Antichamber (2013)

I played Antichamber on PC which took me about 8 hours to finish. I tried to follow the "normal" route of the game although I unintentionally managed to get to 5 of the secret rooms (I didn't find a clear indication of what was optional and what wasn't). On more than one occasion I felt like I was solving some puzzles in a way not intended by the developers, which I guess is cool.

Something that I really liked is that with just one button you go back to the main area and then you can warp to almost anywhere on the map very easily. More puzzle games should have this! The great advantage of this is that if you find a puzzle that you can't solve, you can just switch to another one very quickly. It happened to me more than once that a different puzzle gave me a clue on how to solve another one that I left unfinished.

About the difficulty, I wouldn't say it's easy but it's not that difficult either. I didn't need to use a guide, although some properties of the green and yellow guns were a bit tricky to use properly, though I eventually managed to understand them.

Recommended, although it is far from the level of games like Portal 2 or The Witness.

Antichamber is one of the classic indie puzzle games, and it's easy to see why. This is easily one of the most unique puzzle games I've ever played.

The puzzles here, by and large, are more like riddles rather than the logic or spatial puzzles that are so common in first person puzzle games. Each room has something it wants you to do. A room can have its own rules, its own physics even. One early room asks you to do something as simple as walk instead of jump, a later room may require you to do the opposite. This obviously does get more complex and connected as you go on.

The puzzles constantly ask you to break walls and boundaries, to think outside of the box. It will ask you to rethink conventions, both of the first-person puzzle genre and of Antichamber itself. The game teaches you a rule, then it teaches you to violate it. You must constantly be aware and observe, be ready to adapt, to try some new approach, to look at each problem from a new angle, if you are to complete all of the challenges.

The game's structure is nonlinear and complex, with many rooms containing one-way warps to completely different parts of the map. Fortunately, you can return to the main hub at any time by hitting Esc, and it contains a really well-implemented map system:

Mousing over any node on the map shows exactly what the room is, and you can click on it to instantly be sent there. The map also shows what all the warps are, where you've explored, where you haven't explored, where you entered and exited the map the last time you left the main hub. This makes it sensible and effortless to keep track of a game structure that would otherwise be quite confusing.

Perhaps one of the best points of the game is that in addition to the challenges of the puzzle rooms themselves, there are a few "hidden" game mechanics that you must learn. You will need to know them in order to progress. They're always present, always accessible. However, like the "pogo" mechanic in hollow knight, these mechanics are never directly taught to you. Instead, the game guides you, pointing you in the right direction, presenting you with situations where you can see them in action, but leaves it up to you to observe and draw the right conclusions. You must figure out how they work.

Catching on to these "hidden" mechanics gave me one of the most satisfying "aha!" moments I've ever had in a puzzle game, and my mind immediately started searching back through all the places I knew I could apply them. Rather than unlocking some ability or upgrade in game, it is you, the player, who have progressed. You've learned. You've gained knowledge you didn't have before, and with this knowledge, you can now move forward to places that were previously impossible.

Everything about this game is a masterpiece of design. Absolutely brilliant.

Antichamber is an engrossing maze of strange puzzles and intricate exploration that may be difficult to navigate and not completely intuitive, but provides a very unique and creative experience that must be played.

The gameplay is from a first person perspective as they explore different rooms where Euclidean space isn't necessarily a given. Small collectible portraits can be picked up by the player and they may return to a hub world and warp into any room they need to.

The rooms themselves can be tricky and eye-opening - looking through openings can warp into other areas, walking slowly may reveal hidden pathways, and space can bend into areas that the player must memorize in order to progress instead of map out. There are also various colored guns that produce blocks for more standard block puzzles, which at times can be slightly more unintuitive to figure out than the more space-related puzzles but can be used to open up new areas. There's a start and an end but a lot of the rooms are optional and can get the player lost fairly easily.

That said, the game is a gentle and soothing soundscape amongst some vibrant colors and clean visual design. Amidst all the crazy puzzles it's quite the relaxing game.

Antichamber is quite the enigma to figure out but if you've got a lot of patience and really can throw your head against the wall for some of these puzzles, you'll get quite the experience out of it.

It is hard to describe Antichamber. It's such a unique game with imaginative mechanics and detached art. What everyone can agree on is that this is a first person puzzle game.

The basic plot wants you to escape a non-determined, unconventional space by solving logic puzzles. There's no guide throughout the game aside from some esoteric, quite uncertain hints which borderline the realm of motivational quotes. As you progress, it slowly becomes apparent where to go and what to do; the problem is how to do it. As an innovative view on puzzle games (at least for my experience) the game doesn't follow conventional schemes. The physics is quite abstract and thus, turning left as opposed to turning right, might result in the world changing differently behind you. Your actions, and how you look at the game world (e.g. through some objects) literally change how the world is presented and reacts to the player actions. It is really stunning and disorienting playing it for the first time as things appear to change places, level paths are fluid, and you don't really know if there's something wrong with the game or with you.

Experience it because there's nothing quite like it (that I know of).

Let me get this out of the way: the first hour and the last few minutes of Antichamber are AMAZING. Why? Because that's when it capitalizes on it's premise of a shifting, non-euclydian world. The puzzles that involve the twisted architecture are often the more imaginative, fun and satisfying ones to solve. The art style is beautiful, and the dynamic ambient soundtrack is amazing too. You think you are in for a real treat, but then you get your first gun and spend the great majority of the game solving block puzzles.

Don't get me wrong, many of those block puzzles are still good, but it's a shame they barely interact with the level design and their welcome is way overstayed, specially towards the end when you think you're finally going to make some progress but instead end up in one of the developer rooms - those are rooms hidden behind apparently normal puzzles that contain some behind the scenes of the game development, shown in a museum-like way. They are interesting in their own right, but ended up being a frustrating part of the game due to the reason I mentioned.

I give Antichamber 7 cubes out of 10 - good stuff but kinda meh.