| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| PC | 5.40 |
| Overall | 5.40 |
|
I generally like puzzles in my games but full on puzzle games are hit and miss for me. Games like portal manage to have such an amazing story and campaign that it works well as just a puzzle game. Antichamber like Portal is a first person game with a weird gun that is used to solve puzzles, except minus the fun. There is basically no story, the world is a white surreal setting with bright colors highlighting objects, so you meander around hoping to find the correct path. It's kind of metroid like in terms of world design except the traversal doesn't follow normal game rules, nothing does. Antichamber is all about perspective and playing with reality. The first few hours simply have the player walk around with no weapon as you begin to learn how the world works and what you need to do to advance. For instance you enter a room that has no exit but a window on a pillar, walk up to the window and you can see a new location through it, press up against the window and now you are in the location you saw. There are many different mechanics from invisible floors, triggered lasers that open doors, using momentum to jump, and puzzles that use backtracking and positioning. There are some hints explaining the mindset you should be in to solve that particular puzzle. Advancing through the maze could be confusing so there is a map that allows you to warp to any room you have visited in the hud room which you can access anytime with the push of a button. I enjoyed the first view hours, I wish the whole game was puzzles involving movement and perspective. But eventually you get the block gun and everything goes to shit. Now puzzles involve random block puzzles. There are different colored guns that give blocks new abilities but at its core you absorb a block with one button then shoot it out with another. The block will attach to anything and you can attach blocks to one another to create shapes. Most of the time you will be filling in these tracks on the wall or floor with the blocks, using the different properties of the color blocks is the key to many of these puzzles. Things got tedious at this point, the block puzzles were sometimes annoying especially ones where you have to build something in a 3D space which is close to impossible with these controls, if it had a wiimote maybe it could work. As the game grows more and more paths open and end up in impassible roadblocks because you don't have the color blocks to move on. I would just meander around hoping to find some puzzle I missed that lets me move forward. Some puzzles you would fail and it would lead you to another room meaning you have to get back to the room. Oh and running out of blocks is infuriating, I want to yell at someone. Puzzle games are supposed to create this sensation of “eureka! I got the solution!” I didn't feel that all to often, most of the time I felt relief that I stumbled on the solution. There is no sense of progression with this game, ideas don't really build on one another, some do but it's not a consistent addition of ideas like a portal. I am going to keep the score on the positive end of the spectrum just cause it is a meaty game and it had some good ideas. Some people will really enjoy this, for me I found it to be more tedious and frustrating than it had to be. |
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Posted by Dvader Sun, 17 Jan 2016 03:40:32
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travo (3m)
I loved Portal, I think I'd like to play Portal 2 at some point, but a lot of these games it has "inspired" just don't look too good. Especially if they're busy being clever instead of fun.
One other thing: if I remember correctly, the colour-based roadblocks you ran into are usually actually passable if you don't have the "correct" gun to solve the puzzle in a more obvious way. That's kinda the key to the whole game: you actually have to figure shit out for yourself unlike, say, in Portal, and when you do you can overcome things in an unconvential way. It's the puzzle version of emergant gameplay.
It's the absolute antithesis to Portal, but I love Portal too. I'm pleased I predicted you wouldn't like it and glad that you can see why other people might.
"Sort of like a Portal which you can't beat."
Presumably he beat it. Even Aspro beat it.
And I played kb mouse which is still shit. With a wiimote I can have depth, I can push into the screen and back without changing my perspective, it would allow actual 3D manipulation unlike the mouse where i am stuck to the cursor in the center of the screen and have to constantly walk around an object to aim exactky at the spot I want the block to go.
So something that should have been as easy as moving your hand across a screen is now this constant back peddling at a weird angle. Or you can stand and face the row directly and have the blocks add toward you but then you have to get out of the way to add the last few blocks. And yes you can holds he button down to fill in blocks but all too often it am doesn't stay in the plane you want it to and starts to flow in and out of the pattern you want it to be in.