Oh they definitely knew performance could be a thing - they literally make a gag about it at one point recovering your coins chest HOWS THE FRAMERATE
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Antichamber’s real problem was that it lacked any kind of heuristics for puzzles, so literally the only way to progress was ‘try everything you can think of until something works’, which isn’t very interesting despite how much visual interest the game conveyed.
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I played it over the course of 3 or 4 nights. I didn’t feel a need to take a break because I was literally never stuck for more than 30 minutes. I feel like I’d be more forgiving of the game if it ever challenged me.
Comparisons to Grow Home are entirely unwarranted! Grow Home didn’t force cumbersome tutorials on me, it just let me explore and discover the mechanics.
I wonder how big our SB anti-Antichamber club could be, I think we were relative immune to its gimmicks
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I just finished blueville and am off to what I believe is the last stretch. I enjoyed it a fair bit more than carrot town but I’m still of the belief that carrot town somewhat kills the pacing – I think the long, open, self-contained areas work against the most interesting parts of the first half of the game.
I liked the first hour of so of Antichamber when one just wanders through it and runs smack dab into every random environmental gimmick or dead end. The second the actual puzzles got involved and you had to try and figure it out it become markedly less interesting. Was also way too finicky for what it was going for.
I just noticed that this Supraland has a demo so I may have to try that as much to see if I can actually run the thing as anything else.
Yeah, Antichamber’s reality bending is full of verve and it makes a good first impression. It’s clear that it really was designed almost entirely from convention demo feedback. And I’m not entirely surprised he hasn’t yet made a followup game.
The demo is generous and will tell you everything you need to know. Disabling depth of field should be your first step to claw back performance.
Dof had literally no effect on performance. Literally nothing did, from lowest to highest settings it was all the same questionable performance
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I fixed performance by turning (I think) shadow quality to low, but keeping everything else on high. Game still looked kool and ran way better.
I put an hour into the demo and it does seem pretty swell aside from combat, which is so bad that it should be removed.
I had to mess around with the settings for a good bit before I got it to run even okayish, turning all the individual settings down as low as possible only helped so much but lowering the actual resolution itself down let me put the rest of the non-shadow settings back up to a respectable level.
The platforming is almost as bad as the combat
OK I gotta admit it’s losing me. I really adored everything up to the boss fight at the halfway point! I don’t think the late-game puzzle rooms are interesting enough to sustain it!
In my last session, I entered the castle and I guess now the whole world I’ve explored so far is again open to me.
In the past couple areas, I’ve found the puzzle solutions a combination of tedious and clever. Sometimes both at the same time. In some cases, it’s just a matter of remembering something pretty obvious that doesn’t come to mind immediately (such as when picking up a few coins lets me buy back another piece of equipment). Things that the 90% joke from earlier kind of apply to.
That spoilered part was the biggest issue I had as far as puzzles
Hi! I don’t remember anti-chamber outside of I bought it on word of mouth and really didn’t like it.
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happens to all of us
In short, if you’re going to play just one game like this it should probably be Portal.
If you’re going to play two, I’d recommend The Talos Principle.
if you’ve already played those two, I’d probably say go with Portal 2 next. I know it gets some criticism for having puzzles that are too breezy so that the story doesn’t stall (and probably for other things that I can’t remember at the moment), but I found the game compelling and I think the multi-player stages kind of fill that puzzle complexity gap. And I can forgive a lot just for that moment involving the moon.
Also, did you know that there was an unofficial Portal sequel in 2007, way before the official sequel? It was a re-creation of Portal: The Flash Version within the real engine and it was surprisingly good:
Oh, wait. Maybe Metroid Prime should be second in my list.
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The Talos Principle is swell but aside from both being first person I think it is different enough from Antichamber and Portal that I hesitate to consider it a game “just like them”. Definitely play it before Antichamber as it is comfortably better and very good on its own. Quantum Conundrum is much more like them and while it is a… lesser work I’d comfortably place it higher than Antichamber.
I remember there being a lot of writing in The Talos Principle but not that any of it was remarkable. Does it get better than deliberately mysterious & vague emails and booming god voice later? Or is it the plot that’s good.
I’m in the “Antichamber was good actually” camp. It was a while ago that I touched it last so lemme replay it real quick and come back with some real thoughts
From watching some Supraland play throughs it looks static & constrained as heck and I don’t get how people are saying it rewards out-of-bounds play when all those rewards are because the dev recognised this supposedly off-map area was still in-play and arranged for the player to maybe find them. Sounds like secrets?
It does a clever thing with at least one terminal that only I seem to like as much as I do. One of the computers is running a voight-kampff-y quiz on you, a robot. But you are, in real life, a human controlling this robot, so even though you are forced to fail, this experience indicts the test as unfair rather than you as being somehow artificial. So, it uses a metanarrative trick to force you to reconsider the sophistry you have to deal with.
It managed to draw the contours of the philosophical zombie thought experiment without ever directly citing it.
I know its easy to dismiss this stuff as cog. sci. 101 or whatever, but I think it manages to layer a deeper understanding of cognition in a surface level primer on cognition.
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