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Cathartic

Difficulty: Easy/Medium

Hey! Glad you made it. Just up ahead is something pretty special. Don't want to overstate it, but let's just say it'll... suck your socks off. Yeah. It'll suck your socks off. See what I'm getting at? No? Too subtle for you, I see. Alright, I'll just come out and say it. Drumroll please, get ready: you are about to enter... the central sorting system!

Amazing, right? Come on, how can you not love this? Hundreds of thousands of tubes and pipes, and they all go through here taking cubes, turrets, staplers, chairs, you've got boxes... turrets... did I say staplers already? Anything that'll fit really, and it all goes wherever it needs to go! I'm telling you, the cores that work down here? Heroes. "Not all heroes wear capes," you ever hear that? It's true. You can't, actually, down here. Wear capes. Against the rules. One of the guys did it once, absolute legend. Yeah, big name on shift that day, he was... Sad, really, what happened to him. Turned his back on an intake pipe. Nobody's seen him since.

Anyway, not to worry! No capes on you. That's foresight, that is. Planning. You're gonna be fine!

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I'd forgotten how fun it is to just make a regular old Portal 2 map, set in regular old Aperture Science. While I started making this map for the Thinking With Portals Intertwined Streams mapping challenge, I decided I wanted to do the concept proper justice so I took an extra couple of weeks to flesh it out into what you see here. Catharsis is good fun and very clever, as Demon Arisen's puzzles always are, and it was a great choice for a mapping challenge like this. Its layout provides a great base for almost any setting you want to put it in and seeing the other mappers' takes on it was a delight. You can find a full collection here.

This whole process has also been a nice break from the other Portal 2 projects I've been working on for the last couple of years, namely the huge mod Desolation[emberspark.games] and my Doctor Who crossover Portal Who: Science of the TARDIS, the first part of which will hopefully release later this year.

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Credits:

Original puzzle by Demon Arisen

TeamSpen210 - Invaluable help, advice, and tools. This map would not exist without his direct input.
Rosemary Webs - Curved walkways, circular testchamber door, 256-unit vactubes, and vactube interior models.
Wii2 - Orange funnel skin.

All other custom assets (including the light rings and large vactubes) were modifications I made to assets from the base game or from the above creators.

A special mention should also go to ARES Agent 228 who provided feedback and encouragement throughout almost all of the mapping process.