When comparing Antichamber vs Gateways, the Slant community recommends Antichamber for most people. In the question“What are the best Puzzle games on Steam?” Antichamber is ranked 5th while Gateways is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose Antichamber is:
The primary theme to puzzles in Antichamber is that things aren't how they appear. If you walk down a hallway and turn around, you might be in a totally different area. This leads to some incredibly interesting and difficult puzzles, forcing you to think about the world around you in a totally new way.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Brilliant Puzzles
The primary theme to puzzles in Antichamber is that things aren't how they appear. If you walk down a hallway and turn around, you might be in a totally different area. This leads to some incredibly interesting and difficult puzzles, forcing you to think about the world around you in a totally new way.
Pro Unique minimalist visuals
Using stark white halls with glowing colors there is a minimal beauty to Antichamber. One room houses great abstract art which changes depending on which way you are looking at it.
Pro Wise quotes
Pro Lateral thinking
Pro Good for speed running
A great game to put your speed skills to the test! Great for those who love any percent speedruns!
Pro Just the right amount of content
The game is long enough that the player gets to master each of the unique mechanics, but not so long that you get bored of any of them.
Pro Portal x 4
Gateways has the same formula as the great Portal, except that it's in 2D, BUT, they introduce 3 new types of portal guns, a gun that makes you smaller/bigger, a gun that shifts gravity 90 or 180 degrees, and the best one, a time travelling gun. The last part of the game lets you used all the 4 guns together for mind bending puzzles.
Cons
Con Lack of story leaves the player wanting
There is not much of a story to be found in the game and what there is is pretty convoluted and has the player asking what even happened by the end of the game.
Con Short for its price
The time to beat the game is well around 7 hours for an average player, and there's not much extra content left after that. In that time the game doesn't exactly go deep in its innovations on the "mind-bending" idea (no gravity flips, just teleportations).
Con Focuses less on its main selling point near middlegame
Near the middle of the game, you get a thing that a lot of the puzzles start to focus on, and the mind-bending puzzles and tricks to the player take more of a backseat as this mechanic changes the game to more of a traditional style of puzzle game. There are still elements of it, but much less of it.
Con Playing it literally hurts my eyes
Good lord the art director ought to have done a better job.
Con Lacks clean or clever puzzles
Unlike Portal, a game with high polish that shows in its puzzle designs Gateways has a clear lack of polish to its puzzles which makes for a subpar experience as it the games design can lead to problems interpreting the puzzles appropriately.