Until August of last year, I had been a student, which meant plenty of time to relax and play videogames at my leisure. Since then I’ve been in full-time work, which means every day I get in at about half seven and want to unwind, usually resulting in something I don’t really have to concentrate on to enjoy - such as Just Cause 2, where every landmark is cause for potential explosions, and who doesn’t love explosions?
On the weekends, it’s a different matter, and the last couple of weekends I have been testing myself with Antichamber, a new independent release on Steam from a lone developer who’s worked on this, his first release, since 2009.
The game opens in a black and white room, depositing the player in front of a wall with a cryptic message: “Every journey is a series of choices. The first is to begin the journey.”
A click on the first level from the map wall fades the antechamber away and replaces it with the first room in a very, very long series of rooms. You can choose to take any route, really, and the game guides you with messages written in floating blocks, and more cryptic phrases with accompanying pictures on the walls. Most are hints toward puzzles you need to solve, as well as being life lessons such as “Curiosity can get the better of all of us,” or “Sometimes the best path is straight forward.”
The puzzles you encounter are as frustrating as they are simple, and honestly I got stuck at several points where I thought I had tried everything, only for me to re-read the hint and realise I’d been over-complicating the question. You will laugh, you will cry, you will mutter oaths of aggravated tedium under your breath, and gasp with awe as you step into a small box that opens into a vast corridor…
There’s also an ominous shape-changing black smoke monster drifting through these hallways, though you never seem to catch up with it. It’s always a few corridors away, and by the time you reach those areas you’re almost fearful you’ll run into it and not know how to deal with it, since it seems to be able to bypass all the worst puzzles without even lifting a finger.
I’m not sure that you’re supposed to learn everything about the world and finish the game within 90 minutes like the first screen suggests – in fact it specifically lets you know that “You shouldn’t have to work to someone else’s time,” if you happen to over-run. I think it’s just another way of getting up close and personal with the player, and even though sometimes it’s a really obvious solution that the hints provide, and I groan with how stupid I was being, every little hint moment is a real nod to the developer in that they feel human – being guided by a person instead of a robot or a voice actor.
In terms of graphical capability, it’s powered by Unreal Engine 3, though the level design is minimalist, being white corridors with black outlines dictating corners and giving you pointers on where to go. Colour enters sometimes, if only to guide you to the next puzzle and draw your attention so you don’t end up wasting time trying to do later puzzles without having learned the skills you need first. That’s not to say it’s a bad scheme though – the bleak minimalism is a great change from the detailed, vast chambers of Portal, and it gives you the idea that the game might be simpler than it actually is, luring you into a false sense of safety before hitting you with the hardest stuff I’ve seen in ages. By comparison, Portal & Portal 2 were a cakewalk. I started and finished the latter in a single afternoon; Antichamber sends me spiralling into despair after a few minutes…
If you’ve got a few hours to burn and you want a fascinating game to drive you completely insane in those couple of hours, get this game. You will not regret the time you devote to finishing those intensely ‘difficult’ puzzles.