Welcome to the insane asylum

It has been a long time since my brain has hurt this much. I’ve just worked out how to reach the bottom of an endless staircase, and now I’m faced with alaser puzzle that needs 30 pieces, when I’ve only got 12, and I can’t even move them around. Welcome to Antichamber.

Imagine a game like Portal, where you have to complete puzzles to reach the next room, but where your path to the end of the game isn’t linear, nor is how you complete each chamber. Instead of placing portals around the level, you can instead pick up and place brightly coloured blocks - think of them as mini Minecraft blocks if it helps. So far, this description would make for a Portal-esque game; you’ve got a mission, a gun that helps you get around the game, and some puzzles thrown in. That’s not all Antichamber is, however - if Escher could have made a video game - I feel it would be a lot like this. For example, say you are walking along a corridor, turning 90 degrees to your right, every 5 metres, with no incline. Then, after doing this 10 times, the corridor suddenly becomes straight when you turn the corner. Being an FPS, it’s weird to know that your mind is being tricked quite easily, yet you don’t see how or where it happened.

The artistic style of Antichamber makes you feel like you’re trapped in a modern art museum, with pristine white walls, ceilings and floor. Little motivational images are posted around the game - often giving subtle hints as to how you should approach the next chamber. There’s sporadic use of colour in some areas - you may go through multiple white-walled chambers, before coming across a large room, where you need to make your way to the end, using the coloured corridor sections as a guide.

Once you’ve learned the tricks of trade, and know what to expect, the game will then throw something obvious into the mix, and stump you for another good 5 minutes before you facepalm, and wonder why you even thought it would be good to procrastinate this way.

The block-play isn’t too repetitive either - there are upgrades available to your launcher that make older puzzles quicker to run through, and new puzzles, managable.

As soundtracks go, Antichamber‘s may not be as odd as you think - it’s not your normal game OST, with a thematic motif... or any emotion - it’s just sounds. Relaxing sounds at least. I expect that if they added anything more energetic, there’d be more temper tantrums than usual. Being made in the Unreal engine, the graphics look fine and will work on any relatively recent and decent laptop, although you might find there are some issues with the screen resolution (nothing too had too fix with notepad).

There’s not much, in terms of replayability, as a lot of the ‘fun’ is from not knowing what to do. There’s a timer in the menu room, that counts down from 1hr30min, so at least you’ll be able to speedrun the game...

It’s available on Steam for £14.99 - and I can’t see any reason, why after this great success, we wouldn’t see a 360 or PS3 version. With DLC though. :(