Antichamber
Playtime: 7 Hours
Finished 18 September 2025.Playtime is based on my total Steam time, which includes the ~1.8 hours I put into this game the first time I tried playing this in 2017 or so. This playthrough was actually my second attempt at it, and it really stuck with me this time! I think I found all but one of the panels (but fully explored the map, including all of the secret dev rooms - not sure what I missed), and only used a few basic hints total: detailed description of green gun cloning functionality, and some hints for the last 2 dev rooms.
Yet another runback in 2025 of a game I didn't give a fair chance a long time ago! The concepts behind this game are incredibly cool, and probably influenced many of the puzzle games we started seeing in the mid-2010s that explored lots of weird concepts related to non-Euclidean geometry, perspectives, and the like. I originally played it for a bit under 2 hours sometime in 2017 and dropped it for some reason, probably because it just didn't really mesh with me at the time. I'm very glad I decided to give it another go, since it's an amazingly designed little game.
The premise of the game overall revolves around a bunch of tricks and mechanics that warp and break the obvious preconceptions that you have of most 3D game worlds. There are windows that act like teleporters, walls you can walk into, and lots of space-warping trickery that's hard to describe in a brief manner. Each mini "puzzle", of which there are hundreds, typically involves a very small task - getting through doors or hallways, finding alternate pathways, etc., and lets you reach black panels, each with some kind of saying or comment. Since it's easy to get lost or completely stuck in the world, the game gives you the ability to teleport back into the spawn chamber, then back to any puzzle at any time (resetting the puzzle conditions of course).
At some point early on, you get access to the Antichamber gun, which is a key mechanic throughout the remainder of the game. It kind of feels like the Portal gun, and is analogous to it in the sense that the abilities it gives you in moving, destroying, or creating matter are vital to solving the game's puzzles. There are 5 versions you get throughout the game, and each grants new functions to help you solve puzzles & unlock regions of the map. The blue gun only gives you the ability pick up and put down cubes, the green gun lets you do it much faster (and also grants the ability to create & destroy matter under certain circumstances). The yellow gun you eventually find lets you move entire formations of blocks around, and the red gun gives you the final functional upgrade that lets you automatically fill or suck up surfaces from a single point. The final black gun is mostly ceremonial, only used at the end of the game to transport a special antimatter cube.
Although the beginning of the game can be a bit boring and more than a bit confusing with lots of dead ends and limitations for puzzle-solving, it really starts to open up after you get a couple of upgrades and start to see what the guns can really do. It's still not quite as straightforward as something like Portal, which is very understandable, but is intuitive enough to grasp with a few practical demonstrations. One touch I think is really nice is that puzzles are often color-coded with the "tier" of gun needed to solve it, so you know not to waste time fooling around with red blocks or hallways when all you have is the blue gun. All together, this was a really neat experience!
