Portal (series)/Nightmare Fuel

Despite the witty, sarcastic humor of the writing, digging beneath the surface of Portal will reveal a world of deranged insanity. Trust us, Aperture Laboratories isn't all sunshine and daisies.

Portal 1
"Turret: Guys! Stop shooting! Please! Guys, it's me! Stop shoo--*static*"
 * Portal isn't that much of a creepy game. It almost completely takes place in a series of brightly lit rooms, which are all white and very clean. There are even opaque windows to observation rooms, but you soon realize that the entire facility seems to be completely deserted, except for you and a slightly malfunctioning AI. Of course, things get worse. Later on, you can climb into the machinery behind the movable walls, which I found even much more discomforting.
 * To wit, despite spawning a very popular meme, the areas behind the platforms when you go off the rails and see the scribblings of subjects before you become unnerving, these people have been tested well into insanity, some of them perhaps even know that at the end, they'll just be met with an agonizing death by burning, and to top it all off, you can see exits just out of reach, and nightmarish music plays in the background.
 * The first time you encounter turrets is the first time you can duck out of the testing chamber into the maintenance areas and see scrawled gibberish on the walls, along with scattered food cans, which some creepy ambient music is played. This is the point, as you hear turrets trying to kill you ask plaintively "ARe yOU StiLL tHEre?", that you know that everything has gone catastrophically wrong and you cannot escape from it.
 * Admittedly, the turrets could easily be knocked over, and could be turned against each other, but if you dodged around them, they would ask "Are you still there?" in a high-pitched Creepy Monotone.
 * By the way, the developer commentary states that the turrets were intended to lull you into a false sense of security.
 * Try using a turret as body armor against the other turrets. It SCREAMS.

"*high pitched laughing sound*"
 * Pfft, that's it? Every single phrase in the game is Creepy Monotone, you don't know where or who you are, and your only help is GLaDOS, the bipolar, cake-obsessed Master Computer who alternately tries to help you and tries to get you killed (and at one point claims that "killing you and giving you good advice aren't mutually exclusive"). Ironically, this is part of the appeal.
 * GLaDOS's aggression core. The snarling.
 * Well, it IS Mike Patton voicing the thing.
 * Try carrying a turret through a technology emancipation field: there's one just before each lift at the end of a level. They scream.
 * What's REALLY freaky was the last three levels of the game. The dim, occasionally flashy lighting, the occasional turrets, the writing on the walls... All fit very well with the games 'hilariously creepy' style.
 * Knowing this, the folks at Valve gave you far more time with malfunctioning turrets in Portal 2. Apparently the Aperture Science turret manufacturing line is extremely buggy, spitting out alternating good and faulty models. The solution was not to fix the line, it was to set up an automated QA/QC scanner that pitches the defective ones straight into a crusher. The turret A Is are online before testing and selection, resulting in a series of protests and death screams from ones that are being discarded. (Color Coded for Your Convenience too, as the good turrets are eggshell-white with kiddy voices while the defective ones are coal-black due to lacking their casing, with voices reminiscent of Steve Buscemi.) Solution to stopping the flow of good turrets?
 * The ending theme, "Still Alive", manages to be both cutesy and very disturbing. Someone made a video. Lyrics here. "We do what we mut - because we can. For the good of all of us. Except the ones who are dead..." Yeah...
 * The cheerful description of "doing science for the people who are still alive" ("[making] a neat gun" for them) is bad enough, but the bit that really creeps me out is the line near the end where it becomes "[doing science] on the people who are still alive".
 * "And believe me I am still alive".
 * The update for Portal. Nothing but cryptic messages and content added into the game, including incredibly creepy sounding noises in the data files (which are bad enough until you notice "GET ME OUT OF HERE!") which, when converted into images show some very ominous scenes...
 * A humorous and mildly creepy Black Comedy suddenly becomes mindbendingly creepy when it's revealed to be happening in the same continuity as Half Life. This game becomes much more uncomfortable to laugh at when you realize that, in the context of its universe, it's dead fucking serious -- as amusing as GLaDOS is, imagine meeting her or someone like her in real life. Not quite so funny now, is it.
 * The glowing red fade-offs behind things such as fans, vents, pipes, and shafts. The sharp contrast of glowy red against dead, dark colors gives a feeling of being in the belly of the beast (which, you kind of are). The glowing red especially makes you feel like, even though you escaped the incinerator, it's still somewhere just around the corner. And maybe others have died there before you. Try looking at the first set of glowing red vents just past the incinerator and thinking about that.
 * The entire testing section of the complex can be reshaped at any time, as demonstrated here, at the will of a deranged AI. While you're inside it.
 * "Thank you for assuming the party escort submission position..." The idea of thinking it's all over then being dragged back in...
 * "Your entire life has been a mathematical error. A mathematical error I'm about to correct".
 * "You're curious about what happens after you die, right? Guess what? I know."
 * Made downright chilling after playing Portal 2 when you realize
 * Don't disappoint me. Or I'll make you wish you could die."
 * In the song at the end and even during the game, GLaDOS alludes to Black Mesa. It is possible that Chell has only survived to this point because of GLaDOS. Even though GLaDOS is trying to kill her, it's still better than what's happening on the surface.
 * GLaDOS is a supercomputer, one of the fastest and smartest minds around, who gained self-awareness miliseconds after coming online. When I realized that, this particular dying statement of hers became absolutely terrifying.

