If you have the day off today, why not revisit Portal 2. You’ve already finished the single player and played through the co-op? Well, how about trying some new maps! Thinking With Portals just finished a Summer mapping contest and announced the winners.
The Top 5 prize winning maps include:
In addition to the contest winners, you can find more single player and co-op Portal 2 maps available in the Thinking With Portals forums.
To install a custom map, you download the .zip file and copy the .bsp file within it to your Portal 2 maps directory, which might have a path like:
C:Program Files (x86)Steamsteamappscommonportal 2portal2maps
Once the map file is copied to the location, you need to enable the developer console inside of Portal 2. Start up Portal 2 and from the Main Menu go to Options -> Keyboard/Mouse and enable Allow Developer Console at the bottom. Then click the Done button.
Back at the Main Menu, hit ` (backtick or tilde key ~) to get into the console. This will bring up a layer with a lot of the behind-the-scenes status codes. Type in:
map name_of_map
In the example of wanting to start up the Patent Pending map, you would type:
map sp_patent_pending
The developer console will auto-complete so you don’t have to know the full name. Use the down-arrow to select one of the options, Tab to complete your typing, and Enter to submit it.
Voila! You have new maps and puzzles to solve on this day off. Celebrate your independence from boredom! I’ve already played through Patent Pending and Infinifling. They are pretty interesting maps with new takes on puzzles.
Read the readme.txt files that come with any downloaded maps since they might deviate a little bit from the common instructions.