The Entropy Centre

It has been a while since I last played an entirely new (for me) first person puzzle-platformer. While I have played a few in the past and we're not exactly lacking in these chamber-based Portal-without-portals games, they don't always look entertaining enough. The Entropy Centre by Stubby Games did, however. Its gimmick is rewinding objects backwards in time.

What if you could turn back time?

Once again: like about all the other titles in this specific genre, The Entropy Centre, too, struggles with the plausibility issue: why on earth (or moon) would anyone build a massive complex just for people to solve physical puzzles. Although in this case, the reason is valid even if everything else around it is nonsense.

The titular Entropy Centre, built on the Moon, has puzzle operatives solving puzzles to generate entropy energy. The facility collects this energy which is then used to rewind Earth back in time to before disaster has struck: such as an animal species going extinct or an asteroid destroying the planet. Once it's done, Earth's officials are contacted to inform of the coming danger. There are so many problems with the whole entropy/time-reversal concept but it is what it is.

You play as (voiced) Aria Adams, one of the puzzle operatives. You wake up with amnesia to discover the Centre seemingly having been abandoned. Soon you'll acquire an assault-rifle-looking handheld entropy device that comes with an AI assistant called Astra. And off you go.

Like a comment said somewhere on Steam, the dialogue between Aria and Astra is pretty trite most of the time. The game's conclusion is quite unrewarding as well, though I suppose it really didn't have anywhere to go once you learn what's going on.

Graphical fidelity is very close to the second Q.U.B.E. game -- another Unreal Engine 4 title in the very same genre -- but art style differs a bit. The brutalist concrete walls brought to mind Control. The asset reuse is repetitive but realistically thinking, if such a huge complex was built on the Moon, the interiors wouldn't have huge variation. And you do get to go outside at times where a tropical beach environment provides some variation.

Proper brain ticklers

The Entropy Centre is initially of the more challenging titles in the genre -- at least of the ones I've played. I recall the puzzles that have you making recording of your path in The Talos Principle often being the most difficult ones and this game features that mechanic in almost every puzzle. Puzzles are often easier to solve when you start from the end and in this game's case it's very clear where a cube needs to be at the end: obvious point to start tracing a path that is then rewound as you move through the solution.

I feel the puzzle difficulty peaked well before the end, though -- the last two chapters with chambers were a decrease in difficulty, in fact. The game had shown me every trick and didn't escalate the complexity any further.

I got stuck once in chapter 6 and had to look up the solution. I had not realized that you can grab an object from the middle of its rewind and it will not reset the part of its timeline you haven't rewound yet. I think you can quite easily get to that point of the game without realizing the fact. The mechanic is needed from thereon.

In chapter 7, after a lot of pondering I solved one puzzle in an unintended way by setting a bridge cube on an incline to skip to the exit. I just couldn't figure out where the cube was supposed to be at the end. I felt a tad silly checking the correct solution afterwards. And looking at the screenshot -- the platform was right there! But I did learn from that to consider all the pieces in a given chamber: The Entropy Centre doesn't do red herrings. Although, in chapter 15 I think, I couldn't figure out the purpose of a conveyor belt in a chamber. Maybe I solved that one in an unintended way as well when I didn't use the belt for anything.

There was also a puzzle in an early chapter I managed to exit with a cube in my possession. I didn't manage to see if it was possible to carry it into the next chamber because I perished when clipping with geometry on the way and the cube wasn't included in the checkpoint save.

With a few grievances

The game often has you rewind collapsed parts of the environment to form a bridge or to lift you up. You have to be careful where you're standing lest you collide with a moving surface forcefully enough to end up inside it, which is then harshly punished. I died to that half a dozen times throughout the game. Maybe it shouldn't be a thing; just push the player away or something.

Another thing that didn't feel quite right was how you can't launch grabbed puzzle pieces even though you can do so to explosive cubes and even maintenance bots. Maybe that would have encouraged all manner of unclean solution attempts, players throwing objects over gaps, trying to get them to land in a certain way. Also: considering that you're on the Moon, you should be able to jump higher. You can't even get on the barely knee-high cubes -- always these plausibility problems in the genre.

The Entropy Centre is not entirely a leisurely experience. While regular puzzle chambers have no urgency, there are quite a few parts where haste is required. There are chases as well as lockdown sequences in which you have to find buttons to open the exit while fending off infinitely respawning maintenance bots. In addition to grabbing and launching them, you can also rewind their projectiles back to destroy them.

I guess the action sequences were included to provide variation to the gameplay. But thanks to their frequency, they're rather formulaic and feel unnecessary. Stubby Games' current project is a straight up first person shooter VOID/BREAKER.