"GLaDOS:"
 * Especially creepy when you remember this is the Half-Life universe directly after the resonance cascade. The scary part is, you really are better off in there, where the aliens and inter-dimensional baddies can't get you.
 * The beginning of the boss fight with GLaDOS. She drops a spherical object from her body, claims ignorance on what it does, and you drop it in the incinerator. What happens afterward really disturbed me: Her voice becomes garbled, then you hear what sounds like quiet laughter. Then she speaks again, only now her voice, which had been previously very computerized and robotic, has become much more human-like and evilly seductive. And then she informs you of a rather interesting fact:

"[on neurotoxins] When I said "deadly neurotoxins", the deadly was in massive sarcasm quotes. I could take a bath in this stuff. Put in on cereal, rub it right into my eyes. Honestly, it's not deadly at all. To me. I let you survive this long, because I was curious about your behaviour. Well, you've managed to destroy that part of me. This isn't brave. It's murder."
 * Her whole boss fight could be said to be pretty creepy. The shrieking of the cores/GLaDOS as you throw bits of her into the incinerator, her beginning to malfunction, the fact that, as you slowly rip pieces off of her she gets more and more vicious and starts trying to convince you to just roll over and die. Any of her quotes!

"Curiosity Core: Where are we going? EWW, what's wrong with your legs? What's that thing? Ooh, that thing has numbers on it! Hey! You're the lady from the test! Hi! Are you coming back? Do you smell something burning? Blood-curdling shriek as the core is destroyed."
 * Her emphasis on how you're murdering her. Oh, and then if you go over the time limit, the way that Chell just drops like a lead weight.
 * Oh yeah, and also, having to destroy the Curiosity Core.


 * "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. " As silly as some of her lines are when she's trying to psyche you out, things like that can really strike a chord. Which is exactly what she wanted.
 * GLaDOS apparently has a backup file of you that should you die she can resurrect you from, in the final battle she deletes it. Who's to say the Rattmann isn't just one of your earlier tries? And all those times you were crushed or fell into acid? Those actually happened, you just don't remember it.
 * You remember the personality cores? Morality, Curiosity, Cake, and Rage? The ones that you THREW IN THE INCINERATOR. Think about it. Really, think about that, and the fact that Wheatley, too, is a personality core, and an AI. and so is GLaDOS. Who is made from Caroline. it's already fanon that personality cores are made from humans, and you just threw 4 of them in the Incinerator.

