668 - Neighbor of the Beast

...where it wasn't out yet, the wait was excruciating, and you wanted to go "Shut up and come out already, so you can hurry up and take my money?"

Not many games can do that to me - I'm an old salt; I've been playing games for two decades. I rarely get hyped up. There's a few games I am that way for this year (Hawken, Torchlight II and Borderlands 2, for example... not that Hawken will cost money, but I digress...) but I'm really looking forward to a puzzler called "Antichamber."

Allow me to quote the fine folks at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

The engine, presenting itself as deceptively simple, draws minimalist white corridors, barely outlined in thin black, with simplistic icons on the walls that, when interacted with, display esoteric sentences that suggest hints. Not progressing in the direction I’d intended, it informs me, doesn’t mean I haven’t progressed. Fair point.



Then things start getting weird. Turning around to go back the way you came very rarely takes you back to the way you came. Turning four right angles is very unlikely to bring you back to the point you where you started. A passage that can’t be accessed walking forward might be perfectly passable if you’re walking backward. If you don’t look at something, it’s not necessarily there. And most of all, none of those illogical violations of reality are consistent with one another. Just because something just worked doesn’t mean it will work again, and applying one understanding of the game’s behaviour to another is unlikely to produce results. It’s not so much lateral thinking as upside-down and back-to-front thinking.

This is emulated by the objects the game presents you with, too. While the minimalist frames form the canvas for the game throughout what I’ve seen of the first quarter or so of the game, it’s built upon by some really smart use of colour, brain-bending geometry, and some utterly remarkable features to gawp at. One room acted like an art gallery, filled with central cubes. Look through a side of the hollow cube and it contains some abstract piece, perhaps a flickering Escher-like shape, or maybe a more traditional sculptures. Then look through another side of the cube and the hollow space contains something completely different. Stand so you can see through two sides at once and you’ll see the space containing two different things simultaneously. A corridor with a dead end may reveal a passage way if viewed through a glass window. A passage way that remains in place until you look through the window again. Space becomes meaningless, in a way that makes you wonder why the game’s engine doesn’t just refuse to work at the sheer pertinence of its unreality.

I love puzzle games. They're probably one of my favorite genres. This is an indie title, so I doubt it will be expensive, but I'm absolutely looking forward to playing the hell out of this, trying to wrap my brain around whatever it throws at me.

And that's worth the price I'll pay to play it, be it Hamilton, Jackson, or some combination thereof with a dash of Lincoln if need be.

It's going to be absolutely incredible.