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This article is about the video game actually titled Portal. If you are currently searching for portal-related tropes, please refer to Teleportation Tropes.

The most fitting description you can have for Portal is possibly what That Other Wiki calls it: "first-person puzzle game". Essentially, it is a Puzzle Game made in 3D with a First Person Shooter engine, which can serve as a somewhat misleading combination.

Portal nominally takes place in the Half-Life universe, but there's nothing connecting them other than random hints on walls referring to Black Mesa and the fact that Aperture Science is mentioned in the Half-Life 2 episodes. The storyline is very simple: Chell, the player character (female, but that's where the characterization ends) wakes up in a seemingly uninhabited facility, finding her way through a series of puzzles as a test subject for the portal gun, which is capable of shooting portals on flat surfaces (only two at a time), creating a link between them, sometimes with bizarre twists of geometry and gravity that are exploited for all they're worth.

There are no other characters to interact with (except for an AI voice guiding the player throughout the puzzles and a completely inert friendly cube), no enemies to kill (except for largely indestructible gun-turrets), and no items to find (other than a number of cubes, and the portal gun itself, which is given to the player in the very beginning and upgraded slightly later). However, it's clever, challenging, and has a unique premise - definitely worth checking out.

Finally: the fact that Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw simply couldn't find anything bad to say about it should probably tell you something. Now, please enter your local Aperture Science Enrichment Center for further testing.

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Provides examples of:

