Portal

Story

The plot of Portal is revealed to the player through audio messages or "announcements" from GLaDOS and visual elements in rooms in later levels. According to The Final Hours of Portal 2, the year is "somewhere in 2010" - twelve years after Aperture Science was abandoned. The game begins with Chell waking up from a stasis bed and hearing instructions and warnings from GLaDOS, an artificial intelligence, about upcoming tests. Chell enters various chambers, which introduce the players to the game mechanics one after the other. The announcements from GLaDOS serve as instructions for Chell and help the player to progress in the game, but also develop the atmosphere and characterize the AI as a person. Chell is promised a cake as a reward if she completes all the test chambers. Chell goes through the empty enrichment center, with GLaDOS as the only interaction. The closer the player gets to completion, the more sinister GLaDOS' motives and behavior become. Although meant to be encouraging, GLaDOS' actions and speech suggest insincerity and callous disregard for the safety and well-being of the test subjects. The test chambers become increasingly dangerous as Chell progresses. The tests include a shooting course for military androids and some chambers that are flooded with a dangerous liquid. In another chamber, GLaDOS realizes how important the Weighted Companion Cube, a waist-high box with a large pink heart on each side, is for Chell to pass the test. However, GLaDOS explains that he must be euthanized in an "emergency intelligence incinerator" before Chell can continue. In some later chambers, there are automated turrets with childlike voices (also voiced by McLain) that shoot at Chell, but only sympathize with her after they are destroyed or disabled. After Chell completes the final test chamber, GLaDOS maneuvers Chell into an incinerator to kill her. Chell escapes with the portal gun and makes her way through the maintenance areas of the enrichment center. GLaDOS panics and claims that she only wanted to kill Chell as part of a test. GLaDOS asks Chell to assume the "party escort submission position" and lie face down on the floor so a "party partner" can take her to her reward, but Chell continues her escape. In this section, GLaDOS is talking to Chell when it becomes clear that the AI has killed everyone else in the center. Chell makes her way through the maintenance areas and empty offices behind the chambers, sometimes following graffiti messages that point her in the right direction. These backstage areas, which are in an extremely dilapidated state, are in stark contrast to the pristine test chambers. The graffiti includes statements such as "The cake is a lie" and pastiches of Emily Dickinson's poem "The Chariot", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Reaper and the Flowers" and Emily Brontë's "No Coward Soul Is Mine", referring to and mourning the death of the Companion Cube. GLaDOS tries to dissuade Chell with threats of physical harm and misleading statements as Chell advances deeper into the maintenance areas. Chell reaches a large chamber with GLaDOS's hardware hanging overhead. GLaDOS continues to threaten Chell, but during the exchange of words, a bullet drops from GLaDOS and Chell throws it into an incinerator. GLaDOS reveals that Chell has just destroyed the morality or conscience core, one of the many "personality cores" that Aperture Science employees installed after the AI flooded the enrichment center with neurotoxin gas. Once it is removed, it can access the emitters again. A six-minute countdown begins as Chell removes and incinerates more personality cores from GLaDOS, while GLaDOS discourages her both verbally with taunts and juvenile insults and physically by firing missiles at her. After Chell destroys the last personality core, a malfunction tears the room apart and transports everything to the surface. Chell is then seen lying outside the gates of the facility amidst the remains of GLaDOS. Following the announcement of Portal 2, the ending was extended in a later update. In this retroactive continuity, Chell is dragged away by an unseen being who speaks in a robotic voice, thanking her for assuming the "subjugation position of party escort". In the final scene, after a long and quick zoom through the bowels of the facility, we see a Black Forest cake and the Weighted Companion Cube surrounded by a mixture of shelves with dozens of seemingly inactive personality cores. The cores begin to glow before a robotic arm descends and extinguishes the candle on the cake, darkening the room. As the credits roll, GLaDOS gives a final report: the song "Still Alive", declaring the experiment a great success and showing the player that GLaDOS is still alive, that her "lucky" core has not been deactivated.