Okay Portal, the game which sees your imprisoned protagonist forced to navigate her way through a series of intricate, potentially deadly puzzles is far from your normal happy game. However, the comedic elements made even more prevalent with the introduction of Stephen Merchants Wheatley in Portal 2 combined with the lack of insight into Chell's psyche mean that it is by no means as dark as the premise suggests. However, the speculation that the gigantic, robotic GLaDOS (the central protagonist of both games) is intended to look like a bound and gagged woman makes the whole thing exponentially darker. Jeremy Bennett the series art director stated that when designing the entity behind all the puzzles they settled on a huge mechanical device with a delicate robotic figure dangling out of it, which successfully conveys both GLaDOS' raw power and her femininity. Jeremy Bennett was certainly successful in achieving the femininity part but were not so sure about the power. Tangled up in cables and machinery, this image of a bound GLaDOS may represent how her robotic nature means she is determined to act so malevolently by her creators, Aperture Science.
Hailing from South East London, Sam Heard is an aspiring writer and recent graduate from the University of Warwick. Sam's favourite things include energy drinks, late nights spent watching the UFC with his girlfriend and annihilating his friends at FIFA.