Portal 2
""I've got another surprise waiting for you after this test. And not a tragic surprise like last time. A reeeeal surprise. With tragic consequences. And real confetti this time, the good stuff.""
 * The preview videos for Portal 2 look funny and cool, especially repulsion gel and propulsion gel. Wowee, can't wait to try those out! What does that tiny tiny text on the screen say? These were originally developed as diet pudding foodstuffs. And they didn't work because they stuck to the stomach lining, causing food to oh my god stop stop imagination NO
 * The entire first chapter has an oppressive, ominous feel to it.
 * In Chapter 3, Testchamber 17 you can discover a hidden chamber: "Fear the turret for it is knell, that summons to heaven or to hell." There's a picture of Chell sleeping there, but she looks dead. You can see it at around 20:40 of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYfBFy2yjiA
 * What makes that a million times creepier? Once you leave the hidden chamber, the opening closes, and so does the door to the office looking over your test chamber. He was watching you. The crazed psychotic mad man stalking you all this time, painting you as you sleep was just inches away from you and you never even knew.
 * Especially because, according to the Lab Rat comic, it seems as if Doug Rattmann had died between the two games...
 * However, with some careful shooting, when you get the Hard Light Bridge to lead you to the observation room, you can get a portal into the hallway. Go in and there is no one there. No one. There's a door that leads to the Rattman den and you can't get it to open from either side. And when you're in the den, you can still hear him, as mentioned below...
 * Another thing that adds to the creepy factor: get close to the picture. Really close. You hear muffled voices, babbling in a clearly insane way. And you're the only one down here.
 * The voices are on the soundtrack too; "Ghost of Ratmann". Such a great track to fall asleep to...
 * The reference to Macbeth adds yet another layer of horror.
 * Which is more terrifying: the thought of an insane stalker who secretly watches your every move, or an insane stalker's ghost secretly watching your every move? You be the judge.
 * Not only do the panel and any portals in the den close, the ENTIRE TEST SEEMS TO START OVER! Ratman seems to be either a poltergeist, or a panel master. You decide.
 * Portal 2 repeatedly uses the sound that the Manhacks made. Play one, then the other, and you will be on edge constantly.
 * One notable incident is when Wheatley is recounting the story of the crazed caretaker. Yeah, it's a pretty bad ghost story told by an idiot of a man dismembering identical robots, but hearing the words "chopped up his entire staff" while also listening to the unmistakable sounds of Manhacks gives the whole thing an edge. Sorry.
 * The ghost story gets worse when you consider the man might be a forgotten reference to Cave Johnson, especially with fanon that every A.I in the place,
 * And how about the fact that, RIGHT before wheatley yells the story, if you listen closely, you can hear what sounds like turrets SCREAMING!
 * Even better, the sound file for  is called "sp_a2_core_drag_to_hell01.wav".
 * It's overlooked easily,
 * I always thought he was just taken out of his receptacle (the thingy with the handlebars), and that cores can normally move like that when taken out of the receptacle.
 * If you're quick enough, you can noclip through the panels and down a bit then look up. When I did that, I wish I hadn't. You can see what looks like
 * Wheatley's
 * Here it is.
 * And here.
 * Ellen McLain's acting in the few lines that remain would be enough to put anyone off of continuing the scene; she gives a VERY convincing impression of being in the same mental state as a rape victim. According to one article, she was crying while recording her lines for this conversation...
 * You know when you first see them, when Potat OS attempts to paradox Wheatly? All the Frankencubes are still twitching, their eyes flickering on and off...
 * The most horrifying part of that whole scene is that, while Wheatley is too dumb to fall for GLaDOS's paradox, you can see the Frankenturrets spark a little. That's right; those things are smarter than Wheatley.
 * However,
 * , but found this part to be creepy.
 * Even more than, the song   in Portal 2 is filled to the brim with horror. The big prize winner has to go to " "
 * ALL of the Rattman Dens in the second game are really creepy. The broken lighting, the discomforting music, the pictures, all of it. But the scariest has to be in the Den where you complete the Final Transmission achievement...
 * The extremely giddy tone GLaDOS gets as you near the second "surprise". Evil A Is shouldn't be allowed to sound that giddy about murdering someone.
 * You know when you first see them, when Potat OS attempts to paradox Wheatly? All the Frankencubes are still twitching, their eyes flickering on and off...
 * The most horrifying part of that whole scene is that, while Wheatley is too dumb to fall for GLaDOS's paradox, you can see the Frankenturrets spark a little. That's right; those things are smarter than Wheatley.
 * However,
 * , but found this part to be creepy.
 * Even more than, the song   in Portal 2 is filled to the brim with horror. The big prize winner has to go to " "
 * ALL of the Rattman Dens in the second game are really creepy. The broken lighting, the discomforting music, the pictures, all of it. But the scariest has to be in the Den where you complete the Final Transmission achievement...
 * The extremely giddy tone GLaDOS gets as you near the second "surprise". Evil A Is shouldn't be allowed to sound that giddy about murdering someone.
 * ALL of the Rattman Dens in the second game are really creepy. The broken lighting, the discomforting music, the pictures, all of it. But the scariest has to be in the Den where you complete the Final Transmission achievement...
 * The extremely giddy tone GLaDOS gets as you near the second "surprise". Evil A Is shouldn't be allowed to sound that giddy about murdering someone.


