Okay, if you are only going to look out for ONE idiosyncratic psychoanalytical first-person puzzler this year, make it this one. Originally known as Hazard: The Journey Of Life, Antichamber is a sort of sequential environmental problem game; part Portal, part Echochrome and part philosophical odyssey.
Created by lone coder Alexander Bruce, it’s been doing the indie rounds for a couple of years, gathering plaudits from the likes of Kotaku, Edge and Joystiq and winning stuff at events such as Pax and IGF. Every room in the game is a sort of optical or psychic illusion, everything warps your expectations. To defeat the cryptically described puzzles, you have to alter your perception of interactive space. It is like being willingly brain washed of game conventions.
It’s also very hard to describe because each new area presents new challenges – and they don’t really work like logic or physics puzzles. Oh look, it’s okay, Bruce has just released a new trailer, which explains everything – well not really, but it does show you lots of bits really, really quickly. I’ll write something in more detail later – this is just a heads-up for those who haven’t seen this yet. Just… prepare yourself.
