The Entropy Centre Review: No Time Wasted Here

It’s often said that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. When I first saw advertisements for The Entropy Centre, while admittedly interested, I couldn’t escape one thought: “Man, this reminds me a lot of Portal 2″. It’s often a gamble sticking so true to a formula (albeit a damn good one), but I can safely say that while a good amount of The Entropy Centre does bear semblance to some of our biggest puzzling forefathers, it wastes no time carving a solid path of its own.

The Measurement of Chaos Over Time

Can we fix it? No we can’t!

You wake up as a girl named Aria, a puzzle tester for something called The Entropy Centre, whose primary purpose is to generate what’s called Entropy Energy for undisclosed reasons. You do this by solving puzzles and creating said Entropy Energy, not unlike a normal ol’ 8 to 5 job. Your primary method for solving these puzzles is something called an Entropy Tool, a device that can record an object’s movement and rewind it back. Oh, it also talks. Because we all love talking guns. The problem is though, this place doesn’t look like it’s seen human life in several hundred years. The adventure unfurls as you complete puzzles and try to figure out where all the people went and why the place looks post-apocalyptic. There are a lot of notes hiding around terminals that’ll give you a better insight into how this place was before whatever end happened here, and I can say that while the plot is rather drip-fed, it was still impactful, being often funny, interesting, and good for deepening the overall worldbuilding here. I’d say the length of the game here when I played it was no more than maybe 15 to 20 hours, but this can vary vastly because people solve puzzles at their own speed.

I’d say the weaker part of the adventure itself is the characters. It’s not that they’re badly written, in fact, I enjoyed the conversations between our two protagonists Aria and Astra. The problem here lies in that they’re way too nonchalant about the whole scenario. Aria wakes up in a strange facility that’s being overgrown, with no memory of where she is or how she got there, gets ushered into puzzle rooms with a talking gun that can manipulate time, and the two of them talk and act with the urgency of two friends that missed the bus at their bus stop and decided to check out a new mall near them while they wait for the next bus. Again, it’s not BAD writing, I just feel like at least the earlier parts should have Aria at least a little more panicked at her absolutely surreal situation. The two talk like they’ve been friends for a long time as well, but that at least is kinda visited in the worldbuilding. It’s complicated, as all things involving time travel often are. Speaking of writing, I’ll also add that the ending felt a bit hollow. I can’t divulge too much, but for such an interesting climax, the ending really wound up as a letdown.

Be Kind, Rewind

I’m pretty sure writing that header aged me by another five years.

But with all this talk of the deep lore and characters here, let’s take a look at the whole reason you’re here: Puzzles, and how you interact with them! So this game operates as a first-person puzzle-exploration game, wanting at most you to solve puzzles using your new time travel gun while exploring the occasional nook and cranny to find intel collectables. If you’ve played games like Portal or Quantum Conundrum, you’ve been here before, just with a couple of tweaks.

The key mechanic here is being able to rewind objects you’re working with in the puzzles. You move an object and the clock starts ticking on your gun, recording its movement over a span of time. You’ll need to pay attention to how much you do, as you can only record up to a specific amount of time. I’ll admit, this was one of the stranger mechanics in that I sometimes noticed the limit of how much time it can record seemed like it’d change from 28.2 seconds to 42.9 seconds. I still question if I missed a tooltip somewhere on this or if it’s a bug, but I’d still warrant bringing it up as a factor that I never got a full explanation for. Beyond that though, this mechanic is very well implemented, gradually showing you trickier and trickier ways of solving puzzles using the time travel mechanic.

Getting the hang of solving puzzles four-dimensionally takes a little while. You essentially have to solve the puzzles backwards so your time rewinding puts everything where it needs to go as it travels back in time. During the first half of the game and even into the later half, I kept accidentally solving puzzles the wrong way. Before I knew it though, that rewind mechanic really stuck out on how much impact it had on my ability to solve puzzles. I think this is what I’d commend The Entropy Centre the most for, and that’s making a meaningful, impactful puzzle-solving mechanic that makes you mentally rewire how you solve puzzles. Establishing a meaningful relationship between the player and the core mechanics is crucial to a puzzle game, so an absolute A+ effort in encouraging the player to learn and adapt.

