There's no context here, which is something to be celebrated. Antichamber is a goddamn GAME, and proudly so. Do we need a backstory or cutesy love triangle? No. We need chambers, gateways, platforms, hidden elevators, puzzles. And more puzzles.
But not your regular puzzles. Basically, these are puzzles for people who understand that games are software, and as software, are not behoven to the regular laws of physics. Also, that a first-person perspective is actually beautifully rigid, in that the player can only ever look precisely in one direction at a time. There's no peeking out of the corner of the eye.
This means that one of the central machanics in Antichamber is that as you move through an area, it will change behind you. Ever read House of Leaves? Read it. It's almost nothing like Antichamber. But the key word is ALMOST. But anyway, its not even about the puzzles. Not for me. And it shouldn't be about the puzzles for you either. And here's why.
Imagine that the Doctor gave the TARDIS some really bad drugs. This is a space that's not so much bigger on the inside in that it's twisted up on the inside. Running endlessly up a blue stairway or down a red stairway just brings you back and back to the same corridor.., unless you turn around, whereupon you'll discover a green exit. That's pretty much the first proper puzzle in the game.
Antichamber thrives on misdirection. "Turn back," it will cry, while whispering: "Don't." Which voice will you listen to? And these helpful little signs on the walls with their cute and possibly slightly unsuitable Pipboy-like artwork, do they reference the puzzle you've just defeated or the puzzle just ahead?
Turn around once, and there's an empty corridor. Turn around again and there's a pendulum, ticking dolefully in the starkness, the letters LIFE spelled out by the swing. It stands as sentinel to a gallery of fantastic forms and twisted perspectives.
Antichamber is a bizarre mix of a 1980s hologram show, rat maze, Ken Reinhard exhibition, and Tron.
That movie Tron. Okay there's stuff about collecting guns that can move cubes of different colours, and after a while the endless exhortations to go left when you should be going right get just too cute, but in the right circumstances - and on the right kind of high - this could be the most terrifying game you've played since System Shock 2.
That's because in Antichamber, you feel like you're being tested. Most likely by hostile entities. Oh, nothing's ever said, but there's tension. The simplest tension of all: a countdown tinier. It starts at 1 hour 30 minutes and it never stops. Ever. There's no pause, unless you shut down the game. What happens at the end of 90 minutes? Do you want to know? In a geometric nightmare where fizzing blobs change colours and then change the shape of the walls UNLESS YOU WALK CALMLY PAST THEM, and that pendulum keeps ticking out your life in a gallery full of slightly-hard-to-see crustaceans that never were, do you really want to know what happens when the clock runs out?
And yet, of course, there are these moments where the whole edifice teeters and nearly collapses. The mood is so knife-edge, maintaining it is a massive task. That occasionally Antichamber isn't up to. The room with WTF? written in the middle of it. How 2006. Those helpful illustrations on the walls... there's just something a little too 1920s-Mintie-commercial about their style. Like they should have been baffling glyphs instead of cute dudes lifting weights or walking dogs or whatever.
Then there's the art style. Damn but it's close. Not quite close enough to NOT make you wonder if the reason it's like this is because Alexander Bruce was too stingy to pay an artist. And then just when you think the cartoons are a bit crappy and the white corridors a bit too much like the developer telling you to go shove it, you wander into a geometric fever dream of stark beauty and you're left wondering if Antichamber is the dream that HAL 9000 had 12 years ago when he was stuck in orbit around Jupiter. Or Saturn if you read the book. Or possibly both if you're the kind of person who takes to Antichamber readily.
Is this a GOOD game? Does that question even mean anything? If you play it for the puzzlers, as a cold, intellectual exercise in beating Bruce - quite literally - at his own game, well then yeah Anticharnber is okay.
But if you wander through this multicoloured, multilayered, multidimensional mansion like Dave Bowman after he fell into the Monolith, well then, you might just have yourself an experience. Then the only question that will remain is this: Will you dream?
Developer: Alexander Bruce
Publisher: Alexander Bruce
Price: $19.99
Out: Now
Web: antichamber-game.com
