Imagine waking up, without any memories, in a small, square
room with no doors. There are no people around, only you. This is the situation
in which Chell, the protagonist of Portal, finds herself.
In the relaxation vault, as the chamber is called, she apparently spent a bit of time. While looking around the chamber, a computer-generated voice speaks to her, welcoming in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, and warning that while fun and learning are at the core of the Enrichment Center activities, serious injuries may occure due to... due to what? The voice breaks down and the lights dim, sowing the first seed of uncertainity.
Before Chell can dwell on this, the first portal opens, allowing her to exit the warm, quite comfortable relaxation vault and step out into the cold, concrete corridors of Aperture Science.
From her first step, she is watched by souless, red-eyed cameras, reminiscent of HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Oddysey. They are the only spectators of the happenings in Aperture Science. There are no humans inside the complex other than Chell, the observation rooms she finds are empty, and any signs of human activity are old and covered with dust.
Chell is apparently a test subject, a lab rat of sorts. Each "test chamber" she enters, is reminiscent of mazes rats run in any laboratories... except now the maze is scaled up to the proportions of a human, and it is Chell who is apparently being watched. With nothing else to do, she participates in the tests, guided by the souless voice. In the second test chamber she acquires the item that will prove essential to her survival in the tests and beyond: the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, a "weapon" that can generate portals on any flat surface, that she can walk through.
The voice introduces her to the tool, and it malfunctions again, together with the lights. Chell proceeds onwards, noticing the rundown state of the facility and enduring the tests, topped off with unintented dark humour of the AI that guides her. She encounters no humans on the way. The center is completely deserted, Chell's only "companion" the voice that guides her, which is audinly malfunctioning, playing templates without entering variables or stopping abruptly halfway through the sentence.
The tests become more and more deadly as Chell progresses, with high energy pellets used liberally (and which vaporize any flesh that touches it) or extremely toxic pools at the bottom of the chambers, which act as an "incentive" for the test subject to perform well... and despite the voice's claims, quite deadly.
Eventually, in test chamber eleven, Chell manages to procure the second part of the ASHPD, allowing her to now create two linked portals at her leisure. At this point, the tests become even more elaborate than before, and the voice malfunctions even more, at times failing to even form a coherent sentence. The atmosphere of the tests slowly becomes disturbing, as the voice, in a steady, emotionless voice informs about various Aperture Science regulations, which range from slightly quirky to surreal... yet the promise of cake, counseling and most importantly contact with another human keeps Chell going.
She manages to finish test chamber sixteen, wounded, but alive. The entire test chamber was replaced with a live-fire exercise for military androids, complete with kind-voiced pulse turrets, which do not hesitate to kill anything they identify as enemy, all the while comforting their target in a child's voice that they do not hate them. It is also here that she finds the first of a number of hideouts of another test subject... which is a disturbing sight indeed. An entire concrete wall covered with scribbles, drawings of Aperture Science items, posters... and the prevalent "the cake is a lie", a warning that is yet not understood by her.
Then, there is test chamber seventeen, a place of both happiness and sorrow. Chell finds a fellow soul here, in the form of a Weighted Companion Cube. He's not a talkative guy, but a comforting companion nonetheless... exploring the chamber, she finds another hideout, this time more disturbing than the previous one. The walls are covered with photos of the companion cube, photos of people with heads replaced with the companion cube, poems dedicated to the cube and what seems to be a... goodbye poem for the companion cube... Chell finishes the test chamber, thinking about the poem. It is not until the end of test number seventeen that the horror strikes - in order to progress, she is forced to murder her companion in the incinerator. It takes a long time, but she eventually breaks under the constant nagging of the voice. The cube dies, and with a heavy heart, Chell moves on.
The sheer proportions of test chamber eighteen makes one wonder just where on Earth is this chamber... the massive heights and sizes of each room are astounding. Upon it's completion, Chell finally reaches the last of the chambers, where she is reminded that she will be granted cake after this test. Relieved to see the end of the testing, she quickly completes the challenge, and sits on the Aperture Science unstationary scaffold, waiting to arrive at the end, satisfied that she completed her testing and will be free once again.
Her satisfaction turns to horror, as the platform is revealed to be heading into an incinerator. The voice reassures her that the ASHPD will continue to function even after placing it into such a fire. Using her skills, she manages to evade impending death. As she lands on the observation platform over the pit, the voice seems startled and tries to convince Chell that it was just a final test, and urges her to assume the party escort submission position or she will miss her party for completing the tests. Needless to say, Chell doesn't believe one bit of what she is told. She notices the ruptured pipes over the incinerator and using the ASHPD enters the belly of the Enrichment Center.
