I’m not jealous of puzzle game developers. They have to create puzzles that are formidable enough to be challenging and interesting, but not so much that the player feels heavier than energized. The best path is almost perfect, and the Entropy Center is full of them. But The Entropy Center isn’t just its brain teasers, and it’s “more than that” where the game hits its obstacles. Even so, its core design is unlike anything I’ve played, and enthusiasts of the genre will find that the game molds their brains in new ways worth experiencing. I just wish the game’s pacing and polish lived up to the thrill its 60+ puzzles gave me.
Since The Entropy Center’s reveal earlier this year, developer Stubby Games has been pretty clear about its inspiration. This sci-fi game opens in an abandoned brutalist facility where you solve puzzles that are predominantly orange and blue in color. Oh, and there’s an AI with a bubbly personality and a dry sense of humour. Naturally, my mind immediately compared it to Valve’s Portal series, and in terms of gameplay, The Entropy Center was a hit.
Aria wakes up in an abandoned lunar facility called the Center of Entropy, left alone, and discovers that Earth will experience a cataclysm any moment. It happens and since Earth is destroyed, the space facility says there is now a danger of exploding, and Aria must stop it. To do this, she must solve puzzles with her AI-powered gun, Astra, charging the station with entropy so its time-reversing device can prevent Earth’s apocalyptic catastrophe in the first place. head. This premise immediately caught my attention, and I enjoyed reading emails on the center’s various computers to learn more about the other apocalyptic events that entropy prevented.
The story ties that premise, Aria and Astra’s place in it, and the emails in this world together in a unique way, warning that without forward thinking, no outside force is involved. can help the Earth survive; If we, the human race, don’t act together, our world will die. I just wish the game’s pacing didn’t dampen any climax I might feel otherwise. Many times I thought I had reached the big “a-ha” moment of the game, only to have it throw me through another challenge. And while I love trying to solve each puzzle as a separate example, I don’t like how often they feel like grueling obstacles in the game’s third level. As a result the whole experience felt bloated and I felt more exhausted than anything else when the credits came. However, that clunky third act is offset by the previous two-thirds as engaging and engaging in the way that the best games in the genre are.
Dozens of puzzles in the game revolve around special shapes. You place these blocks on pads to power up elevators or open gates. Some cubes don’t do anything on their own. Others act as jumpers to help you reach high platforms or act as bridges to help you get through gaps. The Entropy Center continued to work on new types of shapes during the 15-hour experience, and I enthusiastically met with each one to see how it could rearrange my mind’s puzzle-solving toolbox. However, the cubes alone won’t reveal your solution – you need Astra. This gun can go back in time on an individual object 38.1 seconds and as a result every obstacle becomes a place where you must first visualize how the sequence of events must unfold and then that inverts it in your head so you know exactly how to put it up. Simply put, solving a puzzle in The Entropy Center requires you to determine where you need to end and work backwards to find a starting point.
In the end, I solved the puzzles using a variety of cubes, all doing different things, and felt like a genius as I witnessed the different ways back in time placing every stuff into exactly where I need it. It gave me a headache at first – a lot – but I quickly learned the rules by which the Entropy Center works, and as a result I’m happy to have found a whole new type of puzzle.
Sometimes I would lose five minutes of progress because a cube would disappear into the wall, causing me to restart the whole sequence. There is nothing more annoying than watching a cube hit a wall before disappearing completely. The game also crashed completely on me a few times. In the end, however, the satisfaction of solving each puzzle brought me more than the frustrations I experienced.
With the Entropy Center behind me, I was fascinated by what Stubby Games had achieved at launch. It’s packed with great puzzles, but the things around them, like bugs and story pacing, prevent the entire package from coming together in an equally impressive way. Although I feel exhausted when the credits roll out, I’m still excited that the Entropy Center still exists. It brings something unique and new to the genre and I hope Stubby Games continues to repeat that in a sequel, spin-off or spiritual successor. It’s not every day that a game shows me something I’ve never seen before, it happens like a nail, and what The Entropy Center does well is well worth going through its long story to see. make sure you see all its tricks.
