Antichamber is a game designed to hurt my poor little brain. Its a first person platformer, cross puzzle, cross example of a higher dimensional space fucking with your brain.
The main thrust of the game are the puzzles, which are mainly compromised by the corridors through which you navigate. Some are simple, such as walls that aren’t there, or doors that close when you look at them. But then it gets really confusing, such as stairs that lead back into themselves or corridors folding in on themselves. For some reason, it reminds me of an old episode of the Avengers “the house that Jack built’.
As you progress through the game, you acquire ‘guns’ with which you use to solve puzzles. The first gun can pick up and drop small coloured blocks found within puzzles, and later guns can draw with blocks to solve more complicated puzzles.
While you are told how to activate these guns, you are otherwise left to figure it out yourself, with only a specially designed puzzle and maybe a cryptic phrase to help you along the way. These images/phrases constitute the story and tutorials of the game.
Throughout the game are black squares with an image of them, clicking on them will show a sentence which relates to the picture. The pictures broadly follow the life of a human, from conception to death. Each picture and accompanying phrases help guide you through the game, which seems to parallel the life of a human being, growing and learning about the world. Learning new ideas has a parallel with learning how to better live as a human being, learning how to stop when something isn’t working, or learning to defy a failed authority.
Most of Antichamber is white on white, with only a few splashes of colour here and there. Colour is used to draw attention and is heavily involved with puzzles. For a game as complex and mind boggling as Antichamber, the colour works very well, drawing your eyes and in several areas, acting as tutorials, by showing the player differences in the background and prompting the player to think.
One big difference that separates Antichamber from other puzzle games is the complete lack of physics, apart from the fact that you fall downwards. This means there are no physics puzzles, no learning how to get an object to interact with the environment. As soon as you know how to solve a puzzle, its solved. You don’t need to worry about the execution. This takes the focus away from keyboard proficiency and more about exploring the story
Antichamber is a complete and utter mind fuck. Everything in it challenges and rejects how you think it should work. Normal space is classed as Euclidean space, basically, if you walk left you will end up to the left of where you were. Antichamber runs on Non-Euclidean space, where something may be to your right, so you go downwards, and end up in front of the object. In addition, the place you are looking can often change other things. Walk down a corridor, then turn around and you’re somewhere completely else. All this strangeness and otherworldliness compounds the metaphysical narrative structure.
Forgoing a traditional main menu, Antichamber instead boots into a dark room. One wall covers the settings, sounds, resolution and such.
Another shows the experiences you have seen over your lifetime, and the third holds the map of the game. The map shows all the chambers you have explored, what corridors you have not unlocked and the room you just left. Not only is this map vital in orientating you in non euclidean space, it plays a pivotal role in solving several rooms. The final wall shows you the end door, showing your final goal before you start the game.
Antichamber is a complex story of your life, wrapped up as a dimensional puzzler. All of its elements fit beautifully together as a cohesive whole, greater than the sum of its parts.
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