Antichamber

In Antichamber, the player controls the unnamed protagonist from a first-person perspective as they wander through levels. Regarding typical notions of Euclidean space, Bruce has stated that "breaking down all those expectations and then remaking them is essentially the core mechanic of the game".

The player starts in an antechamber that contains four walls. One is a diegetic menu to set the various game options as well as a countdown timer starting at ninety minutes. A second wall provides a map of the game's space that will fill in as the player visits specific rooms, highlighting passages the player has yet to explore, and allows the player, upon return to this room, to jump to any room they've visited before. A third wall shows a series of cartoonish iconographs and obfuscated hint text that are added as the player finds these on walls of the puzzle space. The fourth wall is a window, showing the ultimate goal, the exit from the space, which the player must figure out how to get to.

Antichamber started as early as 2006 as Bruce's idea for an arena combat game based on expanding the mechanics of the game Snake into a multiplayer experience. Full development of the game, initially called Hazard: The Journey of Life, did not start until 2009 and continued into 2010. Bruce developed the game using UnrealScript with the Unreal Engine 3. As Bruce iterated through its design, he dropped the combat portion and chose to focus more on a single-player puzzle game along with the psychology of the puzzles, eventually adding the subtitle "The Journey of Life" in 2009.

Part of this change came about how he was able to create Impossible Object spaces within the Unreal Engine, which came about as a result of a "rookie error" in coding. Bruce recognized that there was a single-player game behind creating spaces and puzzles where the player would have to work out how the rules work, and expanded the game in that direction. Bruce said in a 2011 interview with Kotaku that "the game started off as being all about geometry... I needed to find a way to represent that [non-physical geometry] to players...

The PC version was well received by critics prior to its commercial release. In 2009 the game was featured in the showcase at the Tokyo Game Show Sense of Wonder Night, and was a finalist in the Independent Games Festival China. In 2010, indiePub Games's third Independent Game Developers' Competition awarded the PC version the prize for Technical Excellence. In 2011 the game was a finalist in GameStop's Indie Game Challenge, and in the Make Something Unreal competition (run by Epic Games), the game won 1st for Best Level for a Mod in Phase 4, 3rd for Best non-FPS Mod in Phase 4, and 5th place overall in the grand finals.

During the 2011 Independent Games Festival, the game wound up as a finalist for the Nuovo Award, which recognises "abstract, short-form, and unconventional game development". Also in 2011, the game made it into the PAX 10 and finished as a finalist in the IndieCade festival. In 2012, Antichamber took home the Technical Excellence Award at the Independent Games Festival.