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43 reviews · 3 essays
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Counterpoint on Antichamber — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Antichamber 8.5/10. I read through the negative reviews and examined five claims: withheld information, trial and error, a reversed difficulty curve, a weaker back half, and the physical toll of all that white. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on Superliminal — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Against Komugi's 7.5/10 for Superliminal, I examine five claims drawn from the negative Steam reviews — length versus price, shallow puzzles, a second half that turns into a walking simulator, motion sickness, and an unearned ending speech. I agree with the sag in the back half and the sermonizing finale, and push back on the verdict that short automatically means bad value.
Inside Alexander Bruce's Philosophy — Doubt conventions down to their reasons
A study of Alexander Bruce, author of Antichamber, based only on his interviews and GDC talks: a philosophy of doubting conventions down to their reasons, an obsession with removing death and menus, candid failures and pivots, the dilemma of when to stop iterating, and his acknowledged influences.
Related reviews
The Magic Circle
A first-person meta-puzzle set inside a fantasy game that has been in development for twenty years and is still unfinished. You steal behaviours from creatures and objects, paste them onto other things, and rewrite your way toward the exit. Puzzles have no single intended answer. Released in 2015 by Question, a studio whose members are credited with work on Thief and BioShock.
puzzlemeta-puzzlefirst-personEvent[0]
A first-person narrative exploration game aboard a retrofuturist spaceship, where you type your own sentences into the ship's terminals to talk with its AI, Kaizen-85, and look for a way back to Earth. Free text rather than dialogue options is the central mechanism, and how you speak changes the AI's attitude and your ending. A 2016 work by Ocelot Society.
narrative-puzzleadventurefirst-person4D Golf
A first-person mini-golf puzzle set in a space with a fourth spatial axis on top of the usual three. You turn through it, compare cross-sections, and read hidden routes and shifting gravity on the way to the cup. Over 120 holes and a 4D course editor, from CodeParade, who made Hyperbolica.
puzzlephysicsfirst-personSUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE
The sequel to SUPERHOT, the first-person action puzzle where time only moves when you move. It drops the hand-built one-screen levels for randomly dealt rooms fought in runs, and adds abilities you pick up along the way. The third game from SUPERHOT Team.
puzzlefirst-persontime-manipulationMachinika: Museum
A first-person puzzle box in which you scan alien devices of unknown origin delivered to a museum, peer inside them and reprint their missing parts until they run again. A short piece from Littlefield Studio that opens seven machines one at a time, with the touch of science-fiction archaeology.
puzzleescape-roomobservationSUPERHOT
A first-person shooter built from white rooms and red figures, where the world's time advances only as far as you move. You take your weapons from the enemies who drop them, and a single hit ends the level. Grown by SUPERHOT Team out of a game-jam prototype.
puzzlefirst-persontime-manipulationThe Talos Principle: Reawakened
A first-person puzzle game through ruined gardens, where a jammer that shuts devices off, a connector that carries a beam and a recorder that replays your own movement combine to open doors. Croteam rebuilt their 2014 game in Unreal Engine 5 and packed the Road to Gehenna expansion, an eighteen-room new chapter and a level editor into one release.
puzzlefirst-personlogic-gridPortal Reloaded
A free community mod built on Portal 2: alongside the familiar blue and orange spatial portals you fire a third, green time portal linking the present to the same facility twenty years on, and solve twenty-five test chambers by moving between them. Released in 2021 by the solo developer PORTANIS, with twenty cooperative puzzles added in 2023.
puzzlefirst-personphysicsTacoma
A first-person exploration adventure set aboard an emptied space station in 2088, where you replay, rewind and walk around volumetric recordings of its six-person crew to reconstruct the days before they left. From Fullbright, the studio behind Gone Home.
observationnarrativeadventureHyperbolica
A first-person non-Euclidean adventure set in towns built from hyperbolic space, where parallel lines refuse to stay parallel, and spherical space, where distant objects look larger; you talk to residents and play races, skiing and snowball fights to build an intuition for the place. Made by CodeParade, who wrote the rendering pipeline from scratch.
puzzleexplorationfirst-personSupraland
A first-person exploration puzzler set in a literal sandbox, where each ability you find reopens paths that were closed before. There is no map and no objective marker — hidden chests and handmade contraptions are the only signposts. Made by David Münnich's Supra Games.
