It plays with our expectations through optical illusions, with walls that shift and dematerialize and behaviour that defies what we’ve come to expect from first-person games. Escher painting come to life, and that’s what makes Antichamber so interesting. A 90-minute countdown clock adds time pressure (though you surely won’t reach the game’s end on your first – or likely fifth – attempt), and one wall is decorated with all of the tips and hints uncovered during your explorations, many of which double as general life lessons. From here, you can immediately teleport to any point in the game’s labyrinth that you’ve previously visited, and you can also pop back to the hub at will. The game begins in a large room that serves as Antichamber’s hub. From its unusual format to its sparse visuals to its deliberately confounding structure, it’s like one of those tiny puzzle sculptures that seem impossible to disentangle until you look at it a new way and think way outside of the box.

If you’ve played Portal, you know what this is about: moving around maze-like, meticulously designed 3D environments, figuring out how to get from A to B.īut Antichamber is not really like Portal. Six years in the making (by one very patient man) and currently a darling of the indie game scene, Antichamber is of the absurdly specific “first-person puzzle-platformer” sub-genre. Whether Antichamber is actually much fun to play is open to debate. Rather, it’s an earnest examination of game design, of the language of video games and of how we’ve learned to interact with 3D virtual worlds. It’s very meta, and not in the condescending way we sometimes use that word. In fact, Antichamber is a game about how we play games. And like a lot of young things, they can be kind of dumb at times.Īntichamber is not a dumb game. Manage Print Subscription / Tax ReceiptĬompared to literature, film and TV, video games are a relatively young medium of entertainment.

Antichamber online download