Right up front I will be honest and admit that I did not finish this game, so I understand if that's an issue and if you'd prefer to ignore this review. The reason I didn't finish the game is because it is incredibly confusing. I've played and completed difficult puzzle games before, The Witness being one of my favourites in recent times, and the big difference between something like The Witness and Antichamber is that The Witness was able to express its puzzles in subtle but detailed ways. Antichamber presents you with a puzzle and then does little to explain itself to you, at least as far as I could tell. The puzzle chamber is laid out in a confusing and difficult to track manner, with a return to a sort of overworld map possible, but no clear indicators as to where you were or how everything fits together. The world is deliberately Escher-esque, with changing pathways and unnatural architecture etc., but the look of the game is so barren that it becomes difficult to tell areas apart, again a problem that The Witness solved with its distinct graphics helping to create a sense of location. The other problem I found was when I found a puzzle that didn't seem entirely obscure or reliant on some tool or piece of information from a separate, difficult to locate part of the map, it was pretty unimaginative. For its unique graphics and lofty ambition to toy with our sense of spatial logic, the game doesn't seem to have a grasp of the more fundamental aspects of puzzle design, such as how to convey information necessary for the understanding of a puzzle. I concede that the way this game is presented and designed may have just been lost on me, puzzle games seem to be divisive in this way, but as I can only present an account of my time with the game, that account has to be almost wholly negative.
