Antichamber

It’s hot here. It was hot when I was trying to play Antichamber, and it’s hot again now that I’m finishing this write-up of it. Here are the facts and figures:

Antichamber is a first-person view puzzle game, akin to eg. Portal. It is the tenth game that I’ve attempted for this A-Z project. Hooray for me! Apparently I also spent $12 USD on it, which makes it the most expensive game so far. I spent like four or five hours on it, and it is also the first game that I am pulling the plug on well before finishing the game, even though such a task seemed achievable.

So what’s going on here? I really wanted to like Antichamber, and I definitely went into the game with the expectation that I was going to, or that I should like it. I vaguely remembered reading a few positive things about it over the years, and from a very quick trial install when I bought it, I’d surmised that this would be good if I could bring myself to concentrate on it. To top that off the developer is Australian, and aside from the obvious home-country pride it’s rare enough to play games by developers from here so you really want to get behind it when they succeed in bringing games to fruition.

However!

I hit a wall…and then another wall…and then the game was entirely walls, metaphorical and real. Partially this is just me being sucky at certain kinds of puzzles, being sucky at games, being sucky at this particular game. I know this. I began failing to find solutions and found myself quitting the game and looking for something else to do (but oh, I have to keep playing!). I’d come back a few minutes later, repeat the process and quit again. And so it went. For the life of me, and maybe the weather is also partially to blame here, but I couldn’t work up the persistence to get through this.

Another small and perhaps unfair yet significant detail: As the game progresses, it relies more and more on the use of a portal-gun cube re-distribution gun to complete puzzles, the abilities of which evolve slightly each time you find a new upgrade for it. The rules for this gun felt superfluous and annoying to me, and I didn’t much like the mechanic to begin with. That didn’t help. At one point I got stuck on five or so puzzles at once because I didn’t realise the existence of a certain mechanic (I’d probably just forgotten about it to be fair), and remembering this mechanic turned out to be the answer for all of them. Simultaneously, I found it too hard and too frustrating to distinguish when a puzzle was unsolvable simply because I didn’t have the right upgrade yet rather than because I just couldn’t work out the answer. Such is the curse of a non-linear exploration mechanic in a puzzle game, I guess, but I feel like something to ward me off draining time on puzzles which I wouldn’t be able to complete until I’d progressed significantly down other paths, well, it would have felt fair. As it was the game felt too chaotic to the detriment of it’s own playability even while it leaned on this chaos for it’s aesthetic.

I made it through 3 or 4 gun upgrades and some areas were starting to look pretty wacky, so I suspect I was getting close-ish to the end. I did enjoy the feel of the game, and the creative non-linear layout felt very novel. In the end though it was feeling like too much of a chore to push through it, and I was no longer having fun. GG Antichamber.

next up is Aquanox. No promises I’ll get to it anytime soon, as it’s sale season and there are other games I might want to play instead.