The workings of the Center are quite different from the test chambers. Wheras the latter were clean and safe, the former are full of rusting walls, decaying equipment and general abandon. Apart from abandoned technical and maintenance facilities, Chell finds herself in administrative and control facilities. They look as if people just disappeared overnight. Cups, tools, computers, chairs all look as if people just... vanished. Projectors are still running in the conference rooms she comes across, and give a name to the voice that has been a guiding hand and now a hounding ghost.
GLaDOS. Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operation System.
It seems that it was developed as an alternative to the Black Mesa system, with which Aperture Science was competing, with extreme hostility it seems... it all means naught to Chell, who just wants to find an exit from the horror she is forced to endure.
She finds her way using the cube delivery system, which deposits her in one of the test chambers she previously completed. With the full ASHPD, she manages to circumvent the mechanism (and curiously, she notices that someone removed the cube she previously used to complete the test) and find herself once again in the depths of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. She is guided by red drawings on the walls, apparently drawn by the same person to whom the hideouts belonged... she has no other choice but to trust them.
The extent of abandon manifest to Chell - numerous destroyed equipment litter the halls, access ladders come off the concrete wall... yet signs of human habitation are present, as she comes across discarded Aperture Science drinkable water bottles, milk cartons, even beans. The Center continues to function regardless, storage cubes continue to run through the transport systems, pistons still operate and machinery continues to work.
Narrowly avoiding a GLaDOS turret trap, she finds herself in a turret maintenance shed, abandoned and decaying, shortly arriving at another office section, where GLaDOS finally shows what she intents to do - kill Chell.
Chell has no other choice but to move on. The abandoned office turns out to be an R&D facility, housing a rocket turret... which quickly identifies her as an enemy, destroying the glass barrier and allowing passage. Thanks to it's slow reaction time, Chell manages to coerce it to destroying the obstacles in her path, opening the path ahead.
Which leads her to the sewer system. Ignoring the stench and general unappealing looks, she manages to traverse it, arriving in a monstrous chamber. With the ceiling disappearing high in the blue mist, she is left speechless. She is quickly awakened from the stupor as another ambush by GLaDOS manifests itself. Numerous turrets open fire from ports on the walls as Chell dives for cover. It isn't enough to stop her, however - the ASHPD gives her an advantage over the mindless turrets, allowing her to emerge behind them and tip them over, rendering them inert.
She recognizes her objective, and thinking with portals, she makes her way to the walkways above her. She is close to her goal, with only a single door between her and GLaDOS.
The tiled corridor, filled with various apparatus on the walls leads her to the most amazing sight in the complex - a massive metallic cylinder resting on pillars, located inside a giant, metal chamber. The chamber's walls disappear in the blue mist filling it...
Chell enters the walkway connecting to the chamber, determined to face GLaDOS and end her imprisonment within the abandoned Enrichment Center.
When entering the cylinder, she finally sees GLaDOS in person... or rather in her full malevolent AI glory. She is a massive supercomputer suspended from the ceiling of the massive cylinder, and just as she sees Chell enter, she speaks, taunting her and promising a surprise...
The surprise turns out to be a violet sphere. GLaDOS urges Chell not to touch it or do anything with it... and of course the pleas go unheard, as the adamant woman places the orb in the incinerator, prompting a rather strange reaction from the AI... while at first surprised, her voice suddenly changes into a more subtle, seductive tone and the feel of the sentences being out together from pre-recorded words is gone.
The thing Chell destroyed was a morality core Aperture Science technicians installed to prevent GLaDOS from filling the Enrichment Center with deadly neurotoxin, ever again. With limits gone, she is now free to kill Chell with the toxin, and she intends to do so, warming the emitters up.
Chell has five minutes before the toxin overwhelms and kills her. That was more than enough for her. A rocket turret deployed by GLaDOS to kill her enemy turned out to be Chell's best weapon against the malevolent AI. With portals, she manages to force the rocket to hit the computer's exposed AI core, detaching the spheres responsible for various aspects of GLaDOS' functioning, such as curiosity, cake baking and aggression. Enduring the taunts, Chell placed all three in the incinerator, and when the last one was burned up, GLaDOS suffered a critical error, resulting in massive failure and destruction of the supercomputer. The vacuum created by the destruction sucked Chell in, and it seemed she is going to die...
...but not quite so. She was deposited just behind the entry gates of the Enrichment Center, among falling debris, the remains of the AI she just defeated. The sky was clear, with the sun shining on the surface, trees thriving in the warm weather.
