I have finally got my hands on Antichamber and I gotta say it is pretty amazing. In principle the game looks like your average first-person puzzle-platform game, maybe sort of like Portal, only with weird graphics. Once you start playing though you realize you are in for a crazy trip.
The game basically consists of a series of puzzles which you must solve to reach the exit. What makes the whole experience interesting is that it will often kick you into a state of surprise, most of the time because you (sensibly) expect the mechanics of the game to follow some real world logic and they usually don't.
If you have always wanted to know what it feels like to mess with psychedelic drugs but are too much of a wuss to actually do it, I'd wager Antichamber is about as close you can get to it.
Minecraft or Terraria? Quite often these two games get compared, it's not hard to understand why: both involve exploring worlds made up of blocks which you can destroy and pick up, and in both of them you use the blocks and items found to craft other items.
When I first tried out Terraria a few months back, having already known Minecraft for a lot longer, I was quickly convinced Terraria was a superior game. And how could I not be? In Terraria there are many many more items to be crafted and acquired by the player, it also has a large variety of enemies (tough ones too) and bosses even. Overall you can feel the RPG component of the game is just much stronger than in Minecraft, in which you can get the top tier equipment during your first session and count all the different monsters with your hands.
So why do I think Minecraft is the best game then? Because it's the magic lasts longer (for ever, arguably). It is a better sandbox. In Terraria progressing through the game and killing the big bad bosses is all amazingly good fun, but once you reach the end you find out there's not much else to do and interest vanishes. You can still build and explore, sure, but the worlds of Terraria are small and in 2D: there's nothing new to surprise you when exploring and building in 2 dimensions gets old very fast. In contrast, Minecraft's worlds are practically infinite (you won't reach the edges without cheating) and 3-dimensional too, this means there's a lot of more variety in the geographic formations you can find, and in the stuff you can build too. Not matter for how long I have known and played Minecraft, there is always fun and wonder to be had, even from just jumping into a newly generated world and wandering about.
So I say Minecraft wins. But then again some may argue I have no business comparing the two.
(Also creepers. Terraria has no creepers, and creepers are the bomb.)
The best indie game I've laid my hands on so far in 2013 has been undoubtedly Subset Games' Faster Than Light. FTL is a roguelike strategy game where you take on the task of managing a spaceship's systems as well as it's crew as it travels (and engages in glorious battle) across space.
The premise of the game is that your ship carries information that is vital to the space Federation and you must move across 8 sectors of space to deliver it, all the while trying to avoid the Rebel fleet that is hot on your tail. As you explore and gather supplies you can buy new equipment and make a variety of upgrades to your ship's systems.
Captain's log: We're all going to die.
The cool thing about this game is that if(when) the ship is destroyed, it's game over for you and that's that. This forces you to think carefully about everything you do, and ask God WHY when the tiniest mistake gets your loyal crew wiped out.
