The Entropy Centre Preview – I’m Really Digging Your Entropy

Newcomer developer Stubby Games and publisher Playstack revealed The Entropy Centre during the Future Games Showcase in June, and it immediately caught my attention. It seemed to have its Portal-inspiration on it, which was a draw. Its concept of a puzzle game was different and innovative. You can use your weapon to turn back the time on specific objects in a space station, stopping the Earth’s explosion.

I continued to cover the game and its various trailer drops, excited to finally go hands-on with it, wondering if it’d live up to what those trailers presented. I’m happy to say that it does, and then some. I respect that Stubby Games has no problem speaking to its Portal inspiration – why try to hide it? Portal is an outstanding puzzle game and has inspired many other games. The Entropy Centre features an extremely sci-fi color scheme, an orange and blue palette, and a talking artificial intelligence that laughably guides you through your objectives.

The Entropy Centre is different from Portal, and all other puzzle makers because of its ability to use its talking gun. It can be used to pick up items and move them around the puzzle area. But, it can also turn back the clock on one thing. Let’s say you have two puzzle pads: one opens a door atop some stairs, and the other opens a second door beyond the first one. If you place one orange-trimmed box on a pad and step on the other, you’ll see both doors open, leading you to the exit of this puzzle room. But you must walk through those doors, so that won’t work.

Instead of using the gun, place the box onto the last puzzlepad you want to activate. Next move the box back to the one that you are trying to activate. In this instance, which is one present in the game, you need to go through the first door after using the box to activate the puzzle pad connected to it and then, on the other side, fire your gun’s time-reversing ray at the box to move it back to other pad, which then opens up the final door. And there you have it – that’s a puzzle solved.

I made a joke about each of these puzzles and placed a monitor at the end to show how long the problem took and how much entropy it gained. This entropy is what powers the space station’s time-reversing abilities. Similar to your gun, The Entropy Centre is outfitted with a huge Death Star beam which reverses time for the entire Earth. As part of Steam Next Fest’s demo, my demo with the Entropy Centre ended with my protagonist witnessing Earth explode. I imagine The Entropy Centre’s conceit is that you must solve enough puzzles aboard this space station to build up enough entropy to reverse the Earth’s explosion, saving everyone who lives there. 

It’s a fun sci-fi idea, and I like that each puzzle seemingly plays into the overall narrative. The variety of puzzles I encountered in the demo and Portal-esque humor, which can be used to build a friendship between protagonist and special gun have made me eager to see the finished product.