She was free again.
In the relaxation vault, as the chamber is called, she apparently spent a bit of time. While looking around the chamber, a computer-generated voice speaks to her, welcoming in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, and warning that while fun and learning are at the core of the Enrichment Center activities, serious injuries may occure due to... due to what? The voice breaks down and the lights dim, sowing the first seed of uncertainity.
Before Chell can dwell on this, the first portal opens, allowing her to exit the warm, quite comfortable relaxation vault and step out into the cold, concrete corridors of Aperture Science.
From her first step, she is watched by souless, red-eyed cameras, reminiscent of HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Oddysey. They are the only spectators of the happenings in Aperture Science. There are no humans inside the complex other than Chell, the observation rooms she finds are empty, and any signs of human activity are old and covered with dust.
Chell is apparently a test subject, a lab rat of sorts. Each "test chamber" she enters, is reminiscent of mazes rats run in any laboratories... except now the maze is scaled up to the proportions of a human, and it is Chell who is apparently being watched. With nothing else to do, she participates in the tests, guided by the souless voice. In the second test chamber she acquires the item that will prove essential to her survival in the tests and beyond: the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, a "weapon" that can generate portals on any flat surface, that she can walk through.
The voice introduces her to the tool, and it malfunctions again, together with the lights. Chell proceeds onwards, noticing the rundown state of the facility and enduring the tests, topped off with unintented dark humour of the AI that guides her. She encounters no humans on the way. The center is completely deserted, Chell's only "companion" the voice that guides her, which is audinly malfunctioning, playing templates without entering variables or stopping abruptly halfway through the sentence.
The tests become more and more deadly as Chell progresses, with high energy pellets used liberally (and which vaporize any flesh that touches it) or extremely toxic pools at the bottom of the chambers, which act as an "incentive" for the test subject to perform well... and despite the voice's claims, quite deadly.
Eventually, in test chamber eleven, Chell manages to procure the second part of the ASHPD, allowing her to now create two linked portals at her leisure. At this point, the tests become even more elaborate than before, and the voice malfunctions even more, at times failing to even form a coherent sentence. The atmosphere of the tests slowly becomes disturbing, as the voice, in a steady, emotionless voice informs about various Aperture Science regulations, which range from slightly quirky to surreal... yet the promise of cake, counseling and most importantly contact with another human keeps Chell going.
She manages to finish test chamber sixteen, wounded, but alive. The entire test chamber was replaced with a live-fire exercise for military androids, complete with kind-voiced pulse turrets, which do not hesitate to kill anything they identify as enemy, all the while comforting their target in a child's voice that they do not hate them. It is also here that she finds the first of a number of hideouts of another test subject... which is a disturbing sight indeed. An entire concrete wall covered with scribbles, drawings of Aperture Science items, posters... and the prevalent "the cake is a lie", a warning that is yet not understood by her.
Then, there is test chamber seventeen, a place of both happiness and sorrow. Chell finds a fellow soul here, in the form of a Weighted Companion Cube. He's not a talkative guy, but a comforting companion nonetheless... exploring the chamber, she finds another hideout, this time more disturbing than the previous one. The walls are covered with photos of the companion cube, photos of people with heads replaced with the companion cube, poems dedicated to the cube and what seems to be a... goodbye poem for the companion cube... Chell finishes the test chamber, thinking about the poem. It is not until the end of test number seventeen that the horror strikes - in order to progress, she is forced to murder her companion in the incinerator. It takes a long time, but she eventually breaks under the constant nagging of the voice. The cube dies, and with a heavy heart, Chell moves on.
The sheer proportions of test chamber eighteen makes one wonder just where on Earth is this chamber... the massive heights and sizes of each room are astounding. Upon it's completion, Chell finally reaches the last of the chambers, where she is reminded that she will be granted cake after this test. Relieved to see the end of the testing, she quickly completes the challenge, and sits on the Aperture Science unstationary scaffold, waiting to arrive at the end, satisfied that she completed her testing and will be free once again.
Her satisfaction turns to horror, as the platform is revealed to be heading into an incinerator. The voice reassures her that the ASHPD will continue to function even after placing it into such a fire. Using her skills, she manages to evade impending death. As she lands on the observation platform over the pit, the voice seems startled and tries to convince Chell that it was just a final test, and urges her to assume the party escort submission position or she will miss her party for completing the tests. Needless to say, Chell doesn't believe one bit of what she is told. She notices the ruptured pipes over the incinerator and using the ASHPD enters the belly of the Enrichment Center.
