If you become light headed from thirst, feel free to pass out." They wouldn't land the same without the context that also makes them sinister. "This next test could take a very, very long time. Until then, she has the upper hand in every situation, and her lines speak of the chilling distance of someone with complete power over your life, but also very little interest in it. Many of her most absurd quotes ("That thing you burned up isn't important to me… it made shoes for orphans") are only when she's desperately trying to regain it. We remember GlaDOS as funny and mean, but she exists in Portal as a spectre of control. What's going to be at the end of testing? If there was going to be a way out of this, why is someone hiding from 'her'? Exactly how malevolent is Aperture, and what are you supposed to do about it? Every handprint staining the wall, every scrawled 'help', is a disruption from the controlled environment of the testing chambers, and a reminder that indefinite testing isn't normal or sustainable. The implications of this mysterious figure feed into the sense of threat. 'The cake is a lie', yes, but also plainly 'help', and if you hadn't picked it up from all the cameras-and GlaDOS's vocal dislike of having them destroyed-'she's watching you'. In contrast to the sterile, surveilled test chambers, the maintenance areas as you discover them are rusting orange and falling apart-not to mention covered in panicked graffiti. Regardless, the imagery is known across too much media to not understand the effect: it's medicalised, and it's isolating.īut of course, you aren't entirely isolated, because there's someone living inside the walls, behind the test chambers. Invoking psychiatric wards isn't my favourite visual shorthand in horror, particularly when some of the canon background lore for Aperture is clumsy in its depiction of mental illness. Cake, and in one instance, grief counselling.Įven the interstitial spaces between levels are hostile, with the emancipation grills that dissolve any items you try to bring with you (and may emancipate your fillings, crowns, tooth enamel, or teeth), but also the lifts, which are notably lined with padded walls.
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Turrets, armed with laser-sights, will certainly kill you-or at least leave blood spattered up the pristine white walls while you work out how to disarm them.Īll the while, GlaDOS offers unhelpful advice, but promises the reward of cake at the other end. Coming into contact with energy pellets, which ping off at regular intervals, will also kill you. The floor in one will kill you, so you're warned to try to avoid it. Increasingly, it's not only the design of the testing chambers that are hostile, but the tests themselves. She's the robot you talk to on the telephone while trying to find a real agent, if that robot had the capacity to snipe at you as much as you might want to snipe at it. The sense of only being a cog in a machine is oppressive-and while the messages are a little off, GlaDOS' presence early on is implied to be that of a set of pre-recorded messages, simply representing Aperture Science.
Trying to rush parts of the test prematurely will at best fail, and at worst get you killed. You can press buttons, and you can shoot portals. Of course it's possible to play it fast-there are both speedruns for 'fastest times' and 'fewest portals'-but there are only set ways you can act on the world. You have to wait for platforms to come to you, for timers to align, for energy pellets to traverse to their destination.
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