The Entropy Centre Review – Reverse-Engineered Ingenuity

I don’t envy the developers of puzzle games. It is their job to make puzzles so difficult and interesting that they are challenging but also not too easy for players to get overwhelmed. They know how to walk this line, and The Entropy Center is full of examples. But The Entropy Centre is more than its brain teasers, and it’s that “more” where the game hits its stumbling blocks. Despite that, its core design is unlike anything I’ve ever played, and genre enthusiasts will find that this game bends their brains in new ways worth experiencing. I only wish the game’s pacing and polish lived up to the thrills its 60-plus puzzles gave me. 

Since The Entropy Centre’s reveal earlier this year, developer Stubby Games has been quite clear in its inspirations. You will solve puzzles that are primarily orange or blue-colored in this sci-fi video game. Oh, and there’s an A.I. With a bright personality and dry sense of humor, she is a cheerful person. Naturally, my mind immediately compares it to Valve’s Portal series, and on the gameplay front, The Entropy Centre succeeds.

Aria wakes up in an abandoned moon facility known as The Entropy Centre. She is left to discover that Earth is about to experience a catastrophic event. It happens and because of the Earth’s destruction, said space facility is now at risk of blowing up, and Aria must stop it. To do this, she must solve puzzles with her A.I.-powered gun, Astra, to charge the station with entropy so that its time-reversing device can stop Earth’s apocalyptic calamity from ever happening in the first place. This premise immediately grabbed my attention, and I loved reading emails on the centre’s various computers to learn more about other apocalyptic events entropy had prevented. 

The story ties that premise, Aria and Astra’s place in it, and these in-world emails together nicely, warning that without forward thinking, no outside force can help the Earth survive; if we, the human race, don’t get our act together, our world will die. I just wished the game’s pacing didn’t dampen any climactic feeling I might have felt otherwise. Multiple times I thought I was reaching the game’s big “a-ha” moment, only for it to throw me through another gauntlet of challenges. And while I loved trying to solve each puzzle as an isolated instance, I didn’t love how often they felt like tiresome roadblocks during the game’s third act. As a result, the entire experience felt bloated. I was exhausted when the credits ended. The third act feels bloated, but the two-thirds that precede it are engaging and intriguing in a manner that is not possible with other games of this type. 

The game’s dozens of puzzles all revolve around special cubes. These cubes can be placed on pad to open doors or power elevators. Some cubes don’t do anything on their own. Some cubes act as bridges or jumppads that help you get to higher platforms. The Entropy Centre continues to dole out new types of cubes throughout the 15-hour experience, and I met each with enthusiasm to see how it might rearrange my mind’s puzzle-solving toolbox. The cubes alone won’t reveal your solution, though – you need Astra. The gun is capable of turning back the time by 38.1 seconds on any object. This makes every obstacle one in which you need to first imagine how it will play out, then reverse it so you can set it up. In other words, you have to determine your destination and go backwards in order to solve the puzzle in Entropy Centre. 

At the end of it all, I had solved multiple puzzles with different cubes. I felt like a genius watching various time-reversing paths put everything where they needed to be. It hurt my brain at first – a lot – but I quickly learned the rules by which The Entropy Centre worked, and I was delighted to find an entirely new type of puzzle as a result. 

Occasionally, I’d lose five minutes of progress because a cube would disappear into a wall, causing me to restart the entire sequence. There was nothing more annoying than seeing a cube disappear into a wall and then disappear completely. A few times, the game crashed completely on me. I was ultimately satisfied with solving the puzzles and the happiness that it brought me.

With The Entropy Centre behind me, I’m fascinated by what Stubby Games accomplished with its debut. It’s full of excellent puzzles, but the stuff around them, like bugs and narrative pacing, stop the entire package from coming together in an equally impressive way. Despite the exhaustion I felt as the credits rolled, I’m stoked The Entropy Centre exists. This game brings something fresh and innovative to the table. I’m hoping Stubby Games will continue to innovate on it in future spin-offs and sequels. It’s not every day a game shows me something I’ve never seen before that it also happens to nail, and what The Entropy Centre does well is worth pushing through its long narrative to ensure you see every trick up its sleeve.