 * As much as a moron as Wheatley is,


 * That, and the
 * The following unused GLaDOS line. I mean we know she's into the demoralising but DAMN!
 * Almost all of Chapter 6, but especially the first part (before you make your way into the sealed chambers, and thus have Cave Johnson's deranged ramblings to keep you company). You're miles below the surface, absolutely no idea where to go, and most of all: GLaDOS gets carried off, and for once you go without her constant attempts to "assist" and "encourage" you. You. Are. ALONE. in the crazy place, more so than you ever have been.
 * Consider: you're trapped beneath a massive, decaying structure that could collapse on you at any time. And as if that weren't bad enough, there's a nuclear power plant slowly going into meltdown somewhere over your head....
 * Although... at one point, in his recordings Cave Johnson casually mentions that one of the test groups volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA, only to end up having to fight "mantis men" when the first batch of tests went horribly wrong. Given Cave's...devotion to For Science!, who the fuck knows what he eventually ended up creating in some of the crazy experiments he was involved in -- and whether it's still alive or not...
 * During an interview, Eric Wolpaw hinted that  Have fun thinking about that.
 * I inverted that. I felt really relaxed in lower Aperture. This is because unlike the modern chambers where the main AI could kill you right then. Ou also have Cave Johnson's funny quotes, and even when GLaDOS gets attached to your portal gun, she is just a powerless potato.
 * The beginning of the turret factory? Sure, Wheatley's "ghost story" is rather silly, but then listen. The distant, echoing cries of "Hellooooooooo....", the telltale sound of a turret locking on, the creaking and groaning of millions of tons of damaged Enrichment Center settling overhead... it's disquieting to say the least.
 * So seconded. And RIGHT before Wheatley tells his story, YOU CAN HEAR TURRETS SCREAMING! Have fun trying to hear it.
 * When GLaDOS hums For He's a Jolly Good Fellow, it's enough to make your skin crawl.
 * When GLaDOS is awakened, she crushes Wheatley with a claw from the ceiling. Then she picks Chell up with another one and drops her into the incinerator.
 * The Turret Disposal Area just before the neurotoxin tank, where all the rejected turrets get sent to be ground up by giant crusher wheels... . The obvious terror in their otherwise-cute voices is horrifying enough. Then Wheatley tells you in the most offhanded manner possible that they can feel pain
 * GLaDOS waking up.
 * The final test chamber. The deer is a lie.
 * Wheatley's fate at the end of the game,  to be very unsettling. Worse, he seems to show genuine remorse for he's put the player through. Since he can't die, he has nothing to think about but his transgressions until the end of time.
 * One of the songs on the new Portal 2 soundtrack, Ghost of Rattmann, is very scary. If the music itself doesn't make you shit your pants, the indiscernible gibberish (which gets louder as the song progresses) will. It sounds like a combination of a turret and a mentally retarded Donald Duck. Or maybe just the latter.
 * You can just barely make out a little bit of what he says - for example, at around 2:19-2:21 here, it sounds like he's saying "everybody is dead, it's the end"... no matter if he's saying that or something else, though, it definitely sounds like he's sobbing uncontrollably - imagine what must it have been like for him to realize that everybody else in the facility has been killed at once, and that he's the only one left, alive and trapped in there...
 * The original design that Valve had for GLaDOS was shaped like an upside-down woman. Now, she looks like a bound and gagged upside-down woman.
 * Perhaps this modded version might ease the minds of those scared by the bound-and-gagged thought. Though one fan of the character the mod was based on was scared off his wits after seeing it (then again, a huge, all-white slightly bent backwards upside down swaying girl with a cute smile trying to kill you...).
 * If you play with commentary on, there's at least one commentary node in at least one Rattman Den. If you activate it,.
 * It's a coded message Portal is just that weird.
 * One of the first things GLaDOS tells you upon being woken up is that she has a feature she never knew about until you killed her: A black box. For however long you've been away- a conservative estimate is 200 years- she has been forced to relive the last two minutes of her runtime, over and over again. That is, you killing her. Over and over again. You were the last thing she saw as she was violently ripped apart, and you were the first thing she saw after the endlessly repeating fifteen minute experience of it ended. How much does GLaDOS hate you? A phrase involving the words "nano-angstrom" and "hate" come to mind.
 * The only real consolation is that GLaDOS is a pathological liar, so she may have made it up.
 * It's made all the worse because we've heard use that line before. When you reach the
 * It's Narm for me. I use it when I try to find out how a game crashed.
 * During the testing sequence with GLaDOS, before Wheatley manages to make contact, you can catch at least two glimpses of Wheatley watching you before wallpanels hurried to obscure the sight. Upon running towards the wall, no sound would come from behind it. This can spawn elaborate theories about Wheatley being an evil AI working with GLaDOS.
 * Remember Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, employees!
 * Doubling that, GLaDOS's line in the first game about that day being the perfect chance to have your daughter tested isn't so innocent now...