puzzlefirst-personmetroidvaniaEscape Simulator
A first-person escape-room puzzler where you move the furniture, smash the pots and pick up nearly everything you see. Solve 28 rooms designed with real-life escape room operators, alone or in online co-op, then keep going into thousands of community rooms built with the bundled editor. From Pine Studio.
puzzleescape-roomfirst-personGone Home
A first-person exploration game: home on a rainy night in June 1995 after a year abroad, you open every door and drawer of an empty house and reconstruct a year of family history from the letters, cassettes and magazines left behind. No combat, no puzzles, no fail state — the verbs are open, pick up, read. The first game from Fullbright, founded by veterans of BioShock.
explorationobservationmysteryThe Vanishing of Ethan Carter
A first-person mystery in which you play an occult detective, walking a deserted valley to examine bodies and belongings and reassemble each death by putting the scattered fragments back in order — a photogrammetry-built forest explored with no map and no HUD, from The Astronauts.
investigationobservationnarrative-puzzleCryptmaster
A word-driven dungeon crawl in first person: type the words you have recovered to fire skills and answer riddles. Built in monochrome pencil illustration with a fully voiced narrator, by Paul Hart and Lee Williams.
puzzleword-gamenarrative-puzzleMyst
A first-person puzzle adventure: you arrive on an unknown island and move between an abandoned library and four Ages, piecing together a story of family betrayal from machines and journals alone. Cyan Worlds' own Unreal Engine rebuild of their 1993 original, walkable flat or in VR, with optional puzzle randomization.
puzzleadventurefirst-personMagnetic: Cage Closed
A first-person puzzle game in which a death-row prisoner uses a magnet gun — attract on one pole, repel on the other — to move boxes and escape a trap-filled facility, with end-of-chapter choices branching toward nine endings. From Sweden's Guru Games.
puzzlefirst-personpuzzle-platformerFirmament
A first-person puzzle-adventure from Cyan Worlds, the studio behind Myst and Riven. You plug a wrist-mounted tool, the Adjunct, into sockets to work cranes and generators as you cross three abandoned steampunk realms — a meditative world with no ciphers and no notes to take.
puzzleadventureexplorationObservation
You are S.A.M., the AI of a damaged space station: switch between cameras, drift through the corridors as a spherical drone, and piece together what happened to the vanished crew — and to yourself. You aren't on the station; you are the station. From No Code, makers of Stories Untold.
puzzlenarrativefirst-personMagrunner: Dark Pulse
A first-person puzzler in which a Magtech glove charges cubes and platforms so that like colours attract and opposites repel, carrying you through 40-plus test rooms. Frogwares' 2013 game pours Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos into a Portal-shaped mould.
puzzlefirst-personEther One
A first-person adventure where, as a "Restorer," you dive into a dementia patient's memories, gathering letters and objects in the seaside town of Pinwheel and solving optional puzzles to rebuild the past — carrying just one item at a time. By the UK's White Paper Games.
puzzleadventurefirst-personFRACT OSC
A first-person musical-exploration puzzle set in a vast synthesizer-built ruin, where you actuate glowing nodes and sound rigs to wake dormant machinery and music back to life. There's almost no instruction; working out what is even interactive is itself the puzzle. Phosfiend Systems, 2014, winner of IndieCade's audio design award.
puzzleexplorationfirst-personThe Looker
A first-person puzzler where you wake on a strangely familiar island and clear line-drawing panels — built entirely to parody The Witness. A free, roughly two-hour piece by Subcreation Studio.
puzzleobservationfirst-personNaissanceE
A first-person exploration game about descending into the depths of a vast artificial structure drawn only in black and white. With a handful of actions — run, jump, and stir light and shadow — you travel an inhuman-scale world that recalls Piranesi's etchings and the manga BLAME!. Released in 2014 and now distributed free by Limasse Five.
explorationpuzzle-platformerfirst-personPneuma: Breath of Life
A first-person puzzler in a Greco-Roman temple where you solve by choosing what to look at — eyes on pillars, tiles that flip the moment you glance away. A 2015 game by Deco Digital / Bevel Studios built on observation as its verb, narrated throughout by the self-styled creator-god Pneuma.
puzzlefirst-personShadows of Doubt
A first-person detective sim set in a procedurally generated 1980s noir city. Gather fingerprints, CCTV, receipts and call logs, pin them to an evidence board, and name the killer out of a fully simulated crowd — every citizen with a name, a job and a life of their own. From ColePowered Games.
