Any other First Person Puzzler's that can compete with Portal?

FuturDreamz · 16 Apr 2013

I'm not an extreme gamer by any standards. I do have games like half life, Mass Effect, and Killing room that I got 75% off, but I never got far in them.

It took a fair amount of time for me to figure out why I love portal so much and never got into an other pc games as much (and why i like Nintendo games so much), it's more of a relaxed game where I can take all the time I want to figure out how to deal with puzzles and enemies, as opposed to game like Half-Life where every step you take could trigger some strange creature to suddenly appear out of nowhere and hunt you down, leaving me with no time to plan and just end up flailing around with a crowbar. In those games I find the apprehension just sucks out all of the fun (such as in Mass Effect where signing an autograph immediately starts a mission - which turned out to be nothing serious, but the mission name sounded like Verner tricked me into giving my signature so he can forge it onto documents or something)

I did play Q.U.B.E. which was fun (except for the goddamn magnetism puzzles), but kinda repetitive.
I'm trying the Ball, seems to be a little bit different than I was expecting (but I haven't gotten far as it's barely playable on my old computer and I haven't gotten around to installing it on my laptop.)

Spectraball is good though

OldMX · 16 Apr 2013

Did you try Portal Prelude? Its a fee expansion to Portal with awesome maps.

Contrabardus · 16 Apr 2013

Check out Antichamber. It's available on Steam, and it's even more sadistic and mind bending than Portal. It takes great glee in screwing with your mind.

It's like being lost in a maze designed by M.C. Escher on a neon acid trip. Great stuff.

Check out TAG the Power of Paint as well. It's got mechanics similar to how the paint in Portal 2 worked. Each color has a specific effect on the environment, and you can paint anything. For example, green makes you bounce like the blue paint, and red makes you run faster like the orange goop in Portal 2, blue lets you stick to walls Spiderman style. It's very short, maybe an hour or two worth of gameplay but clever. I also get the impression this is a work in progress as well, so we'll likely see more added to it later.

And get this, it's effing free. Sweet.

[C-net direct DL] Link:

http://dw.com.com/redir?edId=3&siteId=4&oId=3000-7433_4-10907637&ontId=7433_4&spi=476c9b9fc8ab8987c880a3c711a5915f&lop=link&tag=tdw_dltext

Plus, if you can run The Ball, you should be able to run this no problem. Both this and Antichamber are both light on graphics cards with minimalist stylized graphics. So go give yourself a headache trying to figure out the action/puzzles in these two games. Should be exactly what you're looking for.

There's also Quantum Conundrum, which is merely okay. It's made by some of the people involved with portal and screws around with gravity and time. This is the one you should leave as a last resort. The other two games are both much better despite Conundrum being developed by some of the people from the Portal team. It's a bit easy, pretty short, and easily the weakest of the three I mentioned here.

The first two should give you the puzzle fix you need. Especially Antichamber, seriously it's sadistic and takes great glee in making you feel stupid. QC isn't horrible, but don't expect to get much play out of it, a day or two of gaming at best and you probably won't play it again. Wait for a Steam sale to pick it up super cheap. It's not horrible, but not worth full price either.