Portal
Portal is a first-person shooter puzzle video game made by Valve Corporation set inside the Half-Life series. It is available for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac and PC.
Plot
The game starts with Chell waking up in a small glass room that has only a bed, a toilet, and a radio inside. She is told by GLaDOS that testing will start soon, and an orange portal opens on one of the walls. Once the player goes through, she enters the testing rooms and begins testing. There are 19 testing rooms, called Test Chambers, in all.
The tests start out simple. Chell has to pick up boxes, called Weighted Storage Cubes, and put them on buttons, which will open the door to the exit of the chamber. At this point, GLaDOS speaks to Chell as a guide, praises her, and promises her cake when the tests are over. Near the beginning of the game, Chell gets the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, also known as the Portal Gun. At first, her Portal Gun only makes blue portals and the orange portals are made by GLaDOS. Later, Chell gets the complete Portal Gun and can make both blue and orange portals.
The tests become more and more dangerous farther into the game. In some rooms, there is deadly acid on the floor. In others, there are balls of electricity called High Energy Pellets which will kill Chell if she touches them. During these tests, GLaDOS becomes more and more sarcastic, giving Chell useless advice, such as "The floor here will kill you. Try to avoid it." At one point, GLaDOS tells Chell a chamber is broken and she must go through a chamber full of sentry guns, called Turrets, instead. If a Turret sees Chell, it will shoot at her until she dies. In this chamber is a hidden room. In the hidden room are drawings and writing on the walls left by an unknown person. The writing says things like "the cake is a lie" and "she's always watching" with a picture of a camera. There are more rooms like this in later chambers.
In another chamber, Chell has to use the Weighted Companion Cube, which looks like a Weighted Storage Cube with hearts on it, to solve the test. During the test, GLaDOS tells Chell several times that the Companion Cube is not alive, but at the end of the test, she tells Chell she has to "kill" the Companion Cube to get to the next test.
After killing GLaDOS and escaping Aperture Science Laboratories, Chell, the protagonist of Portal, is taken back to the labs and placed in suspended animation for many years. While she sleeps, the laboratories become more and more run down, because no one is there to take care of them. Once she wakes up, a small, dim-witted robot named Wheatley tries to help her escape the building. In the process, he accidentally reactivates GLaDOS, who, still angry with Chell for killing her, forces Chell to perform tests similar to the ones she performed in Portal.
While Chell solves the puzzles and GLaDOS repairs the building, Wheatley works behind the scenes to free Chell. Once he does, they try to sabotage GLaDOS's weapons, including her turrets and neurotoxin. In a confrontation with GLaDOS, Chell presses a button that removes GLaDOS from controlling the laboratory and puts Wheatley in her place. In anger, GLaDOS reveals that Wheatley is an intelligence-dampening sphere, created by scientists to distract GLaDOS from evil by distracting her with a constant stream of stupid ideas. Wheatley is outraged and becomes power-mad. He puts GLaDOS's AI into a potato and turns on Chell, sending them both deep underground to an abandoned part of the facility.
Underground is the first Aperture Science Laboratories, started in the 1950s. While exploring the area, recorded messages by Aperture Science founder Cave Johnson and his secretary Caroline tell the history of the company and explain the many dangerous tests performed there. As Chell moves further up in the labs, time moves forward as well, into the 1970s. Cave reveals that the company is bankrupt and must use homeless people as test subjects rather than the astronauts and Olympic athletes they had used before. Here Chell reunites with GLaDOS, whom she places on her portal gun and carries with her.
As they move forward, GLaDOS begins to repeat things that Caroline says and becomes confused. When they move into part of the lab that was used during the 1980s, a message from Cave says he has gotten cancer from working with moon dust and he is dying. After a rant about the unfairness of life, he says that he wants Caroline to run the company after he dies. GLaDOS comes up with a plan to destroy Wheatley once they find him.
Characters
- Chell is the player-character in both Portal games. She is a silent protagonist outside of small grunts during physical tasks. Very little truthful information is known about Chell; while GLaDOS makes many statements to Chell's background and history, GLaDOS herself admits she is unreliable.
- Cave Johnson was the founder and CEO of the fictional company Aperture Science. He is mentioned in some of the alternative reality game information associated with Portal in describing the history of the company, while his presence in Portal 2 is through pre-recorded messages (voiced by J.K. Simmons) played while the player-character explores the depths of Aperture Science. Based on in-game information, Johnson is shown to have grown frustrated and jealous of his competitors despite receiving significant funding for the company's technology achievements, and slowly grew mad and insane over the years until his death from moon dust poisoning.
- GLaDOS, an acronym for "Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System", is a rampant artificial intelligence computer systems that controls Aperture Science, and is the primary antagonist for the Portal series. She is voiced by Ellen McLain. She awakens the player-character Chell in the first game, tasking her through the dangerous testing course, but Chell manages to escape and appears to destroy her, though later revealed to have had her personality stored within a black box. Within the second game, Wheatley accidentally reawakens GLaDOS, and eventually convinces Chell to initiate a core transfer to replace her with himself. GLaDOS, placed into a module powered by a potato battery, is forced to work with Chell to depose Wheatley from power before the Aperture facility is destroyed.
- Personality Cores are portable, self-powered AIs that are spherical, with one eye and two handles. They are modules that were designed by Aperture Science to be installed on GLaDOS to augment her capabilities.
- the Morality Core, which was installed onto GLaDOS to prevent her from flooding the labs with neurotoxin (as she had done once before). It accidentally falls off GLaDOS when Chell enters her chamber.
- the Curiosity Core, that kept GLaDOS from killing Chell to watch what she would do. This core constantly asks questions to Chell.
- the Intelligence Core, which reiterates a cake recipe with many unorthodox ingredients, referring to the cake that would be awarded to Chell at the end of the testing course.
- the Anger Core, which, instead of speaking, only produces angry snarls and growls.
- the Space Core, which is utterly fascinated by space and desires to go there. He constantly talks about space in a hyperactive manner. He eventually gets sucked into space with Wheatley. Later in the completely unrelated game of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, there is a mod made by Valve in which the space core falls from the sky, and is stuck of the planet Nirn. His character was inspired by an advert for the Oregon Coast Aquarium.[1] The lines and behavior of the Space Core have since become an Internet meme.
- ATLAS and P-body are the player characters in the co-op campaign of Portal 2. They are two robots that cannot speak and can only produce grunts, which are voiced by Dee Bradley Baker. They are equipped with their own portal guns which bears the colour of its user (blue and purple for ATLAS, yellow and red for P-body).
