It has to be, really–you need accuracy and multiple positions to solve puzzles–but a lot of the time, you’re just moving something back to the start. Similarly, the game’s rewind mechanic also feels rather slow. Sure, it keeps you engaged right until the end, but long sections of corridors often offer no exposition–something made a little more annoying with the lack of a sprint function. It’s reminiscent of Catch Me If You Can: a great, wistful story with unbelievable twists and turns, but one that could’ve been shorter. Still, The Entropy Centre is not without the odd grumble. The game gets darker as it goes on, and it's all the better for it. The voice acting and sound effects create incredible tension at the right moments, making you invest yourself in Aria’s seemingly impossible mission to save the world. The game’s mechanics, at their core, are simple and easy to understand. Despite a sub-10GB build, the graphics are simple but smooth. I solved at least five puzzles without a controller in my hand–real eureka moments that are testament to the game’s grip on your mind.Įverything just works. It lived in my head rent-free for even longer, taking over my thoughts while I was walking my dog or shopping for groceries. While The Entropy Centre took me around 15 hours to complete, it felt like half my playthrough was spent in the corner of a room, staring at the puzzle in front of me. Sometimes, you might find yourself putting the game down because you can’t figure it out. However, you also find yourself adding too many extra steps–something thankfully discouraged by Astra’s 38-second rewind limit, which encourages you to embrace Occam’s razor and think as simply as possible. Like Portal, there are often two or three ways to clear a puzzle, even if one or more “solutions” see you effectively cheating the system. Later, the transformer allows you to change cube abilities.ĭespite always upping its intricacy, The Entropy Centre regularly lulls you into a false sense of complexity. Rivers offer environmental assistance, as well as a hazard. Jump pad, bridge, laser, and collapsible cubes offer a variety of routes to success. Time gates dissolve cubes and wipe your rewind abilities. As the game progresses, new items, systems and complications are thrown into the mix. It starts simple, with blank boxes, switches, and rewinding. Sitting in a corner of a room, once again trying to figure out what the hell to do. Split across 15 acts, and offering up to six challenges punctuated by storytelling and set pieces, The Entropy Centre is a surprisingly long game, but one that’s nicely paced to help you learn to solve its increasingly complex tasks. As with the wider game, these unravel from joyous, silly exchanges (with a very British sense of humor) through to explorations of the laws of science, before ultimately coming to terms with the apocalyptic outcomes of their actions. Given you’ve got no memory, and Astra is also struggling to piece things together from her surroundings, the bulk of The Entropy Centre’s story is told through 76 intel computers, dotted around the offices and often hidden where you’d least expect. It’s on you to stop the latest extinction-level event, and you’re apparently the last person alive.

However, it’s no longer working as planned. Rewinding the Earth thousands of times led the lab to save bees, tigers, and billions of lives, harnessing the entropy energy generated by problem-solving tasks. The Entropy Centre itself has one mission: to stop Earth destroying itself through war, famine, ecological disasters, and general stupidity. The Entropy Centre sees you, junior puzzle solver Aria Adams (voiced to perfection by Chloe Taylor), using the ever-buoyant and friendly AI “weapon” Astra (the equally brilliant Kasey Miracle)–the lab’s prized possession, which can move objects to their previous locations–make a mockery of the concepts of time, physics and space on a space station orbiting Earth.

Entropy magazine