The Entropy Centre Review

The Entropy Centre Sci-fi Puzzle Adventure game and is the first game from the seemingly unbelievably talented developers at Stubby Games based out of the UK, I say that because this game is special through a mix of brilliant puzzles, gorgeous music and an incredible story, they have created an unmissable gaming experience.

Earth is suffering from catastrophe after catastrophe, and no one knows why but The Entropy Centre is there to help Earth survive. Your job as an employee at The Entropy Centre is to save mankind over and over again, you have to perform puzzles which fuels a massive engine in the space station that can then reverse time each time the Earth suffers from a catastrophe then they go and inform the governments about what happened so that everybody can prepare and stave off that catastrophe.

The puzzles themselves work in a multitude of ways with a surprisingly large number of acts each introducing new mechanics. Getting to each puzzle room can be a harrowing experience as you use your AI powered gun asteroid to rewind various objects through time, most objects are cubes much like in Portal that you’ll position in various ways to help you clear each puzzle room. There are regular cubes, cubes that make you jump far in the air, bridge cubes that let you walk across previously thin air and a lot more, there is very little combat in the game and when the more dangerous sections did crop up early on, I never found them difficult or in the way, they did their job of adding tension although later in the game I did feel a little overwhelmed with how often you were facing the game’s versions of enemies.

The Entropy Centre Hit me hard emotionally, this is due in large part to some solid writing, a great plot and an incredible soundtrack. The only voiced characters in the game are you, your AI gun and a system warning computer voice that lets you know what’s going on. There is a lot of dialogue and while it started out feeling rather cutesy and light, by the end I was astonished with how powerfully the game built to its conclusion, the game took my roughly 11 hours to complete and at the risk of sounding a little pompous, I was pretty damn good at figuring out solutions to the trickiest of puzzles though I felt like I had rushed parts of the game to get this review out but it’s not how I’d recommend playing, take your time if you can and let your brain recharge when possible because this game is devilishly hard at first glance then you come back later, realize you were overthinking things and get a tough puzzle in one try.

This game has a nice visual style that benefits from atmospheric lighting though you will encounter some clipping and mediocre particle effects throughout it’s also a shame that the game’s world is so environmentally one note outside of a refreshing beach sequence and some of the textures in the environment do look oddly pixelated in comparison to others, it runs at a solid frame rate throughout this is doubly impressive because of the destruction physics on display everything is breaking up seemingly in real time and you’re using your gun to reverse it again seemingly in real time I found myself playing around and breaking fixing and re-breaking the same areas over and over again while I noticed how it broke differently every time depending on when I stopped or started my rewind ability.

The best part of The Entropy Centre is the audio, the realistic sounds of the environment are matched with excellent effects with very accurate positional audio. The majority of the game’s dialogue is between your character and your AI gun but most of the writing is found in text logs on various computer terminals throughout your journey, these are key to understanding just what went wrong and why you’re seemingly alone at the start of the game, it felt like I was reading a slow burn mystery novel in corporate email form, and it worked really well.

Overall, if you like puzzle games with brilliant stories, deviously clever puzzles, an incredible atmosphere and an emotionally charged soundtrack then we highly recommend The Entropy Centre, we did not want to spoil the story for you so the less you know before you go in the better of an experience it will be.

Purchase The Entropy Centre on Steam!