Cormacaroni

This is not a review of a video game. I hate reviews of video games. 

I suppose you could deconstruct it and assign point scores for things like sound and presentation. I suppose you could do that for the Mona Lisa or Moonlight Sonata too, but those criteria are basically useful for distinguishing between grades of extruded industrial ‘product’ and this is defiantly not 'product’.

Released on PC, where weird indie games currently sprout like mold, Antichamber takes exactly the opposite tack from your average 'AAA’ console game. There is no marketing-driven genre label like ACTION or FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER on the back of the box; there is no box. All you get is a name in your Steam library, with an intriguing little Escher loop built into the logo.

Boot it up, and you are thrown into a 3D box with wireframe walls. One side says 'All You Need to Know’, and has a list of key controls, screen resolution options, and a timer, which has already started ticking. You look at the other walls, and see a sign titled 'Exit’. You run towards it, and bash into an almost-invisible glass wall. Ha, you think. Cheeky bugger. And we’re off to the races.

Already, we have subverted or simply side-stepped much of what is repulsive and tedious about contemporary video gaming. Where is the 2hr long hand-holding tutorial that explains the mechanics you already know from every other game in that genre? Where is the unskippable cut-scene filled with all the Hollywood explodey stuff? Where is the motivation for your plucky hero to proceed along their heavily-scripted path? And why is the EXIT right there? Why did I pay money for this again?

Well, here’s the thing about Antichamber: the game is the tutorial is the game is the tutorial. It is pure, abstract learning. You begin in the barest possible environment, to encourage an open mind and an abandonment of preconceptions. And from that point on, each new environment you encounter has the singular goal of teaching you something about how to negotiate it. You learn by playing and you play by learning. There is literally almost nothing else to it.

The first section brilliantly disposes of the standard first-person 'corridor’ mechanic (where players thrust ever forward to get to the next cut-scene). The geometry of the environment is the crudest wireframe 3D, the sort you might remember from the old Arcade game Battle Zone if you are ancient like me, only updated in neon flat colors and disco lighting effects like the neo classic 'REZ’. You run around a corner or two, and hit a room which is split vertically into red and blue corridors. A sign on the wall says 'A choice may be as simple as going left or right’. You keep running, and find yourself facing a room split vertically into red and blue corridors. Hang on…what? You go down the blue corridor and find yourself facing a room split vertically into red and blue corridors. Uhhh. If you are under-caffeinated you might run the cycle a dozen more times, waiting for something to happen to you, for something to break into your experience, tell you what is going on, tell you what the objective is, COMFORT YOU basically. But you don’t get jack shit. All you get is back to a room split vertically into red and blue corridors.

Eventually you give up and backtrack…whereupon you find yourself in an entirely different corridor from the one you entered. A sign on the wall says 'When you return to where you have been, things aren’t always as you remembered’. The lesson? Non-linearity and expectation-confounding are the orders of the day here. Better start dealing with it.

Fortune cookie wisdom to be sure, but thanks to ingenious warpings of geometry and logic, the player is forced to actualize the statement, internalize it, and above all, learn from it. The player will need this knowledge again, and much more besides. By forcing the player to discard everything they thought they knew, they force them to realize 'What I do know to be true is: Just this’ again and again, until they have built a body of knowledge and experience and mind-bending geometrical trickery that enables them to find out what lies beyond that door named 'Exit’ (and you know it’s not 'The End’…because you’ve already seen that door elsewhere. Oh yes, he likes to fuck with you a bit, that naughty scamp of an Australian).

So it’s a puzzle game, then. But what puzzles. The sort that I cannot possibly spoil for you. The sort that make you scream NOOOOOO when you first realize the crushing horror of your predicament, the sheer absurdity of expecting you to do THAT when obviously you can only do THIS. The sort that make you try stupid shit that will never ever ever work but you can’t think of anything else right now so you do it anyway and then your synapses begin to fire a bit and wait a minute this isn’t quite so crazy after all and holy shit you did it worked exactly 100% according to plan, surely that’s the Nobel Prize committee on the line right now…

I tried so hard to break this game, to find ways to cheat and abuse my abilities to get around those obstaclese in a way that the designer hadn’t anticipated. I am by no means the world’s most experienced gamer, but I’ve been around. Nothing doing. My tiny fists beat against the adamantium surfaces of Alexander Bruce’s giant glowing brain to no effect other than me doing exactly what he wanted me to do all along. This sentiment was usually reinforced by the pithy signs viewable after making progress to a new area. You know that brilliant bit at the end of Portal 2? The moonshot? That’s how I felt through most of Antichamber. Like someone was literally reading me like a book and then manipulating me like a marionette. It’s a rare and eerie feeling, that kind of intimate connection with a game and the person behind it.

As much as it obsessed and enthralled me over the past few days, there were some shaky spots, where I got badly stuck or knew what to do but struggled to execute it. But a lot less than I expected, and far less than in most megabudget 'AAA’ titles. And in fact, after finishing the game and watching videos of others playing, I realized that the worst parts of my playthrough were just because I picked the single daftest way of accomplishing a task that others seemingly breezed through in style. Not every learning experience is a brain-fizzing pleasure. Just most of them.

Could more be done with this with a bigger team and budget? Yes and no. Valve excel at taking this kind of raw gameplay mechanic (Left 4 Dead, Portal) and turning them into actual entertainment, usually via the addition of comic relief robot sidekicks, or hats. I am not convinced that would make Antichamber any better though. To reiterate, it is precisely because the learning environment is so reductivist and abstracted that the player learns to focus on the game logic.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel that the addition of some kind of dynamic geometry-reactive electronic soundtrack would tip this over the edge. The existing soundtrack is fine, largely evocative ambient noises, heavy on the bleeps and bloops, but the visuals cry out for an ecstatic Daft Punk electronic anthem or two at times. But the pacing of the game is just not conducive to that, given that you either spend ages stuck in one spot, or you romp through whole stretches at high speed because you know the solution.

Antichamber is a tool designed for a very specific purpose – teaching you to play Antichamber. Adding anything to it would ultimately be subtractive. The only thing it needs is someone to play it, and that’s where you come in. I loved it and I hope you will too.