Antichamber

[IamLEAM1983]

I've been gaming for a long time, you all know that. My wonderful adventure in all things gaming started with the NES, in 1987. That's about 26 years of my almost three full decades of joystick-twiddling. One of the things we never think about as gamers is how much we're being trained, game after game after game, to expect certain things. Shooters involve guns that you shoot at people. First-person games involve a 3D world and a subjective point of view. Falling into chasms and pits equals death or severe injury. Failure is always a possibility. You can, and probably will get stuck. Being hit by something never solves anything. Even the Portal series shies away from breaking all the rules, seeing as there's always that noxious brown glop you can fall into. There's always the turrets that can shoot at you and kill you. Failure states are and seemingly always will be present in the average game design doc. Very few designers find ways to turn failure into a means to proceed ahead. It's generally much simpler to reinforce the sacrosanct Genre Rules, after all.

You have to die. You have to fail. You have to move forward. Moving back means you're doing it wrong, stupid player.

What if it wasn't the case? What if missing a jump only opened up new possibilities? What if being hit by a laser beam didn't kill you and was something you'd actually want to happen? That's Antichamber - and it breaks all the rules you'll have ever learned with a joystick or a keyboard and mouse. All of them.

Designed by a one-man team and finalist at the latest IGFs, Antichamber is a protean little romp that won't tax your system or wow you with its high-resolution textures. The "antechamber" of the game's title serves as the game's menu system, and while it exists as a closed space from which there's no means of access or egress, you can use a map along one of its walls to choose a destination from a set of rooms along a twisting floor plan. Another wall presents all the expected options, and another offers a series of pictograms and little axioms you'll gradually unlock. You can consider that as a sort of achievement system, or just leave it aside as a collection of nice little drawings with cute or inspirational phrases appended to them. "Don't live by someone else's time," says one, or "Pick another path, if the way ahead seems to be blocked". It also tells us there's no shame in looking back or retracing your steps.

In any case, clicking on one of the rooms in the floor plan teleports you there instantly. There, the game offers rather stark and unique visuals. Literally everything is awash in pure white, with only the outline of corridors and walls being cel-shaded in black. Sometimes, as required by the puzzle or to offer a degree of aesthetic variety, the polarity is reversed. There's also plenty of splashes of colour here and there, as the walls will gently glow with green, blue, red or purple hues to catch your eye and perhaps lead you in one direction or another. What these colours mean is up to you, as what really matters is the level of trickery these M.C. Escher-like surroundings will put in front of you.

For instance, you're presented with a chasm to cross, very early on. Your first impulse, like any other gamer, might be to attempt to make the jump. You'll quickly find out that your avatar isn't exactly superhuman, as you plummet not to your doom, but to a seemingly unseen and previously nonexistent lower corridor. There, the game teaches you that its rooms and corridors are designed to eliminate the notion that failure states can occur. You can't really fail in Antichamber, you can only move forward in ways you hadn't expected. You might try two or three more times, only to find out that you can hit Escape and return to the antechamber. From there, you can use the map to select another room and its own set of puzzles.

Or - you can attempt to defy what the level geometry so obviously suggests in order to cross the gap. You can walk in midair, and look down to see a platform phase into existence right underneath your feet. Jump in place, though, and that platform phases away, leaving you to fall back down to that room, below. As with any puzzle game, this one spends the first few rooms you'll cross teaching you to do several non-gamer things, or to consider concepts that lifelong gamers won't be willing to consider. You'll relearn how to fall down chasms, how to retrace your steps or even how to stare at a wall for a solid thirty seconds. All of the things we've been told were not to be done in the context of a story-driven experience or a twitch-fest find a new sense of relevance. You'll start pushing through walls just to see if there's a spot where said wall bleeds away and leads into a hidden room, or you'll round seemingly uselessly pretty fixtures in open courtyards, wondering how many consecutive turns will make the entire room change outside of your field of view. You'll stick your nose directly against a wall and suddenly turn around, only to find out that what was a simple hallway behind you is now an open room.

Quite simply, this is the sort of game Lovecraft would have been terrified by. Not because of its atmosphere - soft colours and stark whites and blacks, the whole of which are accompanied by the sound of ethereal clocks ticking, birdsong or crashing waves - but because it requires that you take Logic with a capital L, screw it out of your head and neatly store it aside for the length of your playthrough. Depending on how good you are at puzzle games, this can take anywhere between three to eight hours. What makes it terrifying is the fact that Antichamber is so committed to destroying your conceptions of how a game is played that the mechanics it presents you with aren't set in stone! There's a kind of malicious intent behind everything the game does, as though the whole thing had been designed by a well-meaning if still quite trollish relative of Discord, of My Little Pony fame. You're never in any danger, but you can't take anything for granted. The game is as committed to breaking tradition as it is at breaking the notion that it, too, might have solid rules of its own.

If you thought Portal and its sequel both put your head in a weird place and if screwing with spatial distances using portals seems too outlandish for you, then steer clear of Antichamber. If you haven't been neutered or "squared" by the industry's strict adherence to certain codes and traditions and if you're missing that old feeling of feeling like an utter genius when a hard puzzle clicks together, pick this up.

Just remember: if the game tells you to do something, try doing the exact opposite. See what happens.