Boss Design Studio: GLaDOS

Good screenshots are oddly hard to find.

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Boss Design Studio, my essay series which so far has had a grand total of one installment.

In this post, I'm taking a look at another final boss: GLaDOS, the sentient supercomputer from Portal.

GLaDOS is an interesting case because she's also the game's narrator, a role about which I could probably write another entire essay. But suffice it to say that she's a sarcastic robot who initially pretends to be prerecorded messages, and who talks to you throughout the game. She's one of the best narrators I've ever seen. (Granted, she's also one of the only videogame narrators I've ever seen.)

To defeat GLaDOS, you have to knock three personality cores off of her main body and incinerate them in an incinerator, all while there's a turret shooting rockets at you. However, your portal gun can't directly hurt her, so you have to redirect the rockets from the turret back at the boss by baiting them into portals. Oh, and there's deadly neurotoxin that will kill you in six minutes, so you're on a time limit.

The fight is mostly divided into two phases: the "bait a rocket into a portal so it comes out another one, hits GLaDOS, and knocks a core off" phase and the "retrieve the core from whatever inaccessible place it landed, then open the incinerator and chuck it in" phase.

The bossfight with GLaDOS is also rather unique as bossfights go, because neither of you can directly hurt the other. That rocket turret is the only thing that does any offensive damage to anyone, and GLaDOS doesn't actually control it anymore (as evidenced by her voice line "I can't shut off the turret defenses"). GLaDOS also has some deadly neurotoxin that kills you in six minutes, effectively putting the bossfight on a six-minute timer, but that's really all it does; the neurotoxin doesn't restrict sections of the arena or anything.

The deadly neurotoxin death clock is also displayed on screens on the walls of the arena, rapidly counting down the six minutes you have left, which adds a sense of urgency to the fight. 

On your first encounter, despite both participants' inability to directly harm each other, this bossfight is a frantic dash to burn all the cores before you die of deadly neurotoxin exposure, helped along somewhat by the music (more on that later). Like most puzzle-based things it does suffer a bit on subsequent playthroughs, because racing to find the solution before the time runs out loses much of its luster when you already know the solution.

Oh yes. The boss arena. GLaDOS's boss arena is dark and spartan, but not dark enough that you don't get annoyed by being unable to see where anything is, and not spartan enough to be boring. At the same time, it's dark and spartan enough that it's not distracting (unlike the boss arena in Portal 2, but more on that in a different post).

GLaDOS's boss music is "You Can't Escape, You Know," a track which consists of rapid and slightly erratic percussion with no melody. However, it doesn't need a melody, because the need for boss music in this bossfight is replaced with GLaDOS narrating it. Sarcastically. Her narration fills the space usually occupied by music (i.e. giving you something to listen to), with the added bonus of being funny.

The climactic battle at the end of Portal is a coherent and very unique bossfight, and one which I still enjoy despite its having lost some of the excitement on later playthroughs.

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time to hear the Space Sphere say, "I'm in space!"