‘Antichamber’ Review – Puzzles That Build Character
We’ve seen a lot of puzzle games here at The Indie Game Magazine, but none of them are quite like this one. Antichamber is a first-person puzzle game developed by Alexander Bruce in which your perception of the environment is the focus of these mind bending brain teasers.
In Antichamber you explore the environment through a first-person perspective similar to most shooter mechanics that we’ve grown accustomed to. Rather than shoot at enemies, you use a gun-like device to manipulate cubes in the environment in order to solve puzzles. Left-click is to place cubes. Right click is to pick up cubes. Everything else you discover by solving puzzles and learning more about how the abstract world of Antichamber works.
Strangely, Antichamber has no explanation for itself or even a main menu. The Unreal Engine logo spins across the screen and you are instantly placed into the game. In this black room, you can find a door marked “Exit” on the other side of a window, a screen to edit your current settings like screen resolution, a mysterious time ticking down from an hour and a half, a blank screen that will eventually become your map, and a screen in front of you that shows the image of a small, unborn baby and the words next to it, “Every journey is a series of choices. The first is to begin that journey.”
Antichamber isn’t like most games in which there is a clear structure. In Antichamber you make choices about which direction to go in which is limited by your ability to solve the puzzles before you. New guns do give you new abilities, but you can solve most puzzles right from the outset. As you learn more about different attributes that the cubes have and how you can interact with them, old routes that you barely glanced at suddenly reveal themselves, and this is what makes Antichamber such a compelling experience: Antichamber gives you the pure exhilaration of discovery. It’s also very hard, but this can make the most frustratingly difficult of tasks also become the most rewarding.
[private_insider]”How we perceive a problem can change every time we see it.” “When you absorb your surroundings, you may notice things that you didn’t see before.” Antichamber‘s blank white halls infrequent bursts of color contain seemingly abstract puzzles, but the solutions reveal a metaphorical application for our day-to-day lives. Most of the little quips you will read are very clever. For example, a blue and red staircase are ahead of you with the sign “A choice may be as simple as going left or going right.” No matter which staircase you go up, you always end up in the same hallway. Eventually another screen matters asking you if either choice you’re making really matters if you end up back where you started. Without spoiling the solution, this is just one of the situations you might find yourself in.
Unfortunately, not all of the puzzles are as clever as this one. In many cases there are puzzles in which the solution is not the hardest part. Rather than test your mind, these will test your will power as these can be some of the longest puzzles in the game simply because the task you have to do in order to accomplish it is mundane. For example, after falling down a large shaft you have to climb back up, only to find a sign telling you that “Life is full of ups and downs” before you have to go back down into the shaft (which has transformed into another location) to reach the bottom and climb back up the same shaft (which has transformed to yet another location) before you reach the next true puzzle. Despite how difficult to execute some of these puzzles are, it’s worth working through. Antichamber is at its core a journey and if you were to ask the game itself about the absurdity of some of the situations you find yourself, I imagine Antichamber would narrow its eyes, pat you on the back and then encourage you with a genuine smile that it “builds character” and that “it will help you on later in life”. In Antichamber, it does.
With such a distinctly minimal and pristine art style, it’s hard to mistake Antichamber for anything else. Hallways are purely white with only the black outlines on the edges to give the player any indicator of the environment. This is varied by blankets of color applied on different areas as well as some pitch black areas in which you almost have to feel your way around. It can be hard to stare at a bright white screen for extended periods of time and not have your eyes hurt, so be sure to turn your lights on. You aren’t going to want to get up for long once you’ve started.
The sound design is strangely realistic. Soundscapes from outdoor environments as well as bird sound effects for groups of violently moving spheres sets a tone for the game that suggests even though you’re in an abstract world with abstract rules, everything you do here applies to our real world. This disconnect remains through the whole game and gives each screen you find a sense of gravity that wouldn’t be there otherwise. “Some choices can leave us running around in circles.” “If you never stop trying, you will get there eventually.”
Antichamber isn’t just a game: it’s a journey you undertake and when it’s over, there are still more secrets to uncover in the recesses of this beautiful and mind-bogglingly complex world. It was hard enough for me to put the game down to write this review. Antichamber is not perfect, in fact, it’s far from it. But what’s here is unlike anything you can find anywhere else, and it finds a way of burrowing into the recesses of your mind and the abstract mechanics and their brief, sometimes teasing messages reminding you of how you’ve overcome these problems before.
Antichamber is available now exclusively via Steam.
