Portal 2

[janegray]

Five days ago, the videogame Company Valve released free Portal 2 downloadable content titled "Perpetual Testing Initiative." Basically, it's a free in-game map editor, which allows players to create and share maps with other player.

Everybody knows the "the cake is a lie" meme, but not everybody knows where it's from. Well, the answer is Portal.

The new maps reminded me that I really, really, really love the Portal games. So I've decided it's about time I shared my love for them by posting some scans from the comic "Lab Rat."

I love the art in this comic. The main character suffers from schizophrenia, and the art reflects his state of mind: when he is off his medication, it's all sketchy, but in flashbacks the pictures are clear.

16 pages out of a free 27-pages comic. At the end of this post you can find the link to the full comic.


WARNING: Lab Rat takes place between Portal and Portal 2, and as such is full of spoilers for the first game.

Of course, Portal is a 5-year-old game, so you might say that anybody who wanted to play it already has. But I got it 5 months ago, so I think it's always best to put spoiler warnings :P





Doug Rattmann, also known as "the Ratman," is the person who wrote all those "the cake is a lie" warnings in the first game. He is the only survivor (excluding the frozen test subjects) of GLaDOS's initial mass murder at the Aperture Science Enrichment Center; as GLaDOS locked the facility down, he couldn't escape, so he has been hiding from her and leaving clues for Chell, the playable character of the games.





Yes, that's a Companion Cube. When Rattmann is off his medication, he can hear the CC speak as if it was sentient. The CC actually gives him good advice.

Even so, Rattmann figures that he'll have better chances of survival if he has a clear head when the time comes to take out GLaDOS. So, he has saved the last of his medication until now.



Now, flashback time!



Back to the present, Chell has defeated GLaDOS!





This is where Portal ends, with Chell captured and dragged back to the facility.





Rattmann to the rescue!

I really love him. He has gone through a mass murder and spent a long time (months?) locked in a dark and cold prison, without his medication and with the sole company of an inanimate object, running away from a murderous AI and countless death-traps. Then, he finally, finally gets away and sees the sun, sweet freedom awaiting him... and he chooses to go back to save Chell!

He is not an action hero or anything. He has no military training, no equipment. But he is a genuinely kind guy, and he wants to help.







Flashback again! Right after GLaDOS' flooding of the Enrichment Center with neurotoxin.










You can read the conclusion, as well as all the pages I cut, here:

http://www.thinkwithportals.com/comic/#1

Comments

[glprime]

Major love for Portal.

It's one of my all-time favorites; fun concept with FPS-playform-puzzle solving, great world-building & storyline, and one of the most truly inspired HORROR games I've ever played (games that use jump scares and say "boo!" could learn something). Seriously, how messed up and torturous and just damn tragic everything is in Aperture really gets to you (and I fully believe Chell's last name is Johnson).

I was lucky enough when I decided to first do the co-op DLC to get a really good partner, and we had a fun couple of hours running through the maps all night, gelling as a duo like Atlas and P-Body, and then the payoff. It was great. I started downloading player made maps, and that was awesome, but a bit cumbersome at times. This new feature could make that fun again. I also like that the backstory opened up a whole new element with parallel-earth outsourcing.

[janegray]

Personally, I much prefer to believe that Chell is NOT Cave's daughter, just like I much prefer to believe that RED Spy is NOT BLU Scout's father.

For entirely subjective reasons, I LOATHE the "Luke, I am your father!" trope. I really can't stand it. IMO, it reinforces the idea that biological bonds are the only ones that truly matter :/

If Cave is Chell's father, that would make Caroline Chell's mother. And IMO the Chell-GLaDOS relationship would be immensely cheapened if it turned out that GLaDOS grew to care for Chell not out of respect for Chell's strength and determination and out of appreciation for their partnership, but just because they share the same blood.

