Developed by Stubby Games and published by Playstack, The Entropy Centre is a new first-person puzzle game where you are adrift in a long-forgotten space station in planet earth’s orbit. On paper, The Entropy Centre might sound too good to be true because it is a puzzle game played in a first-person mode where you have a gun that has the ability to rewind time and it features an atmospheric space station and has a narrative that is addictive as well but actually, this game delivers on every front that it tackles which makes it a perfect game to end your year with. This is our review of The Entropy Centre in which we solve some puzzle rooms and charge a cannon to rewind a dying planet out of its extinction.
The Entropy Centre is set in an abandoned space station which is orbiting the earth and for some reason, it has a huge entropy cannon onboard which is able to rewind back the whole planet in case there is any sort of cataclysmic event. After waking up on this space station, you figure out that the station has been abandoned and you are the only human left on it along with a talking AI called Astra that tries its best to guide you through the space station. As you begin getting comfortable, you find out that a cataclysmic event is taking place on the earth and it is about to be blown into a million pieces if you do not rewind it back with the huge entropy cannon present on the station. As you get there, there is not enough charge and you must now solve puzzles in order to fully charge the generators and save the planet from absolute annihilation while trying to find out what happened to the space station and why you were left there all alone in the first place.
The Entropy Centre allows you to solve puzzles by manipulating time and objects. There is no fast-forward and your entropy gun only allows you to rewind back the state of various objects by thirty seconds only. You have to work around this mechanic in order to solve a variety of progressively harder puzzles. You get the entropy gun right at the start of the game because, without this gun, you cannot solve any of the puzzles in the game. The entropy gun allows you to rewind certain objects back in time in order to move them around to bring them back to a location where they were located before. Using this mechanic, you have to solve tons of puzzles in the game and progress in the main story in order to save the planet earth from destruction.
Playing as Aria Adams, you will explore the decapitating space station and try to fix as many things as you explore it. The entropy gun allows you to rewind thirty seconds of the items that can be moved around. The puzzles mostly require you to move around certain objects in order to activate switches and limited resources and then you have to use your gun to rewind them in a pattern so that they are in the right place at the right time and you can progress to the next part of the space station. Apart from Astra, the space station itself has a built-in AI as well that keeps you informed about all major events happening around the space station as well as the planet Earth. The puzzles start off pretty easy where you just have to move around some cubes and place them down on switches in order to activate some doors.
As you move forward and progress in the main story, eventually you are introduced to more complex elements of puzzle solving where you have to incorporate everything that you have learned before along with new elements in order to solve the puzzles. These elements range from jumpers, switches, cubes, springs, and more. As more and more elements are thrown into the mix, the puzzles start becoming more and more challenging as well with some really good brain twisters thrown in the mix. One thing however remains the same is that you will use your entropy gun to move around cubes and items and then rewind them in particular ways in order to solve the puzzle. Since each object can only have 30 reversible seconds, you can reset it at any time by pressing R1 which clears any reversible loop it might have saved and gives you fresh 30 seconds to make a new loop which you can rewind later.
In certain scenarios, you use your entropy gun for more than just rewinding boxes because since the space station is falling apart itself, sometimes you will need to create a path ahead by rewinding broken bridges, fallen pillars, and more. Sometimes you will need quick reflexes to deflect incoming debris on the top of your head in order to survive the fall and move ahead. There are some really cool matrix-type scenarios as well where while solving puzzles, you jump off a spring, land on a jumping board, and then repair a bridge while falling on it in order to reach a platform. Such moments are pretty often and will make you feel like an invincible Superman flying around moving boxes and repairing bridges in the air. The Entropy Centre has its moments and you will thoroughly enjoy them.
The Entropy Centre does not disappoint when it comes to visual and sound design as well. The space center is beautifully designed and some locations are really cool to look at. Most of the time, you will be exploring inside rooms and working quarters but you will find yourself checking out pools and cool beach-type locations in the game as well which shows that the developers had thought about the design in a variety of ways. The special effects are really good as well and all of this is made even better with a stellar sound design that really puts you in the mood for some puzzle-solving. What is even better is that the music kicks it up a notch when it wants to deliver some sort of urgency and then quiets down when things are about to settle down. This keeps you immersed in the game and is easily one of the prominent features of the game.
One of my favorite aspects of The Entropy Centre is that it creates a sense of urgency without giving any sort of strict timetables or schedules. You have plenty of things happening in the background and probably the biggest one is the planet earth exploding into a ball of fire but the game does not force any sort of timetables or limits on you by default. The overall atmosphere creates a sense of urgency that forces you to move around quickly and frantically as you try to solve puzzles and move to the next area as quickly as possible. The game is pretty linear so there is not much exploration overall however you can still find some random working PCs and get to know more about the space station and find the causes of what happened to it and all of the people working there and why the earth is exploding in a ball of fire right in front of your eyes. It is one of the best games to ever come out this year and it has to be on your playlist even if you normally ignore puzzle games.
Final Verdict:
The Entropy Centre is a beautiful and atmospheric puzzle game that tickles both your puzzle-solving and adventure-seeking nerves at the same time. Very few developers are actually going the lines of making purely puzzle-solving games with narrative bits thrown into them and I was really happy to see that Stubby Games was willing to take this challenge and ended up delivering a beautiful brain-teaser. The story keeps you glued to the game and solving every puzzle in the game is really satisfying however if you are a puzzle nerd and love playing puzzle games, you might not find the puzzles too hard for you to solve. The puzzles are fairly straightforward and most of the time; you will not take too much time to solve them. Still, the puzzles present enough of a mind-bender to keep things interesting in a beautiful and atmospheric package. If you are looking for a beautiful puzzle game, The Entropy Centre should be at the top of your list. Highly recommended for players who want a good narrative, an atmospheric space station, and solid puzzle-solving mechanics.
Final Score: 9.5/10