• AI Is A Crapshoot: A pleasant amusing physics game is turned into a brilliant meme-rich story demonstrating the power of the medium merely by the judicious application of an Insane Killer Robot.
• All There In The Manual: The Aperture Science website reveals much of the backstory. If you know what to do and where to look.
• Arson Murder And Jaywalking: I'm going to kill you. And all the cake is gone.
• Arc Words: *warping sound* C-C-Cakecakecakecakecake... To an extent, anyway. "The Cake Is A Lie" fits the bill.
• Ascii Art
• Bad Liar: GlaDOS is very surprised you successfully completed the test, and it shows.
• Black Comedy: GLaDOS's sense of humor.
• Boss Banter
• Brain Uploading: GLaDOS claims to have a backup of Chell on file, which she later claims to delete. Of course, she is a lying liar who lies, so who knows.
• Bread Eggs Milk Squick: Listen to the cake recipe...
• Briar Patching: Near the end of the game, GLaDOS tells you not to touch a certain object and, for once, it would probably be for the best if you complied (but Stupidity Is The Only Option in order to beat the game.) GLaDOS actually bets on the player not trusting it and doing the opposite of what it says. Despite its double use of Reverse Psychology, its intention is still pretty obvious.
• BSOD Song: Still Alive is a rather weird villainous version of this.
• Cargo Ship: Possibly the most infamous case.
• Collision Damage: Inverted. If you can get close enough to the turrets without getting machine gunned to death, you can shove them over and they shut down.
  • But played straight with the toxic floors and energy orbs. GLaDOS even lampshades it:
    GLaDOS: The Aperture Science Center promises to always offer safe testing environments. In dangerous testing environments, the Aperture Science Center promises to offer helpful advice. For instance, the floor here will kill you. Try to avoid it.
    GLaDOS: While safety is one of many Enrichment Center goals, the Aperture Science High-Energy Pellets (seen to the left of the chamber) can and have caused permanent disabilities, such as vaporization. Please be careful.
• Cool Gate
• Companion Cube: Trope Namer
• Copy Protection: Sort of. If you want to access the backstory on the official site, you need the login and password found in one of the Rooms Full Of Crazy. Specifically, it's in the level with... that aforementioned Companion Cube. Just look around. It's there.
  • Fine, go ahead and take it from below, if you're a whiny little would-be gamer who can't even beat a puzzle game. Wuss. Especially if you don't wanna bother going through that again. You can only type in capital letters on the site no matter what.
  Login: CJOHNSON
  Password: TIER3
• Credits Gag
• Creepy Monotone: Or at least very passive-aggressive
  • In fact, when you destroy the Morality Core and GLaDOS switches from robotic monotone to an emotive, more obviously female voice, the contrast is actually creepier than the robotic monotone that you've been listening to all game.
• Crowning Music Of Awesome - "Still Alive", the song played during the credits.
• Deadly Gas
• Deadpan Snarker: GLaDOS, the AI.
• Department Of Redundancy Department: It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin.
• DVD Commentary: The game has an alternate play mode in which speech-bubble-shaped objects appear that are triggers for audio clips of commentary. Most of the clips are the designers talking about the process of making the game; there are also about half a dozen (some sneakily hidden) in which Ellen McLain talks about the experience of being GLaDOS.
• Ear Worm: "Still Alive", the end song, is incredibly catchy.
  • Which is pretty par for the course, as the song is written by the great Jonathan Coulton.
• Elaborate Underground Base
• Ensemble Darkhorse: The game was originally sold in "The Orange Box" with the much-anticipated Team Fortress 2 and Half Life 2: Episode 2. Guess which one turned out to be the runaway hit and critics' darling? (Not that the other two weren't good themselves.)
  • The Weighted Companion Cube is something of a subversion, as it was intended to be this to begin with in the game, but even Valve admitted they vastly underestimated the extent to which it was adopted as a fan favorite.
• Epileptic Trees: See Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory.
• Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory: There have been some truly odd interpretations of this fairly straightforward game as, among other things, a crushing feminist assault on the masculine and misogynist games industry. See the Wild Mass Guessing page for details.
• Everything Is An iPod In The Future: Granted it's not very far into the future.
• Evil Sounds Deep
• Excuse Plot: A very interesting deconstruction of this trope. The plot at first seems to be a thinly disguised excuse for having you run through a bunch of rooms where you play with the portal gun. With cake as the reward. Then the game starts jerking the heartstrings and applying the Mind Screw.
• Expository Theme Tune: Unusually, this one is an Ending Theme rather than an opening theme.
• Expospeak Gag: "Aperture Science 1500 Watt Super-Colliding Super-Button", "Aperture Science Thing We Don't Know What It Does", among others.
• False Reassurance: GLaDOS is quite fond of these.
• For Science: Aperture Science doesn't seem to be too good at considering the future implications of the gadgets they make. As the theme tune says, "We do what we must / Because we can."
  • If you pay attention in the game you can see a slide presenting GLaDOS originally as a competing bid for an airplane Fuel System Icing Inhibitor. (Cheaper, a fully functional disk operating system, and, arguably, alive.)
• Gaiden Game: To the Half-Life series.
• Game Level
• Gannon Banned: GLaDOS's name is often misspelled "GLADUS" on message boards.
• Grotesque Cute: The turrets — such cute voices. Such infantile dialogue. So polite and apologetic while they machine-gun you to bits dispense product. So much dakka. The Curiosity Core qualifies too.
  Are you still there?
  Do you smell something burning?
• Hello Insert Name Here
  GLaDOS: Unbelievable! You, (subject name here), must be the pride of (subject hometown here)!
• Heroic Mime: Chell. GLaDOS even complains about her lack of response in the final chamber. "You're not even listening to me, are you?" She plays a recording of someone she claims is Chell saying "hello" cheerfully. But since it's GLaDOS, this is untrustworthy.
• Hey Its That Voice: Ellen McLain is the voice of GLaDOS, the Team Fortress 2 announcer, and the Half-Life 2 Combine Overwatch. The last one, naturally, leads to a lot of Epileptic Trees.
  • Mike Patton, lead singer if Faith No More plays the aggression core. For those wondering, he also did some zombies in Left 4 Dead and a the monsters in I Am Legend.
• It Was His Sled: The cake is a lie. Or Is It?
  • Literal Genie / False Reassurance, variation. There's cake, it's just not for you.
  • You wouldn't want to eat the damn cake.
  • Although there was cake, there's no way Rat Man could have known about it.
• I Was Told There Would Be Cake: She was, she really was.
• Laser Sight: The turrets.
• Layman's Terms: "speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out"
• Lights Off Their Eyes: GlaDOS's multiple eyes go dark in the end. Are you happy now? She certainly is. Happy to be still alive.
• Load Bearing Boss
• Long List: One of GLaDOS's cores lists an awful lot of "garnishes."
• Lost In Transmission: GLaDOS's introductory greeting.
  "For your own safety, and the safety of others, please refrain from *crackle* *static* Por favor de donde fallar muchos gracias de fallar gracias. *crackle* stand back. The portal will open in three... two... one..."
  • Translating this doesn't help any.
  • But do note that under it you can hear "Why do we fail/die?"
  • Subverted (intentionally? not?) later on. The subtitles say, "...you will be baked *static* cake". But the audio track clearly says "...you will be baked, and then there will be cake."
• Meaningful Name: Chell, possibly. See the Wild Mass Guessing entry.
• Memetic Mutation: "There Will Be Cake," "The Cake Is a Lie," "Now You're Thinking With Portals," and the Weighted Companion Cube.
• Morality Chip: Well, technically a Morality Core.
  "It was a Morality Core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin."
• Name That Tune: The radios in the game play a short jazzy loop based on "Still Alive."
• Nice Job Breaking It Hero: Trope Namer again (though the event that precipitated the response was not actually an example).
• No Fair Cheating: The steps, portals, and time challenges. Also, you can't get achievements with cheat mode on.
• Ontological Mystery
• Or Is It: The last scene shows GLaDOS's backup orbs turning on.
• Overdrawn At The Blood Bank
• Peace And Love Incorporated
• Phlebotinum Rebel
• Player Punch: We know who, when, and who caused it.
• Point Of No Return: Within some levels, there are doors that close once the player goes through. (The divisions between each Game Level are also points of no return, of course.)
• Portal Cut is averted: If the player tries to put a portal elsewhere when the player is in the middle of a portal, the player gets pushed out. Most of the time. Unless you loosen a security camera, but that's opening a portal.
• Portal Splat: Gets completely averted, at considerable programmer effort.
• Pressure Plate: The 1,500-Megawatt Aperture Science Heavy Duty Super-Colliding Super Button
• Puzzle Game
• Robo Speak
• The Reason You Suck Speech
  GLaDOS: I'd just like to point out that you were given every opportunity to succeed. There was even going to be a party for you. A big party that all your friends were invited to. I invited your best friend the Companion Cube. Of course, he couldn't come because you murdered him. All your other friends couldn't come either because you don't have any other friends. Because of how unlikable you are. It says so here in your personnel file: Unlikable. Liked by no one. A bitter, unlikable loner whose passing shall not be mourned. 'Shall not be mourned.' That's exactly what it says. Very formal. Very official. It also says you were adopted. So that's funny, too.