[mrstatham]

I do think it would be a little too convenient if Cave was Chell's father. There'd be no reason for it, given Cave Johnson doesn't even seem like the sort to have a family and we know he appointed Caroline (with her brain in a computer) as his successor for Aperture in the event of his death, rather than any family member. I don't think there's any need for that sort of link to be made between Cave and Chell nor GLaDOS and Chell, really. I think it cheapens Cave's role as this weirdly enigmatic but really quite powerful Howard Hughes-esque presence throughout the second game to just have him be the protagonist's father, because.. Well, I like the idea that Chell is just this really fucking smart person trapped in a massive problem someone else made.

And the only trait Cave and Chell have in common that I can see is determination. Cave and his insane pushing science forward to the ends of making... Shower rails.. And Chell being Chell. I don't see that many links between the two otherwise.

[janegray]

Plus, Cave and Caroline are white, and Chell isn't.

[mrstatham]

Well, that too.

[stolisomancer]

Chell is played by Alesia Glidewell, who's half Brazilian and half Japanese. If you operate on the assumption that Chell the character has a similar if not identical ethnicity, the only character in the entirety of Half-Life or Portal that you could realistically say she was related to is Azian Vance, Alyx's mother.

[mrstatham]

Well, based on her appearance in Portal, at least, Chell definitely seems to share her performer's nationality, I think. But there is some debate as to where Portal fits into Half Life's timeline that had led people to speculate exactly where Chell could fit into any prospective Half Life appearances, given GLaDOS references the Combine invasion and yet I find it difficult to believe after Portal 2 that GLaDOS would basically turf Chell out into a Combine-controlled world where she could die.

So, it's a tough one.

[drexer]

It is quite, quite far into the future though.

[mrstatham]

The minimum for Chell being asleep seems to be twenty years, which still gives enough time to account for the ridiculous potato growth given, hey, it's Chell's and all the other kids potatoes suck, as we can easily see. The maximum seems to be around two hundred years.

[janegray]

The first Portal game takes place between Half-Life and Half-Life 2 (that's the reason nobody came to help after GLaDOS' initial mass murder, the world's attention was focused on the events of Half-Life).

IIRC, Valve confirmed in an old interview that Portal 2 takes place a couple hundreds years after Half-Life 2. I can't find that interview anymore, though, and I might remember wrong.

Still, the extreme decay of the facility at the beginning of the game also seems to imply that it has been a VERY long time since Chell went to sleep. And after Chell gets out, right in front of her there is a cultivated field, so humanity must have survived.

[stolisomancer]

If they really wanted to stick Chell into the Half-Life games, most likely as an Easter egg, they've got all the tools they'd need to do it. Kleiner's teleporter already has a weird habit of interposing people in time (he teleports Alyx and Gordon across City 17 and a week forward at one point during HL2), and it'd be way too big of a coincidence for two separate top-secret projects in roughly the same time frame to be working on teleportation technology that shares absolutely no common elements. I can already see it now: Gordon goes into one of those flickering teleportation sequences that Valve loves so much, and one of the destinations is an overgrown field full of wild grass with a woman in orange walking through it.

Hell, there's your Portal 3 right there. Red is one end of the portal; blue is the other. White is forward in time; black is backward. The game as it stands right now is mostly about the challenge of actually thinking in three dimensions, so go ahead: add a fourth.

The only problem would be getting the portal gun back to Chell, but we don't know what happened to the broken prototype guns that Cave Johnson mentioned in the advertising trailers, and we have no guarantee that the portal gun in Aperture is the only portal gun that's ever existed.

Sure, odds are pretty good that Chell at the end of Portal 2 is punted out into a post-Combine Earth, where she very well could be the only living human on the planet, or the only unmodified pre-Combine human. That doesn't mean she has to stay there, and we already know that if there's absolutely one thing she wouldn't do, it's give up.

[whitesycamore]

Plus, Caroline being Chell's mother would really harsh the Les-yay vibes between Chell and Glados.

Yeah, I ship it.