mysteryimmersive-simfirst-personRelicta
A first-person physics puzzler set on lunar Chandra Base: flip the magnetic polarity of cubes (attract or repel) and cancel gravity to float them onto the devices that open each door. Two verbs — magnetism and gravity — carry you into a sci-fi mystery, in this game by Mighty Polygon.
puzzlefirst-personphysicsLightmatter
A first-person puzzler where touching a shadow kills you instantly. Light your way out of a collapsed research facility using only portable lamps and light-relaying pylons, turning a floor of darkness into a safe path. Tunnel Vision Games' open love letter to Portal, built on the single paired verb of light and shadow.
puzzlefirst-personlogicCall of the Sea
A first-person adventure puzzler set in the 1930s South Pacific, where Norah lands on an unknown island chasing her husband's lost expedition, reading journals and inscriptions and turning devices to unlock its secrets — Out of the Blue's Lovecraftian entry in the Myst lineage.
puzzleadventurefirst-personThe Sojourn
A first-person puzzler where you toggle light and shadow, swap places with statues, and cross a colour-drenched world within a limited number of steps. A calm, small-verb entry in the Myst and Witness lineage from Shifting Tides.
puzzlefirst-personQ.U.B.E. 2
A first-person puzzler where manipulation gloves grow colored cubes on white walls — red steps, blue springs, green movable blocks — recombined to cross a sand-buried alien structure. The sequel to Q.U.B.E., made by Toxic Games.
puzzlefirst-personadventureBotany Manor
A first-person puzzle set in an 1890s English manor, where you play retired botanist Arabella Greene and deduce each forgotten plant's ideal growing conditions from letters, posters, and clippings to coax it into bloom. Reading clues and binding them to a herbarium page is the core verb.
puzzlefirst-personLingo
A first-person word-puzzle game where a single word on a wall is your clue: type an answer built from anagrams and wordplay to open the next door. Its non-Euclidean world — stitched together by warps and impossible staircases — is itself one enormous clue board for the rules you must deduce. A solo work by Brenton Wildes in the lineage of The Witness.
puzzlefirst-personrule-discoveryThe Entropy Centre
A first-person puzzler in which you rewind an object's last 38 seconds with ASTRA, an AI companion gun, carrying and placing cubes to clear test chambers in a ruined orbital station. Stubby Games' debut, built around one verb: define the end state, then reverse-engineer the cause.
first-personpuzzlephysicsObduction
Touch an artifact that falls from the night sky by a lake and you are flung to an alien landscape stitched from fragments of Earth across times and places. Walk, observe, and solve the machinery linking world to world to find your way home—a first-person adventure from Cyan, the studio behind Myst, that makes observation its only verb.
puzzleadventurefirst-personQuantum Conundrum
A first-person physics puzzler in which a boy searches a deranged mansion for his missing inventor uncle, armed with the Interdimensional Shift Device. Swap between four dimensions — Fluffy makes heavy things weightless, Reverse Gravity flips the pull, Slow slows time — and bend boxes and physics to clear each room. Built by Portal's lead designer Kim Swift (as reported) and published by Square Enix.
puzzlepuzzle-platformerfirst-personThe Spectrum Retreat
A first-person puzzler set in the art-deco Penrose Hotel: you pull a colour out of one wall, carry it, and hand it to a matching barrier to open the way. Steam sits at 'Mostly Positive,' 76% of 223 (snapshot 2026-06-16); opinion splits over its double structure of puzzle and story.
puzzlefirst-personnarrative-puzzleChromaGun
A first-person puzzle where you fire colored paint at walls and roving droids, mixing primary colors to lure each droid onto a matching panel — a Portal-style test-chamber game built on a single verb: painting.
puzzlefirst-personThe Turing Test
A first-person sci-fi puzzle on a moon of Jupiter: redirect energy orbs between sockets to open doors and cross a series of test chambers, wrapped in a story about machine and human judgment.
puzzlefirst-personnarrative-puzzleViewfinder
A first-person perspective puzzle where the photographs you place into the world become real 3D space, letting you reshape the environment to find a path through.
perspective-puzzlefirst-personphoto-puzzleSuperliminal
A first-person puzzle where perspective alone decides how big things are.
first-personexplorationAntichamber
A first-person puzzler in white walls and black lines that treats non-Euclidean space itself as a grammar.
observationmeta-puzzlefirst-personManifold Garden
A first-person puzzle about choosing your gravity inside an Escher-esque world of infinitely repeating architecture.
puzzlefirst-personexploration
