Can this first-person puzzler compete with Portal?
An extinction level event has set the world ablaze. You appear to be the last remaining person alive. Mankind’s only hope lies at the core of the Entropy Centre. The Entropy Centre is a mind-bending puzzle adventure where you reverse objects through time to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles and conundrums. Manipulate time to your will and solve ingeniously challenging puzzle rooms, each one taking you closer to the heart of a colossal space station in orbit of Earth. Deviously challenging with razor-sharp witty writing and outstanding voice acting performances, The Entropy Centre merges a brilliant puzzle game with an epic adventure.
Upon starting up the game and playing for a few minutes, you’ll see a lot of similarities between the game and Valve’s Portal series. The test chambers, the AI “companion” and a gun that has manipulative properties. It doesn’t create portals, but it messes with time with objects so you can manipulate them to be where you need them to be in order to push through to the next room. The game’s gun actually has the AI companion installed into it so will be giving you advice and insights throughout, plus a whole bunch of hilarious dialogue between both your character and the AI.
It will take a while to get used to how to use the gun and how you use objects before using the gun on it. You can also use the gun to “rewind” destroyed areas to their former glory in order to progress or in some cases to stop rubble from falling on your head. The puzzles never get stale either because once you’ve got the hang of one aspect, then they’ll introduce another element that will throw you and then you’ll need to learn how to incorporate that into what you’ve already learned.
It’s a really clever game and while it will naturally live in Portal’s shadow, it does feel a bit unfair that it probably will. The puzzles are really well designed, and the script has some great moments both moving and hilarious. The visuals are quite nice too, even if they aren’t a high-budget game. The framerate is solid, and the load times are minimal, while voice-acting is brilliant and the soundtrack has some good moments to boot.
The Verdict
The Entropy Centre is a great first person puzzle game that fans of Portal really need to give a chance. It has smart puzzles; clever writing and the gameplay feels great. A must for any puzzle enthusiast.