Along the way, you’ll come across things like bounce pads, cubes that emit lasers, cubes that make bridges, and even devices that will change the cubes into other types when pushed through them. If this sounds familiar, again, it’s similar to stuff like the Hardlight Bridges or the jump pads from Portal 2. The addition of time travel mechanics changes how you see some of these objects. An object may have to transition from being a bounce pad for an earlier part of the puzzle to being a bridge placed to go through a grate so you can get to a later part of the puzzle. Sometimes you might have to rewind a conveyor belt so a cube can get through a transformer and become a laser cube you’ll need later. The temporal manipulation power makes everything fresh and unique.

I do feel obliged to mention, however, that there were a few sections that were hit-or-miss. Occasionally, the little helper bots around the station will decide to try revoking your living privileges. They do this via an electric ball that explodes on whatever it touches, though you can rewind their projectiles to blow them up instead. The execution and placement of some of these enemies were mixed, to say the least. There was, for example, one chase scene where a taser variant of these little guys starts chasing you while the catwalks you’re on are crumbling constantly. That whole section felt great, emphasizing fast reflexes to repair your crumbling path while using rewinding and puzzle elements to dodge them when they’re in your way.

Then you get to another part that’s an open area with multiple switches to hit. What makes these parts ultimately more difficult is that you can quickly get ganged up on while you’re doing the puzzle-ish parts. That linear catwalk I mentioned earlier worked fine because it only had so much it could reasonably throw at me at once. With the more open area, there’s a constant potential that upwards of three or more of these little menaces spotting you and throwing electrified death at you. For the open areas, I would’ve enjoyed them more as the chase scenes, using the environment to quickly navigate away from the enemies, instead of feeling like you’re in the middle of a shooting gallery. It wasn’t a super detrimental thing for me as I did find ways to work with the open area onslaughts, but they definitely detracted from more fun forms of action puzzle platforming.

Theory of Portal Relativity

You know the bloom lighting’s good when actual plants start to grow.

So while the gameplay’s perfectly solved, how’s it look in terms of its shiny set pieces? I’ll admit, it’s the lighting that really helps The Entropy Centre pop. Very warm lighting, scattered well where it needs to be, helps accentuate the flourishing greenery taking over the facility. It took a bit for me to really soak in the industrial-ness of The Entropy Centre. There’s a lot of normal black catwalks and dirty grey concrete for the most part, and it can come across as samey for some stretches, but the accentuation of little desk areas, piles of dirt and vegetation, and occasional broken up parts helped me feel like I was in a unique environment that was still somewhat grounded in reality. There were even some outdoor areas that are made to look like artificial beaches that helped breathe some fresh air into my travels. None of it’s bordering on scenery porn, but it’s left enough room to grow and be memorable for its own chunky, concrete style.

Past that, there’s a little bit of audio to go over. First and foremost, I’m really happy to say that the FX done for this game sounds very pleasing. When you only have limited mechanics, you have to be a bit judicial with how you make the sound effects that go with it. Going back to Portal, the sounds from the Portal Gun were clean, easy on the ears, memorable, and didn’t get annoying. If you’re going to be hearing those sounds through literally the whole game, you want sounds that will be exactly as I listed above; Clean, easy on the ears, memorable, and not annoying. Thankfully, The Entropy Centre performed exactly as intended. As for music, it tends not to pop up often, but it’s really good at sneaking its way into a scene, often with me not even noticing unless it’s a real eye-opening scene (there’s a few that earn some very dramatic swells). As always, less is more is absolutely still viable, and am glad to say all is going according to plan here.

A New Era

While The Entropy Centre sticks very close to its Portal-esque roots, the well-crafted puzzles work perfectly with its simple but effective time travel mechanic. There are some sections where too many enemies can be an annoying distraction from the puzzling, but these are forgivable because the temporal manipulation powers provide such unique challenges. Time is our most precious resource, but it’s well worth spending it here.

Final Verdict: 4/5

Available on: PC (Reviewed), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X; Publisher: Playstack; Developer: Stubby Games; Number of players: 1; Released: October 19th, 2022; MSRP: $24.99

Full Disclosure: A copy of The Entropy Centre was provided to Hey Poor Player by the Publisher