I finally played through this and finished it a few days ago.
Wow, I guess I was expecting too much from this game. I loved Portal 1 because I thought the puzzles were really clever.
This game was exactly the same. I thought maybe it was just the intro, that it had to show you how to play again or something and would open up later, but... not really.
I had to force myself to finally finish the game in the last few bits.
Oh well.
Probably would have been pretty amazing to me if Portal 1 didn't already exist.
Merchant was good, liked hearing him.