Antichamber - Review

In Antichamber, the player controls the unnamed protagonist from a first-person perspective as they wander through levels. Regarding typical notions of Euclidean space, Bruce has stated that "breaking down all those expectations and then remaking them is essentially the core mechanic of the game".

The player starts in an antechamber that contains four walls. One is a diegetic menu to set the various game options as well as a countdown timer starting at ninety minutes. A second wall provides a map of the game's space that will fill in as the player visits specific rooms, highlighting passages the player has yet to explore, and allows the player, upon return to this room, to jump to any room they've visited before. A third wall shows a series of cartoonish iconographs and obfuscated hint text that are added as the player finds these on walls of the puzzle space. The fourth wall is a window, showing the ultimate goal, the exit from the space, which the player must figure out how to get to.

Puzzle elements in various chambers involve manoeuvring themselves around the spaces, where level elements can change after passing certain points, or even based on which direction the player is facing when traversing the level. Laser beams are used as mechanisms to control various doors; these may either require the beams to be blocked or unblocked, and many doors require multiple beams to be in their proper state to open. Initially, the player can trigger these themself. Later, the player gains access to a series of coloured "guns", each which helps the player access more of the space. Initially, the gun can pick up any number of small cubes, storing them, and then place them on surfaces; these can be used to block the aforementioned laser beams, or used as platforms for the player to get over obstacles. Other guns can be used to "grow" new blocks by placing blocks out in specific patterns, to direct a connected series of blocks towards an objective point, and to create en masse and fill an area with blocks; later guns retain the abilities of the earlier ones. Certain areas in the space are dead zones that remove any blocks stored in the gun or prevent blocks from moving through them. After most puzzles are signs with the aforementioned iconographs which can be activated to give a hint about the completed puzzle. At any point, the player can jump back to the first room, and use the map to navigate to other areas; this resets any progress made on specific puzzles though the player retains the guns they have obtained.

Upon completing a core set of puzzles, the player can then access the exit door, upon which they start to chase down a black cloud-like shape, using all the solving techniques they have learnt before. Eventually they are able to capture the cloud as a black cube within their gun, and enter a final, more expansive area, where they return the shape to a waiting shell. The shell creates a structure around it – similar to the game's logo – and then sucks everything around it into its centre, sending the screen to black and ending the game.