Antichamber

Wiki: Antichamber Guides

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 04:56:00 GMT

Guides for Antichamber

Blog Post: Antichamber: One Trippy Adventure

Jake Magee — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 02:18:00 GMT

Indie developer Alexander Bruce has created a mind-warping first-person puzzle game reminiscent of Fez and Portal, yet still entirely new and fresh. The title is Antichamber, and its brilliant aesthetic, incredible puzzles, and haunting soundtrack is something every fan of puzzle games—or even unique ideas and innovative gameplay—should experience. The astounding colors, excellent level construction, and plethora of “aha!” moments result in a wonderful journey of madness and discovery none should pass up.

The game starts you out inexplicably in a bland chamber with a set of directions of how to play the game on one wall and an exit door taunting you from behind an impenetrable sheet of glass on the other. As you progress, the other two walls begin to fill with the complex map for quick access to specific areas and small graphics containing short, proverb-like bits of wisdom that are just as applicable in game as they are in real life.

As you begin your journey, you’re not given any direction or story at all. You merely start walking and see where the path takes you, and therein lies the beauty. As you begin solving basic puzzles, you quickly realize this game doesn’t follow any rules but its own. Paths that disappear when you look at them, rooms that change depending on the angle you view them at, and staircases that materialize where no path existed before are some of the unusual ways Antichamber establishes itself. More than once I found myself solving puzzles running through rooms only to turn a corner and impossibly end up where I had been ten minutes prior, and the resulting feeling of confusion and delight never escaped me. Just when you think you’ve figured out what it will take to solve the next puzzle, a new way of thinking becomes necessary to progress. The pacing is perfect and keeps you feeling rewarded without making the game too simple and cheap.

The feel of Antichamber quickly changes when you discover a gun that shoots and absorbs cubes scattered around the map. Using it opens a whole new way to solve puzzles. Cubes can be placed anywhere to create makeshift bridges and staircases, activate tripwires, and hold moving doors in place. The first-person gameplay and use of a futuristic firearm to solve puzzles will remind you of Portal, but Antichamber can’t truly be compared to it; the gameplay and style is entirely its own.

After you solve a few rooms using the cube gun, the game grows in difficulty. Fast. Pretty soon you’re finding forks in the road, solving multiple puzzles in the same room, and traveling to the other end of the map to solve chains of puzzles you didn’t even know were there. The game becomes confusing; often you don’t exactly know what you’re solving, only that finding a solution here may open a door far down the road. The game isn’t so frustrating in its gameplay as it is in the fact that you often can’t remember where you need to go in order to advance to new puzzles.

Despite these minor setbacks, it’s clear in the first five minutes of gameplay that Antichamber is an achievement in thinking outside the box. What the game lacks in story and depth it makes up for in incredible puzzle design, brilliant visual appeal, and a perfect companion soundtrack. Fans of last year’s Fez or the Portal series need look no further than Antichamber to scratch that unique puzzle game itch. For only 20 bucks on Steam, Antichamber is practically a steal.

Blog Post: A Lesson In Originality

Jeff Marchiafava — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:48:00 GMT

Antichamber has been racking up awards at indie game conferences since 2009, and stumbling my way through the game made it easy to see why. This indie puzzler establishes creator Alexander Bruce as the M.C. Escher of game development, providing players with a sprawling and satisfying network of challenges that require novel thinking to overcome.[Excerpt]

Like Portal, Antichamber's puzzles exist in an environment where the laws of nature don't apply, allowing players to think in ways that reality doesn't require. Whereas Portal "only" bent the rules of space, Antichamber throws everything you know out the window, stripping you of your preconceptions before building you back up with a new set of skills and rules to play by.

An early puzzle teaches me the importance of not taking anything for granted. After walking down an L-shaped corridor, my path diverges into two choices: a blue staircase that leads upwards and a red staircase that leads downwards. I choose the blue stairs, which lead me up to another L-shaped hallway. When I turn the corner, I'm confronted by the same two staircases. I spend the next few minutes alternating between the two paths, but no matter which one I choose, it leads me back to the same stairways. Confused, I begin walking towards them again, then pause in a moment of clarity. I turn and walk back the way I came, peering around the corner. Lo and behold, it now leads to a new area.

Each time you solve a puzzle in Antichamber, you come across a plaque with a saying that sums up the lesson you've just learned, many of which have real-world value as well. These lessons are the core of Antichamber, and it teaches you everything you need to know with virtually no on-screen instructions. Instead, you learn from your failures, and every time you expose a trick the world has played on you, your knowledge base grows a little.

There's no hint system in Antichamber, so if you get stuck on a puzzle, you have two choices: bang your head against the wall until you figure it, out or tackle one of the other branching paths that make up the ambiguous laboratory/compound you're trapped in. Thankfully, you can exit to the map room at any time (once you figure it out, anyway) and fast travel to the puzzles you've discovered. You do this a lot. Sometimes your progress is hindered by a tool you've yet to acquire. Sometimes you botch a puzzle and need to reset it. Sometimes a path simply leads to a dead end. Despite these pitfalls and abstract puzzles, I rarely ever felt stuck or frustrated by a lack of progress – a testament to Antichamber's pacing and design.

The gameplay evolves when you discover a gun that allows you to collect and place cubes in the world, providing you with the literal building blocks you need to overcome challenges. You upgrade the gun several times, building on your abilities and the complexity of the puzzles you're confronted with. The upgrades also make redoing many of the earlier puzzles a breeze, easing the pain of backtracking through environments while searching for missed secrets and abandoned puzzles.

Below: Watch our Test Chamber video.

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It wasn't until the very end that tedium began to set in, as I tried to hunt down the last few paths I had missed. That boredom was erased as soon as I entered the multi-roomed gauntlet of puzzles standing between me and Antichamber's enigmatic ending, a final test of the lessons I had learned. Regardless of the lack of story, overcoming those challenges filled me with a greater sense of achievement than the countless "save the world" missions I'm used to taking on in video games. Gamers would be hard pressed to find a more unique, engaging puzzle game.

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