Antichamber

W H A T

Euclidean geometry has nothing on this

A fun and fairly mindbending, if short, first person puzzle game taking place inside a strange and abstract artificial environment. 9.5/10. --- Some puzzle games try and baffle you through sheer complexity, with a room full of devices to link up together to find a solution (e.g. Prelogate), or perhaps a long series of precisely timed actions that you must figure out through trial and error (e.g. Portal). Antichamber takes a different approach. It's difficult to accurately describe the overall structure of the game (and even the full map unveiled doesn't help that much) but to take a simple view, the overall game world is a series of "puzzle rooms" linked together through hallways and long falls. A "puzzle room" may have one or more solutions, and each solution may or may not lead to a different path out of the puzzle room. These rooms and connections are all pre-planned (i.e. there is no random generation), and there are a wide variety of puzzles. Some puzzles are entirely spatial, e.g. walking backwards when you think you should walk forwards, but the main method of solving puzzles is through your cube gun, which is, well, a gun that shoots cubes. The course of the game consists of manuevering through the rooms and solving puzzles until you happen upon the next cube gun upgrade, and each upgrade gives the gun a new major power, and this power allows you to solve previously unsolvable puzzles that may have baffled you upon looking at them the first time. Thankfully, the puzzles are usually color-coordinated with the gun color, so you can tell pretty quickly whether you should even be attempting this puzzle yet. This game doesn't really have a story *per se*, although you do occasionally get a gander at what could potentially be described as an antagonist/goal to pursue. However, through your journey, there are a wide variety of "black boards" on the walls, which can be clicked to show you an image and a sentence of advice. This advice is simultaneously general life advice and advice for the puzzle: e.g. a black board may state "A dead end will only stop you if you don't try to move through it," therefore priming you to be on the lookout for a potentially false dead end in this puzzle; or "When you've hit rock bottom, the only way is up," and so on. In all, the game has a high degree of polish and care, creating an eclectic mixture of bafflingly abstract and quietly profound. It would be too much to describe it as "life-changing" - it's a game about shooting cubes out of your gun - but it's difficult to not be at least somewhat affected by it, and it's a game that has stuck in my mind ever since I played it despite its 5-10 hour playtime, and I've gone back to it a good 4 or 5 times over the years.