#game10

originally posted 28/12/2015

It’s hot. It was hot the entire week I tried to play Antichamber, and it’s hot now that I’m trying to write about it. The room that I both sleep and play videogamez in has no aircon and no fly-screen (although it does have a ceiling fan). My patience breaks easily at the moment. Please factor this in.

What/where/when: Antichamber is a first-person view puzzle game, akin to eg. Portal. It is the tenth game that I’ve attempted for this A-Z project. Hooray for me! Apparently I also spent $12 USD on it in early 2013, which makes it the most expensive game so far.

Who: Antichamber was created by Alexander Bruce, of Australia! So far as I can tell, this was his first and as yet only game.

Previous History: I had it installed for a bit after purchase. I remember thinking it looked like a pretty promising game, if only I could bring myself to concentrate on it.

Time dissolved: Like four or five hours.

Minor dissertation: I really wanted to like Antichamber, and I definitely went into the game with the expectation that I was going to, or that I should like it. In addition to my brief experience with it, I vaguely remembered reading a few positive things about it over the years. There’s also the obvious home-country pride to factor in - it’s rare enough to play games by developers from here so you really want to get behind it when they succeed in bringing games to fruition, due to some strange sense of civic duty.

Yet Antichamber is the first game in this here project that I am truly pulling the plug on well before the finish line (not counting AaaaaAAaaa due to the nature of that game’s finish line).

I hit a wall…and then another wall…and then the game was entirely walls, metaphorical and real. Partially this is just me being sucky at certain kinds of puzzles, being sucky at games, being sucky at this particular game. I know this. I began failing to find solutions and found myself quitting the game and looking for something else to do. I’d come back a few minutes later, repeat the process and quit again. And so it went. For the life of me, and maybe the weather is also partially to blame here, but I couldn’t work up the persistence to get through this.

As the game progresses, it relies more and more on the use of a portal-gun cube re-distribution gun to complete puzzles, the abilities of which evolve slightly each time you find a new upgrade for it. The rules for this gun felt a tad arbitrary to me, and I didn’t much like the mechanic to begin with, which didn’t help the situation. At one point I got stuck on five or so puzzles at once because I didn’t realise the existence of a certain mechanic (I’d probably just forgotten about it to be fair), and remembering this mechanic turned out to be the answer for all of them.

At the same time, I found it too hard and too frustrating to distinguish when a puzzle that I was working on was unsolvable simply because I didn’t have the right upgrade yet rather than because I just couldn’t work out the answer. Such is the curse of a non-linear exploration mechanic in a puzzle game, I guess, but I feel like something to ward me off draining time on puzzles which I wouldn’t be able to complete until I’d progressed significantly down other paths, well, would have felt more fair. As it was (and again, factor in my currently-very-low tedium threshold) the game felt too chaotic to the detriment of it’s own playability, even while this chaos was the core of it’s novelty exploration and aesthetic.

Completion amount: I made it through 3 or 4 gun upgrades and some areas were starting to look pretty quaint, so I suspect I was getting close-ish to the end. I did enjoy the feel of the game, not to mention the creative non-linear layout. In the end though it was feeling like too much of a chore to push through it, and I was no longer having fun. GG Antichamber.

GAME 10 ROUND 10  the hundreth drawing for this Pingpong game!

Crossing 100 leagues of the ocean....of clouds. Well, here is number 100 and looking forward to reaching 200! Please feel free to suggest objects or themes!

GAME 10 ROUND 08

GAME 10 ROUND 06

GAME 10 ROUND 02