The Entropy Centre (2022)

This game's pretty boring. Well, I guess I should've seen this coming after playing the demo which was like the same box and button puzzle repeated half a dozen times with slight variations. I held some hope that the full game would introduce more ingenious mechanics but now that I'm at about the halfway mark, I feel like Dante after going through hell's door.

Almost every puzzle is solved with the same kind of thinking. Look at your potential path and which buttons need to be pressed in which order, move a box in the inverse order and then reverse it's path with the entropy gun as you go along. There are some puzzles that subvert this formula a bit, but not a lot. And then you have the "action sequences" in which you have to quickly traverse the crumbling building in which gameplay can be summarised as go forward click when stuff is collapsing to fix.

And since you can only rewind the very specific world elements that are part of the puzzle, these are always really easy to figure out. And also less fun. It would've been fun being able to, for example, rewind all the overgrown vegetation or to re-order messy desks.

I was expecting more puzzles using the environment in its different states of decay. Like having to rewind something that blocks your path but then being force to unrewind it back for some other reason. Perhaps the developer wanted to do something like that but found that it didn't work, but still. The end result is same-y and repetitive.

Also the story is not very well told, as the various "environmental clues" (emails, power point presentations and videos) tend to repeat the same information over and over again.

The one thing that's keeping my attention is that the required quirky AI that talks between chambers can be fun.

First impressions are somewhat good. Heavily influenced by Portal and the devs seem proud to highlight that. It definitely works in its favour and any game that celebrates its inspiration / successors is a good thing in my book, especially a game like portal which hasn't really had a true spiritual successor.

The puzzles are focused around the manipulation of time (the reversal to be more specific). Cubes are used, just like portal, and once you get your head around the concept of having to repeat your steps so that they can be done in reverse, everything kind of falls into place. In some respects the puzzles are a little too easy although I have been caught out on some of the early puzzles. Excited to see how the puzzles develop later in the game and whether or not there will be steam workshop support for more puzzles, or dlc etc.

The visuals and atmosphere are incredible. Some areas do feel a bit like they've been dragged out just so you can walk through them and look at the environments... but honestly i'm not even mad because they're gorgeous. Topping this all off is the soundtrack which is synth heavy and very moody which i'm loving. Overall they've nailed the look here.

Puzzle chambers, check. Guiding sentient AI with a sense of humour, check. Weird gun, check. Boxes and platforms, check.

This is a portal-like in its purest form. I don't mind it, but the puzzles were, hoenstly, not very good. The shtick is that you have an Entropy gun which can reverse time. Potentially cool mechanic perhaps, but every single puzzle in the demo is a variation of "you have one box and two platforms, so you have to move the box from one to the other first and then reverse time at the appropriate moment to push the appropriate platform". To easy and too uninspired.

(BTW, this time I did search correctly and this one was not in the database.)