So, as 2013 comes to a close and we clear our calendars for the exciting times ahead, I thought I would round up some other indie titles you might have missed.ĭon't Starve: The survival horror game trades in the usual moody, first-person visuals of the genre for a more inviting hand-drawn style that feels like a Tim Burton movie. Over the past few weeks, I've looked at only the tiniest sampling of what was offered this year.
And while the nature of the market makes it difficult to get exact sales figures, there is no denying that 2013 was a great year for introducing new and innovative titles to gamers of all stripes and on all platforms. All of its elements fit beautifully together as a cohesive whole, greater than the sum of its parts.The indie gaming market is a growing force in the industry. The final wall shows you the end door, showing your final goal before you start the game.Īntichamber is a complex story of your life, wrapped up as a dimensional puzzler. Not only is this map vital in orientating you in non euclidean space, it plays a pivotal role in solving several rooms. The map shows all the chambers you have explored, what corridors you have not unlocked and the room you just left. The end of all workĪnother shows the experiences you have seen over your lifetime, and the third holds the map of the game. One wall covers the settings, sounds, resolution and such. If only real life had this sort of menusįorgoing a traditional main menu, Antichamber instead boots into a dark room. All this strangeness and otherworldliness compounds the metaphysical narrative structure. Walk down a corridor, then turn around and you’re somewhere completely else. In addition, the place you are looking can often change other things. Antichamber runs on Non-Euclidean space, where something may be to your right, so you go downwards, and end up in front of the object. Normal space is classed as Euclidean space, basically, if you walk left you will end up to the left of where you were. Everything in it challenges and rejects how you think it should work. If you put 3D glasses on, you see Escher having a panic attackĪntichamber is a complete and utter mind fuck. This takes the focus away from keyboard proficiency and more about exploring the story You don’t need to worry about the execution.
As soon as you know how to solve a puzzle, its solved. This means there are no physics puzzles, no learning how to get an object to interact with the environment. One big difference that separates Antichamber from other puzzle games is the complete lack of physics, apart from the fact that you fall downwards. For a game as complex and mind boggling as Antichamber, the colour works very well, drawing your eyes and in several areas, acting as tutorials, by showing the player differences in the background and prompting the player to think. Colour is used to draw attention and is heavily involved with puzzles. Most of Antichamber is white on white, with only a few splashes of colour here and there. Learning new ideas has a parallel with learning how to better live as a human being, learning how to stop when something isn’t working, or learning to defy a failed authority. Each picture and accompanying phrases help guide you through the game, which seems to parallel the life of a human being, growing and learning about the world. The pictures broadly follow the life of a human, from conception to death. Throughout the game are black squares with an image of them, clicking on them will show a sentence which relates to the picture. These images/phrases constitute the story and tutorials of the game. While you are told how to activate these guns, you are otherwise left to figure it out yourself, with only a specially designed puzzle and maybe a cryptic phrase to help you along the way. The first gun can pick up and drop small coloured blocks found within puzzles, and later guns can draw with blocks to solve more complicated puzzles. For some reason, it reminds me of an old episode of the Avengers “the house that Jack built’.Īs you progress through the game, you acquire ‘guns’ with which you use to solve puzzles. But then it gets really confusing, such as stairs that lead back into themselves or corridors folding in on themselves. Some are simple, such as walls that aren’t there, or doors that close when you look at them. The main thrust of the game are the puzzles, which are mainly compromised by the corridors through which you navigate. “Instructions unclear, got block stuck in washing machine” Its a first person platformer, cross puzzle, cross example of a higher dimensional space fucking with your brain. Antichamber is a game designed to hurt my poor little brain.