The Entropy Centre

There’s a certain number of pure Portal-like games out there (Lightmatter, Relicta, Turing Test, QUBE, Magnetic etc) but The Entropy Centre has to be the best I’ve played.
I usually don’t like these games a lot because they often fail to reproduce what makes the Portal series such a masterpiece, leaving only easy and not really interesting puzzles.

So why isn’t The Entropy Centre like them?

Well, it is puzzle-wise, unfortunately. Especially if you’re already familiar with the time rewind mechanic, you won’t have any trouble at all.
Every puzzle is solved rather quickly and only doing the solution takes time. If you’ve played some Portal 2 workshop maps, the puzzles of the Entropy Centre are very similar to all those easy maps with a bunch of things scattered around that you have to activate in the correct order. Except you have to record the solution this time.
The problem with the time rewind mechanic is that creating hard puzzles means creating tedious ones, the game trapped itself with this core mechanic. That’s why I don’t really mind and understand the puzzles being a bit too easy.
I’ll skip the other mechanics, everything in Portal 2 is in there. I’ll just talk about the jump pad, the hitbox could be better because sometimes you hit the edge and it doesn’t count. And missing a jump pad jump means restarting the solution so it can be annoying.

Where The Entropy Centre actually shines is on every other aspect:
– Let’s start with the best, the story. The Entropy Centre is a moon base where people solve puzzles to gather entropy energy in order to rewind Earth when a cataclysmic event happens.
You are Aria and you wake up alone in the devastated centre while the Earth is exploding, so your goal is to rewind it yourself.
That’s the sort of story I really like and it was well done, including the ending (though I think the story has even more potential). There’s also a lot of lore to find in the mails of certain computers.
– As you probably guessed from the story, the atmosphere is unreal. The destroyed Earth in the background unleashes shockwaves upon the complex, destroying parts of it and allowing you to create paths by rewinding the debris. The walking sections outside of the puzzles aren’t boring at all, that’s for sure.
– The game runs very smoothly, that’s clearly something to praise. Most games nowadays are optimized like sh*t.
The visuals are also stunning, seriously. And that’s why I think exploration could’ve been made more important. There are sections of the game in which you can explore a bit, but there’s usually nothing to find and that’s a shame.
– The characters are very cool with very good voice acting, dialogues and humor.
– The sound design is top notch.

The Entropy Centre isn’t perfect and doesn’t reach the greatness of its inspiration, but it’s an extremely good tribute. Especially when you know it has mostly been developped by one person, that’s just outstanding.

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Developer: Stubby Games
Publisher: Playstack
Platforms: Steam – Windows, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series, Xbox One, GeForce Now
Release Date: November 3, 2022