a cowboy businessman. And pitch-perfect McLain is the funniest, as evil computer Glados, sounding less like Stephen Hawking and more like Britney Spears using a voice modulator, if Britney Spears understood words.

Computer Glados emotionlessly threatens your character thus: "I'm afraid you're about to become the immediate past president of the Being Alive Club. Ha, ha."

"Portal 2" isn't for everyone. The physics and logic puzzles are so hard at times, I get a headache. Games never give me headaches. A casual gamer may not last the first 10 minutes.

Worse, it's a load-athon: You routinely wait 30 seconds for new rooms to load onto your TV screen and for you to enter them. And the puzzles can feel a bit repetitive.

But when was the last time you heard of a game that entertains/hurts your head with physics and makes you laugh simultaneously? At the very least, it reminds me that I'm glad I don't have to take math classes, anymore.

("Portal 2" by Valve retails for $55 for Xbox 360 and PS 3; $45 for PC/Mac -- Plays fun and funny in a nerdy physics way. Looks good. Very challenging. Rated "E 10+" for fantasy violence and mild language. Three and one-half stars out of four.)

Contact Doug Elfman at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.