Portal 2: Confinement

Confinement is a project made of 2 components: a Portal mod and a book. Though at a glance they may appear unrelated, if one were to fully play and read everything, would find them to be perfectly intertwined in both theme and message.

The game component - Confinement - is a mod expressing the sentiment of all the things humanity is limited by. The world we live in now is very sad, oppressive, and harsh, like a prison with no escape. We are bound by time, money, motivation, work, health, and many other things. Though we often don't like to think about it, so we distract ourselves with seemingly fun activities to avoid the confrontation. A way to pass the time.

Mod Info

Confinement is co-op focused Portal 2 mod centered around the confinement concept. Rather than introducing any new mechanics or test elements, confinement puzzles are simply a special type of co-op map where one player is always trapped to allow the other to roam free, requiring swapping out the confined partner. Sometimes referred to as “1.5 player,” these puzzles still utilize all 4 portals, but in a limited manner, creating challenging situations to set up portal states for the active partner to utilize to achieve the objective. Only once both players are freed from their prison can the exit be reached (usually).

Features 28 challenging co-op puzzles offering around 20-30 hours of playtime.

This is a remaster of the Confinement map series available on the Portal 2 workshop. They can already be played online there, but the difficulties in finding a partner/ setting up for split-screen/ getting online co-op to function at all has proven problematic for many people; therefore, this mod exists as an easy way to play all the best maps in a neat and tidy collection. All the gimmicky/ bad maps have been excluded, and many visual and puzzle enhancements have been implemented, leaving only the highest quality puzzles for a streamlined experience. This is Confinement: Definitive Edition.

By default, pressing the "1" key will turn cheats on, and R will swap between players. But you can customize this with the instructions below:

IMPORTANT: Portal 2's built in split-screen control sometimes has issues. To swap between players, you will most likely have to force the command. Here is what to do. Open the developer console and type in the following: BindToggle key in_forceuser. Replace "key" with whatever key you wish; that will swap between the 2 players. Additionally, this command only works when cheats are turned on. To do this, type sv_cheats 1. To bind to a key, type bind key "sv_cheats 1", again replacing "key" with whatever key you wish.

Although not strictly necessary, you may sometimes wish to have one partner's view take up the whole screen. The command for this is BindToggle key ss_force_primary_fullscreen, which will make player 1's view fullscreen. To do the same for player 2, enter the following into the console (all as one command): ss_pipsplit 3; ss_pipscale 1; ss_pip_bottom_offset 0; ss_pip_right_offset 0. This will toggle each player as fullscreen each time the key is pressed.

Music is from the amazing and multi-talented Mikeastro.