The workings of the Center are quite different from the test chambers. Wheras the latter were clean and safe, the former are full of rusting walls, decaying equipment and general abandon. Apart from abandoned technical and maintenance facilities, Chell finds herself in administrative and control facilities. They look as if people just disappeared overnight. Cups, tools, computers, chairs all look as if people just... vanished. Projectors are still running in the conference rooms she comes across, and give a name to the voice that has been a guiding hand and now a hounding ghost.
GLaDOS. Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operation System.
It seems that it was developed as an alternative to the Black Mesa system, with which Aperture Science was competing, with extreme hostility it seems... it all means naught to Chell, who just wants to find an exit from the horror she is forced to endure.
She finds her way using the cube delivery system, which deposits her in one of the test chambers she previously completed. With the full ASHPD, she manages to circumvent the mechanism (and curiously, she notices that someone removed the cube she previously used to complete the test) and find herself once again in the depths of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. She is guided by red drawings on the walls, apparently drawn by the same person to whom the hideouts belonged... she has no other choice but to trust them.
The extent of abandon manifest to Chell - numerous destroyed equipment litter the halls, access ladders come off the concrete wall... yet signs of human habitation are present, as she comes across discarded Aperture Science drinkable water bottles, milk cartons, even beans. The Center continues to function regardless, storage cubes continue to run through the transport systems, pistons still operate and machinery continues to work.
Narrowly avoiding a GLaDOS turret trap, she finds herself in a turret maintenance shed, abandoned and decaying, shortly arriving at another office section, where GLaDOS finally shows what she intents to do - kill Chell.
Chell has no other choice but to move on. The abandoned office turns out to be an R&D facility, housing a rocket turret... which quickly identifies her as an enemy, destroying the glass barrier and allowing passage. Thanks to it's slow reaction time, Chell manages to coerce it to destroying the obstacles in her path, opening the path ahead.
Which leads her to the sewer system. Ignoring the stench and general unappealing looks, she manages to traverse it, arriving in a monstrous chamber. With the ceiling disappearing high in the blue mist, she is left speechless. She is quickly awakened from the stupor as another ambush by GLaDOS manifests itself. Numerous turrets open fire from ports on the walls as Chell dives for cover. It isn't enough to stop her, however - the ASHPD gives her an advantage over the mindless turrets, allowing her to emerge behind them and tip them over, rendering them inert.
She recognizes her objective, and thinking with portals, she makes her way to the walkways above her. She is close to her goal, with only a single door between her and GLaDOS.
The tiled corridor, filled with various apparatus on the walls leads her to the most amazing sight in the complex - a massive metallic cylinder resting on pillars, located inside a giant, metal chamber. The chamber's walls disappear in the blue mist filling it...
Chell enters the walkway connecting to the chamber, determined to face GLaDOS and end her imprisonment within the abandoned Enrichment Center.
When entering the cylinder, she finally sees GLaDOS in person... or rather in her full malevolent AI glory. She is a massive supercomputer suspended from the ceiling of the massive cylinder, and just as she sees Chell enter, she speaks, taunting her and promising a surprise...
The surprise turns out to be a violet sphere. GLaDOS urges Chell not to touch it or do anything with it... and of course the pleas go unheard, as the adamant woman places the orb in the incinerator, prompting a rather strange reaction from the AI... while at first surprised, her voice suddenly changes into a more subtle, seductive tone and the feel of the sentences being out together from pre-recorded words is gone.
The thing Chell destroyed was a morality core Aperture Science technicians installed to prevent GLaDOS from filling the Enrichment Center with deadly neurotoxin, ever again. With limits gone, she is now free to kill Chell with the toxin, and she intends to do so, warming the emitters up.
Chell has five minutes before the toxin overwhelms and kills her. That was more than enough for her. A rocket turret deployed by GLaDOS to kill her enemy turned out to be Chell's best weapon against the malevolent AI. With portals, she manages to force the rocket to hit the computer's exposed AI core, detaching the spheres responsible for various aspects of GLaDOS' functioning, such as curiosity, cake baking and aggression. Enduring the taunts, Chell placed all three in the incinerator, and when the last one was burned up, GLaDOS suffered a critical error, resulting in massive failure and destruction of the supercomputer. The vacuum created by the destruction sucked Chell in, and it seemed she is going to die...
...but not quite so. She was deposited just behind the entry gates of the Enrichment Center, among falling debris, the remains of the AI she just defeated. The sky was clear, with the sun shining on the surface, trees thriving in the warm weather.
She was free again.
