When comparing Antichamber vs Grim Dawn, the Slant community recommends Antichamber for most people. In the question“What are the best indie games on Steam?” Antichamber is ranked 27th while Grim Dawn is ranked 37th. 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 Complex leveling system with thousands of possible builds
Basically you choose 1 class and select skills as you level up. At level 10 you can select a second class, which already gives you 5x5=25 character type possibilities.
Each character has dozens of skills, plus you have this additional passive skill tree that you unlock through cleansing shrines. Then there is item customization with crafted "modifiers", adding additional unique stats and skills that you can use, all this adds literally to thousands / millions of character possibilities.
Do you want to use a double weapon shooting lightning bolts? You can do that. Do you want to summon your creatures and support them with fireballs? You can do that as well, you can push it wherever you want.
Pro Great homage to old school ARPGs
This game is very dark, and grim. It harkens back to games like Diablo 2 or Titans Quest. While other ARPGs have come out since then, none have hit all the marks of what fans of the genre have been asking for. For those that wish for an updated version of Diablo 2, Grim Dawn is the game for them.
Pro Exploration
Pro Highly modifiable
Relevant in modern gaming because the community can keep products like this fresh and varied, even if the developers eventually decide to slow down their updates (which they have not!). The possibilities are great with modding, while the experiences in Diablo 3 and Path of exile are a lot more static.
Pro Drop-in co-op (online and local)
Co-op is pretty convenient as players can drop in and out of your gaming session at any time. This way there is no wasted time jumping out of ones game in order to find players to play with.
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 Only some builds are fun
There is a definite meta, with superefficient vs non-viable builds.
It's easy to mess up a build, and attribute and spec-bar points are non-respeccable (you can use a cheat editor, but devs want you to reroll a new char).
Con Difficult to move when fighting, especially when you are ranged
Con Static pre-rendered levels
This may cut down on replayability a bit as all the levels in the game are pre-rendered, meaning that each playthrough will have the exact same layout, making for something that can get tiring and too familiar. Similar games have gone with randomized levels, which can keep the game fresh. While Grim Dawn is meant to be a throwback to earlier games in the genre, some newer features found in more recent released would have been welcome.
Con Lots of trips to town
The majority of loot in the game can be useless, with odd stat restrictions or repeats of vendor items. This means the user will need to make many trips into town to sell it all off in order to have room for even more loot they will not necessarily need.