What is the name of the player character in Portal?

The player character in Portal is named Chell, a silent protagonist who undergoes testing inside the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. The game is presented from her first-person perspective, so players rarely see her directly.

Chell begins the story waking from a stasis bed and receiving instructions from GLaDOS. She is given the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device and must solve a sequence of test chambers by creating linked portals, redirecting momentum, and manipulating objects.

Her background is deliberately mysterious. GLaDOS makes claims about Chell’s personal history, but the artificial intelligence is an unreliable narrator. Portal 2 and the Lab Rat tie-in comic add clues involving Aperture’s science-fair events and the employee Doug Rattmann, who helped place Chell into testing.

Players sometimes confuse Chell with characters from Valve’s Half-Life series, such as Gordon Freeman or Alyx Vance. Those characters belong to the same broader fictional universe, but Chell is Portal’s single-player protagonist. In Portal 2’s cooperative mode, the playable robots are Atlas and P-Body instead.