Announced in the hush of early morning here in Oz, but broadcast loudly to the lands of the awake is the oft-discussed news of Portal 2‘s release! Set for October 26 in the USA, it’s been a weird ride just getting to this point.

Layer upon layer of clues have been left over the last 6 months or so, but it all started jumping again with a patch that altered the ending of the original game, which came out on March 3 from Steam.

Good to know Chelle assumes the ‘Party Escort Submission Position’, because who knows how awkward that could be if she opened up a portal in whatever freaky robot drone just started dragging her off. After the patch, came the press release:

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and Half-Life) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Portal 2 for shipment this coming holiday season.

Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007′s Portal, which won 70 industry achievement awards.

Randomly underlined things! Which spell out… dreattmannh0nee.

Then there are the bizarre ASCII files and clues which can be found over at Kotaku. There was some seriously hard work done to just get and decode this information, which includes pictures of GLaDOS and what looks like still shots from inside Aperture Science. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, some clever cookie has provided some deciphering. There’s also some interesting tidbits from Aperture Science’s founder Cave Johnson. My favourite?

“…remind you that Aperture Science is built on three pillars. Pillar one: Science without results is just witchcraft. Pillar two: Get results or you’re fired. Pillar three: if you suspect a coworker of bin’ a witch, report them immediately. I cannot stress that enough. Witchcraft will not be tolerated.”

And then there’s the April cover of GameInformer. I feel like I should be saying ‘Good news everyone!’, but we never did discover if the cake was indeed a lie. Also, that looks suspiciously like a reformed GLaDOS…

WITCHCRAFT!