The Entropy Centre Review (Is This Portal 3?)
The Entropy Centre Review (Is This Portal 3?)
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, The Entropy Centre is very much inspired by Portal with its theme, mechanics, dry humour and even as far down to the facility being accented with half life orange. If you enjoyed the portal series, stop right now and go play The Entropy Centre because it is executed very well with plenty of originality across the board that is worth your time if you enjoy a good physics based puzzle game.
Centre of Attention
The Entropy Centre is an organization located on the moon responsible for saving earth from Cataclysmic events over and over again. This is done by solving puzzles which creates energy, which allows time to be rewound, therefore saving earth from destruction. Over the course of the game, you learn what your importance is at The Entropy Centre as you awaken to a long deserted, broken down and overgrown centre.
As a good puzzle game should, The Entropy Centre eases you into its mechanics. At the start you’ll simply move blocks from one place to another and put them in the appropriate square to unlock a door. From there new elements are introduced one at a time on almost every floor including the time reversing gun, jump pads, launch pads, laser gates, moving platforms, electrical panels and plenty more to leave some for surprise. Before you know it, you are completing puzzles with almost every single element you have learned, which leaves you with the feeling that you are the only one capable of solving it.
The pacing is great as the Entropy Centre does a great job with giving you dopamine hits as a results of solving the puzzles as they aren’t too long that they become overly frustrating but not to short that you don’t feel like a genius for solving them. The game even separates puzzle rooms with escape attempts from security bots and a crumbling building.
The Entropy Centre also does a great job with collectibles as they fill in gaps in the story with questions that you might have. You find 90’s computers with emails that give you little teases of lore and answers. None of this information is crucial so if you decide to skip them or miss some of these emails, it wont change your end result but it does help answer some questions you might have about time loops and what happens when Earth gets saved from total annihilation.
The way to story is handed to you with environmental clues, emails and occasional chats between your companion keeps you interested about what morsel lies around the corner.
Beauty is in the eye of the rewinder
The Entropy Centre looks great because the game is divided into floors smartly with the goal being to reach the elevator to the next floor. Each floor is broken down into puzzles that are separated by hallways and corridors which can serve as loading areas so the game only needs to render one room at a time with the end result being great visuals that showcase the brutalist architecture of The Entropy Centre.
The writing never had me laughing out loud but its dry English humor did put a smile on my face frequently. The voice acting is also very well done for the few lines it offers between areas. It doesn’t have some big names that Valve has used in the past like JK Simmons, Stephan Merchant or Nate Bargatze who are experts in their field and elevated the experience but the job that Astra and Aria do is well above average.
Time Loop Consequences
There were a few minor visual glitches that happened during my time on the PS5 but nothing that affected gameplay or performance. Even though the security bot areas served as a nice respite from the difficult puzzles, they were still frustrating at times due to the very minimal room for error.
However, the checkpoint systems in The Entropy Centre were fairly friendly, which meant dying wasn’t unbearable. Playing on the PS5, this feels like one of the few occurrences where using a bunch of haptics and resistive triggers could have been implemented in a very fun and smart way.
Final Thoughts
What The Entropy Centre lacks in Valve polish it makes up for in other areas. The clever puzzles that are evolving throughout with an absurd amount of elements that you will need to juggle by the time credits roll, witty humor , the near perfect gradual increasing difficulty and a rewarding story that surprises. If Valve doesn’t want to make puzzle games anyone, i’m very glad Stubby Games does