Aperture Desk Job continues the story of business mega-bastard Cave Johnson absolutely perfectly

rockpapershotgun.com:

The characters in what we might term the Aperture Cinematic Universe are a memorable bunch (as I have said before). Though GLaDOS rightfully tops the list another, introduced in 2011's sequel spectacular Portal 2, became an instant favourite. Voiced by J.K. Simmons, doing a turn adjacent to his J. J. Jameson from Spider-Man, Cave Johnson is the founder of Aperture Science (which used to primarily make shower curtains before it evolved into being a death trap puzzle company), and he made an instant impression. And though Aperture Desk Job is nominally a tech demo for the Steam Deck, it also expands the Cave Johnson lore in a very satisfying way. Spoilers beyond for Aperture Desk Job, and Portal 2 if you haven't played it.

Cave pops up in Portal 2 when you're exploring the lower, older areas of Aperture Science, as voice notes recorded between somewhere in the 50s, 70s, and 80s - at which point he became incurably sick from rubbing moon rocks together, and the voice notes become increasingly emotional. One of his now enduring lines is that, in answer to the aphorism "when life gives you lemons", he'll "make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's going to burn your house down! With the lemons! I'm going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!"

This kind of thing is, of course, very funny, but the voice notes also reveal a cruel man engaged in human testing that kills a lot of people. It's when he's dying that he starts looking into artificial intelligence, as well as suggesting that his assistant Caroline should take over the company if he dies too soon to be turned into a computer. Caroline eventually becomes, at least in