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I've shown the video game Antichamber to about a half dozen people and watched them bounce right off it.
You know how sometimes snobs of any particular thing tend to start liking things a general audience hates? Like, I've seen movie buffs express a love of stuff like Street Trash, or whiskey snobs really like whiskey that tastes like smoke, leather and iodine. I think you've got to be like that with video games to like Antichamber.
Antichamber is a non-euclidean 3D first person puzzle platformer. It's set in an abstract series of stark black and white corridors that in many cases don't make sense. It's a strange place that doesn't behave like the real world, it is internally consistent, but you'll encounter all kinds of weird shit like falling a long distance only to wind up above where you started, multiple paths leading through the same doorway, things appearing and disappearing, mazes that aren't physically possible...and somehow it makes all the bizarre little puzzles you find yourself in parables for living a human life.
I can't fault anyone for not getting it. It's arthouse bullshit. I've shaken my head mouthing "what the fuck are you doing" to modern artists, I recognize this as arthouse bullshit, but it's arthouse bullshit that I at least partially understand.
The game reminded me so much of exploring museum in all the right ways where you weren't sure what was to come, but it was all loosely connected. The arty elements complemented this mystery and feeling like you were in some sort of other reality, which is honestly appreciated (not Backrooms vibes of unwelcoming). My only regret was having to use solutions a couple of times.
I'm glad you picked this niche game to talk about. I still think about it sometimes despite it being over a decade old. You've inspired me to pick it up again all these years later.
It's a solo project I think? So in some cases yeah it has the feeling of a children's science museum? What's over here? What does this do? OOOOOOH! In one case there's a room full of what I'm pretty sure was the test assets the developer used to learn how to create the shenanigans the game is made of.
For me, it's at it's best when it presents the player with something unfamiliar, like the layout that doesn't spatially make sense, it has strange abstract things in it, like the hallway full of balls you have to walk slowly through. You're unfamiliar with how this place works, you then learn, and it offers a checkpoint that relates that to some aspect of life. Then you get a cube gun and it's a video game again.
I watched a couple friends make their way through that one together. I'd never play it on my own, but I rarely play games anyway. I'm very much a voyeur with them and had a blast watching/listening. The friend helping was yelling things like "do the jiggle jump" and shit