Recent reviews by sous les pavés, la plage!

What a heartbreaking game. There's so much to like about it but actually playing the game is an incredibly annoying and frustrating experience.

I didn't play Mirror's Edge when it first came out 15 years ago and had a bit of hype around it. At the time, most of that hype was around its art direction (which it deserves, even 15 years later) and its focus on parkour mechanics in an FPS (deserved at the time for at least trying something new, but has an extremely frustrating implementation)

The main problem with Mirror's Edge is the sense of flow and fluidity that you should feel as a parkour master is only captured in a few small moments during the game. The rest of the time you'll be falling to your death, getting snagged by walls, jumping to the wrong ledge, running in the complete wrong direction, and failing to do things that you could probably easily do in real life (e.g. walking along a ledge)

To give a specific example - in Chapter 3 - "Heat" there's a part where you're supposed to do a wallrun on a very thin piece of plywood that's hanging overhead. However, when you run into it and press your jump button you end up grappling, mantling, and falling off the top of it to your death. There's no ambiguity around the fact the designers want you to wallrun here, and you know you need to wallrun, but actually being able to execute the wallrun requires you to hit a fairly precise angle and timing to do it. I tried at least 10 times to do it, looked up a walkthrough video, and then it still took me another 5 attempts. And this is the essence of why Mirror's Edge is so frustrating - it wants to make you feel like a parkour superstar but it also punishes you if you don't manage to execute it within a very precise range of space and time.

This is one of the more egregious instances of this kind of thing, but the whole game is littered with them. And it really is heartbreaking because there is about 10-20% of the game where you are able to get a good flow going and running through the city feels great, so you can feel that a great game is lurking somewhere beneath a huge stack of really bad design decisions. Off the top of my head, some of those bad decisions include:

- no minimap or overhead map which would have been so helpful in figuring out your routes & ultimate objectives
- a "focus" system that rotates you in the direction of your next objective, but depending on the actual route you need to take, this will likely point you in the wrong direction.
- you can do insane flying jump kicks that shatter gigantic plate glass windows, but you can't kick out flimsy grates in vents
- there's a few in game cinematic bits which are pretty cool and well implemented, but the majority of the story is told through really, really bad 2d animated flat shaded movies which feel really amateurish and poorly done. I don't know why they didn't just do it all in-engine
- even when you do pull off a bunch of miraculous parkour moves and make great time running through a section of the level, you're never actually rewarded for it because the AI is always gating you
-...and many more I'm probably forgetting

If this game had 6-12 months more dev time and modern usability testing, it could have been an all time great. The art is great, the world is unique, but as it stands as a $20 purchase right now in Steam, I can't recommend it. It's just too frustrating to actually play.

The Good:
- great acting
- good story with a few good twists
- easy main game mechanic (there's only 1)

The Bad:

The bad parts of the game mostly revolve around presentation & polish:

- menu/UI/frontend feel too barebones & basic, like a student project. no "quit" button, no frills, no "juice"
- terrible onboarding - no explanation of the game world, who you are, why you're there. you'll spend a few minutes not really understanding what you're doing or why you're doing it. some of this is down to one of the main story twists, but it just feels like the introduction to the game is missing.
- you'll probably figure out most of the story after watching about 40-50% of the clips. you'll have a chance to be "done" with the game at this point, but again, the way it's presented to you is very confusing and feels unpolished which ultimately makes it feel a bit unsatisfying and anti-climactic. There's also a lot of content that adds absolutely nothing to the game once you do get to about 50-75% of the clips, so trying to 100% the game is extremely tedious.

Overall:
Recommended for good writing & acting, but very poor presentation especially for the start and end of the game.

terrible. I got a network error message and sent back to the main menu when trying to load the single player tutorial. that pretty much says it all.

once I actually got in the game?

- gigantic, sprawling levels where you wander around doing nothing for minutes at a time. it's almost like they forgot they were making a 4v4 game.
- art direction that'll make your eyes bleed -- clashing neon colors, no coherency amongst the characters, no sense of scale
- bizarre game mechanic where you have to switch weapons in order to reload the one you were just firing

I guess the only plus is that it was free? but I wish I had the half hour of my life back.

To Amazon & Relentless: please don't bring this back out of closed beta, let it die the death it deserves.

Antichamber is a best-of-class first person puzzle game and easily worth its price at $20. If you liked Portal 2 you'll like this. It's a little buggier and maybe just a *tiny bit* less polished than the Portal games, but, 1) that's to be expected considering the respective size of the dev teams, and 2) the rough edges are the product of an extremely ambitious design.

