An enormous, seamless non-Euclidean world to explore. Mind-bending challenges that will subvert your expectations at every twist and turn. Antichamber Pre-Installed GameĪ deeply psychological experience that will make you question everything you know about how a game works. Antichamber was also supported by the Indie Fund. Several years in the making, Antichamber received over 25 awards and honors throughout its development, in major competitions including the Independent Games Festival, the PAX10, IndieCade and Make Something Unreal. Discover an Escher-like world where hallways wrap around upon each other, spaces reconfigure themselves, and accomplishing the impossible may just be the only way forward. Or maybe I’m just dumb.Antichamber is a mind-bending psychological exploration game where nothing can be taken for granted. Maybe Antichamber is a little too clever for its own good. Yet given a choice, I’d much rather spend my time with a more conventional first-person puzzler like Portal 2, Quantum Conundrum or Q.U.B.E. But that still doesn’t mean it’s, you know, a whole ton of fun.Īs an experimental bit of game design full of intriguing puzzles that defy earthly geometry, Antichamber is a success. Maybe that’s Antichamber’s exact intent, and I’ve played right into it. I like brain-teasing puzzles, but one after another after another, with no hint of a greater reward beyond, made this feel more like an exercise in endurance. The problem I had with Antichamber was that the lack of any sort of context to my actions sapped my motivation to keep forging ahead. There’s no penalty for trying to come at a problem from a weird angle – sometimes literally – and this kind of experimentation often yields the best results. The game’s world follows a certain logical consistency, with rules slowly revealed over time and several “eureka!” moments to be had, particularly if you pay attention to the chalkboard clues scattered throughout. It plays with our expectations through optical illusions, with walls that shift and dematerialize and behaviour that defies what we’ve come to expect from first-person games. Escher painting come to life, and that’s what makes Antichamber so interesting. A 90-minute countdown clock adds time pressure (though you surely won’t reach the game’s end on your first – or likely fifth – attempt), and one wall is decorated with all of the tips and hints uncovered during your explorations, many of which double as general life lessons. From here, you can immediately teleport to any point in the game’s labyrinth that you’ve previously visited, and you can also pop back to the hub at will. The game begins in a large room that serves as Antichamber’s hub. From its unusual format to its sparse visuals to its deliberately confounding structure, it’s like one of those tiny puzzle sculptures that seem impossible to disentangle until you look at it a new way and think way outside of the box. If you’ve played Portal, you know what this is about: moving around maze-like, meticulously designed 3D environments, figuring out how to get from A to B.īut Antichamber is not really like Portal. Six years in the making (by one very patient man) and currently a darling of the indie game scene, Antichamber is of the absurdly specific “first-person puzzle-platformer” sub-genre. Whether Antichamber is actually much fun to play is open to debate. Rather, it’s an earnest examination of game design, of the language of video games and of how we’ve learned to interact with 3D virtual worlds. It’s very meta, and not in the condescending way we sometimes use that word. In fact, Antichamber is a game about how we play games. And like a lot of young things, they can be kind of dumb at times.Īntichamber is not a dumb game.
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