Another review!
Antichamber is a fun puzzle game with similarities to Portal but isn’t as polished. I picked up Antichamber during a Steam sale a while back but never got around to playing it until recently. Featuring a mute protagonist wandering through a series of puzzles by using a “gun” that changes the world instead of shooting bullets and only works on certain surfaces, the resemblance to Portal is unmistakable: Antichamber’s use of different primary colors to signify a material’s unique qualities also evokes Portal II’s paints. However, Antichamber does distinguish itself from Portal by using non-euclidian geometries to give the game a strong focus on changing perspectives and seemingly impossible geometries (which reminded me of games like The Stanley Parable (without that game’s satire or narration) and even games like Prey).
Unfortunately, while Antichamber is quite fun, has a unique aesthetic, and has some quite imaginative puzzles, it is also sometimes frustrating and non-intuitive. One of the reasons for this is that, unlike the other games, it is fairly non-linear and doesn’t have a strong narrative. This means that once you unlock puzzles you can play them in any order you want. This allows you to go back and take, say, the door on the left instead of the door of the right. However, this means you can become confused as to which puzzles you have beat and which you haven’t.
Worse than being lost is the fact that throughout the game you gain new “guns” which give you new abilities but there is no way to tell if a puzzle requires a gun you don’t have yet. This means I spent lots of time trying to solve a solution to a puzzle, becoming frustrated, looking up the room on the wiki, and founding out that the puzzle required a gun I didn’t have yet. Maybe it is a personal failing but I have very little patience for puzzles when I don’t know if it is even possible for me to solve them. I want to know if I am trying the right thing before I spend 20 minutes doing the same thing over and over.
Even when I had the correct gun, the answers to puzzles weren’t always intuitive or clear. More than once I would rub against the walls and jump around trying to find a fake wall or a barrier that would disappear if I went through it in midair. There were even times when I had watched the walkthrough videos on the wiki and still had a difficult time progressing (to the game’s credit, however, this could be because puzzles could be solved in multiple ways and I might have been trying the wrong solution for he gun I had at the time).
That said, there really is a feeling of triumph when you figure out a puzzle and the playing with perspective to move a character from one place to another is quite fun. Combined they give a feeling of discovery that is quite engaging. It is just too bad that it frequently felt like trial and error instead of discovery.
While writing this, I found that the creator did a post-mortem for the game and GDC has it up in two parts. I haven’t watched it yet but it sounds interesting.
Five thumbs up
If it is on sale
And you like Portal a lot
Then you should buy it