Pros:

- Tons and tons of truly great puzzles. You will get your money's worth if you're after a deep, long puzzle game.

- Good soundtrack and sound design. There are certain sounds you hear in this game that will stay with you even when you're not playing.

- Performance was great / not an issue even on my 10 year old PC

- Immersive. No menus and no deaths. I wish more games would do this.

- Open ended, hub-like design. Unlike other linear puzzle games where you'll be unable to progress if you can't solve the puzzle at hand, the world of Antichamber opens up and lets you hop around to different puzzles. On more than one occasion, I came up with the solution to one puzzle I'd been stuck on while travelling to or working on another one. This type of design is really appreciated.

- Did I mention how I appreciate the design? Not only is this game filled to the brim with probably 100 excellent puzzles, but they also loop back on each other, get re-used, have different purposes depending on where you are in the game, and still manage to have a genuine sense of place. Thinking about the construction and design of this game is probably even more impressive than the finished product. You know that a special mind built this.

- Mostly fun platforming. Since the days of Xen in Half-Life, platforming in first person games has been discussed in hushed tones and generally avoided. So I'm happy to report most of the platforming you do in this game is pretty easy and not frustrating. There are a couple of cases of needing to time jumps in a certain way, but it's more about solving the timing of the puzzle than it is about hitting some precise point or holding 3 buttons while you jump.

- It's exceptionally weird. It has this kind of sinister new age cult aesthetic that becomes more and more unsettling the more time you spend with it. There are a few interviews with the developer where he talks about being depressed and "driven by spite" while making the game -- that makes sense to me after playing it. Even though the hint screens / save points have generally positive, encouraging philosophical messages, it's hard not to feel something much darker lurking underneath the core of this game. That all might sound like a "con" but honestly a game this weird and dark would never come to market through traditional publishing channels so it should be celebrated for taking risks that had the chance to turn away a lot of people.

Cons:

- A bit unstable. Crashed maybe 10-15 times during my playthrough. But honestly every Unreal engine game from around this time had the same issues for me (Mass Effect, Mirror's Edge, and a few more) Definitely forgivable considering some of the cool things it's doing from a technical standpoint.

- Inconsistent design language / messaging. I know that part of the gimmick of the game is that things change and have different uses over time, but there were a few instances where things that were introduced as impassable barriers become passable later in the game without explanation. Or the exact same symbol will sometimes have a different meaning. In a game without tutorials or narrative exposition, you're sort of relying on the established visual language to give you a sense of the game's logic. Every single time I got stuck in the game was a case of inconsistent messaging.

90% of the puzzles are elegant, well crafted, and make you feel good about solving them. The other 10% are "you saw this exact setup before but it's been tweaked in the tiniest way that you won't notice until you get frustrated and start shooting your cubes all over the place and frantically ramming yourself into the level geometry" and then you solve them.

A .900 batting average is still incredible, but some of the symbols and mechanics got stretched a bit too thin and too overloaded with different meanings.

- Some visual bugs. The design of the game is such that a lot of the level geometry appears and disappears, and you also have the ability to add or subtract geometry to the levels. This can result in a lot of overlapping geometry with visual flicker (or z-fighting for you technical folk). It's minor, but it kind of hurts immersion. Some areas also pop in and out of existence depending on your distance from them. This kind of thing is also part of the "ambition for polish" tradeoff I mention at the beginning of the review.

In summary:

Antichamber is an achievement. It's a maximal game both in ambition and in the way it uses the medium's strengths. It's deeply weird and thoroughly beautiful and it makes you use your brain in a way that an obfuscated book, a hard math problem, or a mutually agreeable compromise with a volatile lover might.

It has a contemporary in Portal 2, so I wouldn't say it's groundbreaking, but it attempts and succeeds at things that Portal 2 never would have dared to try.

A useful analogy might be to compare them to sculptures. Portal 2 is a burnished, marble, mass market masterpiece that someone could bring their kids and their parents to see together at the Louvre to say they've seen it -- like Michelangelo's David. You know it's great, and you know it's polished, but so does everyone else and you probably won't think about it ever again after a day or two.

Antichamber is a gigantic, evolving mass of disparate materials that takes up an entire unmarked warehouse in Detroit and the exhibit is invitation only. There's a guy at the door handing out drugs and there's no instructions for how to view it, no hint for where to start, and no precedent for what you're supposed to think of it. But after you've taken it all in, you're stunned and you stagger out of the warehouse into the street completely changed. And you know you'll remember what you've just seen forever.

cool game but has more crashes than a driving school for the blind

fun puzzle / casual game with a good difficulty curve. a total steal as part of the humble indie bundle

the crack cocaine of casual games