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Alexander Bruce's Antichamber is a game that delights in its own inhumanity. It's a wilfully cruel first-person puzzle game that loves to trick the player with rule changes, visual sleights, false walls and impossible spaces as well as some testing logic problems. Visually, it couldn't be any more stark - it's etched in hard, angular monochrome and splashed with lurid neon - while the soundtrack of whining wind and distant animal calls is pure doomy alienation.There's one incongruous human touch in all this lab-engineered intellectual torture. After defeating a puzzle, you'll find a sketchy allegorical cartoon on the wall: a dog chasing its own tail, maybe, or a man pushing a stone up a mountain. Click on it and you'll read a cheesy motivational slogan straight off some kitten-festooned office poster: "Dig a little deeper and you may find something new," or "If you never stop trying, you will get there eventually." Usually these reflect on the puzzle you've just solved. I can't tell if their use is supposed to be ironic or not - but it's irritating either way. It comes across as Bruce condescendingly reminding you that he's always one step ahead.
Antichamber is a deeply self-conscious game, then, and it's a bit smug with it. It's very clever, it's very pleased with its own cleverness, and it's unwilling to let you enjoy a sense of victory over it. It also has an inconsistency that provides it with many entertainingly trippy and confounding moments, but which ultimately makes it untrustworthy. And a puzzle game you can't trust is seldom that much fun.
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