  GLaDOS: You've been wrong about every single thing you've ever done, including this thing. You're not smart. You're not a scientist. You're not a doctor. You're not even a full-time employee. Where did your life go so wrong?

  GLaDOS: Your entire life has been a mathematical error. A mathematical error I'm about to correct.
• Room Full Of Crazy: I <3 Companion Cube.
• Secret Test Of Character
• Single Player Scam: The ending song implies that the whole thing, including the "putting your life in danger" part, was just a test by the computer.
• The Stinger: Unusual in that the "extra content" occurs in the credits themselves, yet regardless adds to the game's ambiguous ending.
• Stupidity Is The Only Option: Subverted, in that the only way to progress is to escape from an apparently inescapable trap.
• Soundtrack Dissonance
• Space Whale Tear Jerker: The Companion Cube
• Super Powered Robot Meter Maids: GLaDOS was originally designed to be a fuel-injection system de-icer. Someone went just a tad overboard.
  • Likewise, the portal gun came out of research intended to produce a better shower curtain.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: "The Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak."
• Synthesizeritis: Done intentionally in Still Alive.
• There Will Be Cake: Trope Namer
• The Tetris Effect: not only the game-fun part, but you'll find yourself wishing you had an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device for real-life transportation. And planning out the most efficient way to get from here to the fresh-produce aisle.
• Time Limit Boss: GLaDOS pumps the room with poison gas during your fight with her.
• Unreliable Narrator: When looking through the Aperture Science website, keep in mind what computer appears to be working as their web server. This also applies in the actual game.
• Villainous Breakdown: GLaDOS. When you try to invoke This Is My Side during the final boss fight and spend most of said fighting making petty insults, you're broken. It doesn't help that Chell spent the fight ripping her mind to pieces and setting them on fire. Though she may have got better...
  GLaDOS: 2+2 equals *static* 10. ...In base 4, I'm fine!
• Wham Level
• Why Dont You Marry It: "WELL, I WON'T LET YOU. How does that feel?"
• Woobie: The curiosity core. And even the anger core. Maybe even GLaDOS herself.
• Wreaking Havok
• Yandere: GLaDOS' dialogue during the final boss fight seriously makes her seem more like a scorned lover than a crazed AI... of course, the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

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