The Entropy Centre PC Review

Puzzle games are always fun and the best ones gives you puzzles that are tricky but the solution is simple when you find it. For those that was gaming back in the noughties will remember the great puzzle game from valve called Portal, that you needed to manipulate the environment to move around the game world. Now we have a game from Indie team Stubby Games, who has developed The Entropy Centre for gamers who like puzzles and solve them in fun ways.

If I Could Turn Back Time

When The Entropy Centre was announced back earlier in the year, I was curious as its inspiration came from Valve’s Portal. When you begin the game, you awake as Aria who is trying to figure out what has happened as the facility, she lives at have been abandoned and there is an eerie feel to the place. As you explore the world you find yourself a A.I weapon called Astra which can control small objects and will become your best friend as the game unfolds over the 14+ hours of gameplay.

You and your A.I buddy must prevent the apocalyptic destruction of Earth. And as you explore more you read emails on other terminals and you soon realise that the Entropy Centre has prevented many disasters and they provide a great backstory to the game, which drew me in immediately. The pace that the game plays out is perfect and you never feel overwhelmed or rushed to complete and can enjoy the story and the puzzles.

The puzzles are fun to solve and they involve using Astra to move cubes and use them in creative ways. Some cubes are used to open doors by placing it on a pressure pad and sometimes you use them to build bridges or as a jump platform to get higher. The gun can also rewind time of an object by around 38 seconds and this allows you to reconstruct destroyed objects and then work the puzzle by working backwards after seeing the series of events that happened.

This might sound complicated at first but by the time you get halfway it becomes second nature working out the order of events to solve said puzzle. There were a few issues in the game, like you lose some progress as a cube would disappear into the wall as the game glitched and you must restart the puzzle again, but this is only minor and having to restart the puzzle is annoying, but the good fun outweighs this issue and I never found myself wanting to rage quite once.

The graphics are very nice and the inspiration from Portal is clear to see with the building layout. This is a good thing and was one of the things at immediately attracted me to the game from the trailers. The sound effects are great and match what is going on and adds the atmosphere. Astra is also a great companion and has a sense of humour and personality that the pairing just feels so natural.

Final Thoughts

The Entropy Centre is a great game and considering this is Stubby Games debut title they did a really great job. Hopefully they have plans to do some spin-off games or a sequel as they could make this in a franchise that could be as successful as the Half-Life series was for Valve. This is a title that is worthy of checking out as it is fun and offers something different.