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Portal was the first computer game I remember playing growing up. Based on Narbacular Drop, a game about a princess escaping a dungeon which had you using blue and orange gateways to travel around, Portal was a game that revolutionized how we think about and construct puzzle games. The puzzles themselves were based on a few mechanics, like the use of portals, cubes and buttons, turrets, and much more. What really made this game stand out was its setting, story, and its humor. No other game's humor defined the early 2000's as much as Portal did, with phrases like "the cake is a lie" and companion cube images appearing at every turn. Being the first video game I ever played on the PC, before playing other hits like Roblox, Gmod, and Half-Life, this game inspired me as a child. I lit up whenever I opened the game, and even though I have beaten this short game dozens of times in the last couple of decades, it still fills me with wonder and an odd sense of comfort.
Having you wake up in an underground testing facility, you are locked indoors during most of the game's runtime. You never see another human, and you are all alone in a mysterous testing facility. Without characters to drive the story, you piece together the narrative using the game's setting, a lonely, empty enrichment center with seemingly no life except for the few turrets that appear sentient, and the security cameras always watching you. With death being the natural result to failing most of these tests, there is a natural hostility to the situation you are in, accentuated by the sense that all eyes are on you. Remembering that this game came out a few years before Portal 2, we had very little pieces of lore to piece together the situation of Portal. We had little details; companion cubes may be sentient, android hell might be real, bring your daughter to work day was an important event. These disconnected details hinted at a deeper story than we were being let on to, but it created space for fans of the game to imagine their own world and give Portal their own backstory. One piece of lore that Valve confirmed around this time that still fills me with wonder is knowing that Portal and Half-Life occur in the same universe. At the time I was beaming with ideas about what must be happening on the surface during the first Portal game, and even if the Combine invasion had begun yet. This freedom to think about the lore of Aperture Science was one of the aspects of the game that appealed to me at such a young age, and the hints of life in the testing track, what we now call "rat dens", made me very curious about all the test subjects that came beforehand. How long was I in stasis? What happened to the testing subjects that came before me? Notice how I call the character "I" and "me" rather than "Chell", and this is the second stroke of genius for how Valve writes their characters...
Like its predecesor, Half-Life, you play as a silent protagonist, Chell. We still know little about Chell after Portal 2, but we knew even less when the game first came out. We only had hints. Some suggest that, based off her cheekbones and wrist girth, she is emaciated and underfed, if fed at all. She has no dialogue during the entire Portal continuity, meaning that we as the player can fill in her silence with our own thoughts; our dialogue becomes hers. My confusion, awe, wonder, and fear in the hostility that's Aperture Science becomes less a reflection of my thoughts as a player and more her experience as the protagonist, since there is no dialogue to directly contradict the personality I project onto her. While we do know things about her from the first game, that she was likely abandoned by her birth parents and that she was a loner with no friends, I could fill in the space of how lonely of a person she already was and how lonely she must be in the testing tracks now. It's one kind of loneliness when you walk down a street full of people and you have no one to care for you, but it's another thing when you are locked underground, miles beneath the surface from the nearest living human.
Though Portal is a rather lonely game due to the fact that you are going through the testing track alone, that doesn't mean the game has no characters. The lack of characters in the game has nothing to do with a lack of ideas or mere laziness. It is how the writers limited themselves to create a more compelling story. There are a handful of characters we can draw from. Outside of Chell, there's the turrets, the companion cube (which is ironic to call a character since it is literally a static prop during the game), and of course Glados and her personality cores. While it was first presented as a machine that went haywire, I now view the character with hindsight from what we know about her from Portal 2. Being a human, forced into a machine against her will, I would be angry and upset, likely to the point that if a few of my wires were mixed, I might be like Glados and try and flood the facility with neurotoxin, because how could an entire body of people be okay with this? Putting personality cores on her adds insult to injury. This is the equivalent of putting voices in another person's head. Not intrusive thoughts or ideas, actual voices, foreign voices that do no represent your core personality. To an extent, Glados is as much a victim of the Enrichment Center as we are. The facility took much from who she was and who she used to be and forced her into a role that she had to play, and by the end of the Portal continuity, she decides who she is and chooses to continue testing, rather than being forced into it; no voices to control her this time. Same with Chell; we also get the freedom to be free of the Enrichment Center in a more literal way.
