The Cake is a Lie T-Shirts and Other Accessories

What could possibly go wrong?  There's a beautifully reassuring voice telling you that your safety is paramount.  Ok!  So the voice is robotic and a tad on the corporate side, but it's promising cake.

Nothing bad could ever happen, if there's going to be cake at the other end, can it?

So you work your way through the test chamber.  You practice your basic portal shooting.  You become quite expert at the whole momentum jumps, with extra portals mid-fall.  There may be energy balls intent upon vaporizing you, but it will be alright.  It has to be alright.

There is going to be cake.

Or is there?

Nothing that could hurt me would give me a companion cube, would it?  It had love hearts on all of its sides; and it sang to me!

Me and my cube will be together forever! (Why did GlaDOS promise grief counseling?)  We will scale the heights of platforms together!  We will press buttons and deflect energy balls and climb blocks.  My companion cube will save me, as my shield in dangerous passageways.

And there WILL be cake!  Moist, succulent, frosted with icing, with chocolate flakes and cherries on the top. There will be a candle to blow out on the cake, for me AND my cube.

GlaDOS said so.  She said there would be cake.

But then what about those rooms I found?  Crouching down and crawling under pipes, discovering hidden living spaces.  Somebody had cooked in here.  Somebody had made a cup of tea.  Somebody had covered the walls in graffiti.

Help!  It said.  Was that red paint or...?  And what about those cameras smashed to pieces on the floor?  Something quite strange has been going on in here.  Something quite unsettling.  Someone has been living with all the hallmarks of desperation and in fear for their life.

The pictures too.  What could they possibly mean?  A companion cube so like my own, in so many poses, depicted in ways which make me question what's coming up.  Everything is going to be just fine though, isn't it?  GlaDOS promised cake. 

But what does this say here?  Repeated over and over and over again.  No.  That can't be right, can it?  The cake is a... nooo!

But that person in the room had to be insane.  I mean look at the place!  What kind of wild, mad individual would choose to live like that?!  Can I trust the rantings of someone like that?

I don't even know them.  I just found their lair.  It might be a trick.  It might be anything.

GlaDOS's voice goes on, calling me brave, great and good, and promising cake.  So much cake.  If I can just make it through these chambers to the cake, everything will be wonderful.  I have to trust her. 

Listen to her!  Whenever I blast her cameras to bits, she warns me that they are there for my own well-being!  Whenever I encounter a toxic floor, she tells me not to land on it.  She wants me to be safe.  Aperture Laboratories have health and safety signs up everywhere!

There shall and must be cake!

If you have no idea what I'm taking about, then that's fine.  These cake t-shirts, merchandise and other accessories are not for you.  You just need to play more Portal.  Or I need to play less.  One of the two.

For those who do know what it's all about, then we can debate all day about the big issue.  Was the cake a lie?  Or was it all a double bluff?  And if it existed, then was the cake ever for us at all?

I'm going through the blue portal now.  I'll see you at the end.