 * Everything above is well and good, but think about actually going through all this. Would it be something like this? (Noncanon, massive spoilers, you have been warned.)
 * One of Rattman's murals shows a woman, screaming with the most horrifically drawn face, as several scientists die around her.
 * In Portal 2, GLaDOS tells us exactly what it's like to be plugged into the mainframe body with other cores; it's like hearing voices incessantly babbling in your head. Not a particularly pleasant thought, but it's not really disturbing enough to make you recoil in utter horror. After all, we met the cores themselves in Portal; they were pretty hilarious and adorable to boot, right? Well, here's a sample of what those voices sound like together. It's already been mentioned above how GLaDOS' form in the first game resembled an upside-down woman bound and gagged. That video is less than a minute long; imagine being forever trapped in that room, suspended from the ceiling with all that noise running through your head. Constantly. There is science to be done...
 * As of the ending of Portal 2, Chell has been set free into the outside world, with the doors to the Aperture Science testing facilities being closed behind her. Assuming that GLaDOS's references to Black Mesa actually mean that both Portal and Half-Life share the same world, this means that Chell has now been released, unarmed, into a world full of alien horrors with no way to go back into her once safe haven.
 * Actually, while YES, Portal and Half-Life are in the same universe, you have to remember Portal 2 takes place HUNDREDS of years after the first portal. And, if the conclusion that the first portal takes place after the seven-hour war is true, there should be no Combine's or zombies there. In fact, the ending looks like the outside is better.
 * Cave Johnson dying of moon rock poisoning. Portal-applicable walls must have some variant of moon rock on them. There are vats and vats of moon rock mixture in Aperture and at one point, Chell spends some portion of the game with it just pouring out on top of her. Thanks, Valve!! I didn't feel like going to sleep today anyway!
 * If it helps at all, Chell was exposed to that stuff for, at most, only a few hours. Johnson probably spent years in contact with the moon rock gel, in addition to whatever other insane concoctions the man cooked up...
 * Wheatley screaming "GRAB ME! GRAB ME!" before he is sucked up into space and Chell is rescued by GLaDOS.
 * It comes back to haunt you when you remember that none of it's his fault. Apparently Aperture Mainframes causes all AIs to become psychopathicly dependent on testing.
 * During the Courtesy Call sequence, you are banged into several other containers, identical to the one you're in. Wheatley ends up knocking a good few of them into the chasm below. You then see that all of the containers are identical to yours. With beds. Wheatley himself makes no attempt at hiding the fact that the entire warehouse is now filled with corpses. The horror part, however, comes in after you read the Labrat comic, learning that when Chell killed GLaDOS in the first game, she inadvertently shut off all power to the facility, leaving only the essential systems on backup power. The only way she survived was because Ratman was able to plug her room into the backup system. This means that she unintentionally murdered over ten thousand people.
 * Actually, it was Wheatley's job to oversee the life support functions. If they shut off, it was his job to turn them back on. Wheatley is the murderer long before he ever tried to kill Chell.
 * The fan-video "This is Aperture" is a Portal version of "This is Halloween", and while it's a clever song and video, it emphasizes some of the creepier parts of the game and the fact that everything in Aperture Science is trying to kill you. Even the announcer manages to sound a bit sinister. You're not safe in Aperture!
 * The scene where Wheatley receives some, erm, "discouragement" from  Sure, the part where   is actually pretty funny - unless   Jesus Christ, you'll never laugh at that scene again!
 * can be rather disconcerting and disturbing to someone with a certain background.
 * Which would be...who?
 * This line was Dummied Out when testers thought that it would be too much:
 * The scene where Wheatley receives some, erm, "discouragement" from  Sure, the part where   is actually pretty funny - unless   Jesus Christ, you'll never laugh at that scene again!
 * can be rather disconcerting and disturbing to someone with a certain background.
 * Which would be...who?
 * This line was Dummied Out when testers thought that it would be too much:
 * This line was Dummied Out when testers thought that it would be too much:


 * The condemned Aperture Labs can scare anyone with a fear of heights just by existing. The place is full of catwalks that just end or with missing railings over bottomless pits. And they certainly don't look very sturdy. The possibility that at any moment the metal grid you're walking on could break away underneath you will put you on pins and needles.
 * The alternate Aperture realities. One of them, Cave died in the mantis-man breakout. Another, everyone is a giant mantis and the experiment was to create Man-mantises. Yet another, Cave and Greg are watching you. Always.
 * Incidentally, the mantis-Cave's voice is horrifying
 * The way the sentient cloud kills people - he leeches your skin off.
 * Speaking of alternate realities... the fan map Don't Make Lemonade seems like any normal map but set in the style of the old Aperture Labs facilities. You should have read the signs...
 * Those thousands of test subjects GLaDOS finds at the end of the co-op campaign?.