The Entropy Centre

Genre: First-Person Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

The Entropy Centre is a First-Person Puzzle game released in 2022 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game puts players in the role of Aria, a woman who awakes to find herself on an abandoned and decaying space station orbiting Earth in the midst of a planet-wide cataclysm. Somehow, with the help of the time-rewinding entropy gun, and a few AI companions, she must find a way to discover what is happening and avert this catastrophe… or perhaps rewind it.

Right from the start, it is stunningly clear that the creators of The Entropy Centre wanted to create a game like The Portal series. And I’m not just saying this because The Entropy Centre is a First-Person Puzzle game, as others in the genre like The Talos Principle and Manifold Garden managed to approach the genre in a way that still gave them their own distinct style and feel. On the other hand, The Entropy Center seems like the videogame equivalent of the kid who had to be reminded, “Dude, if you’re going to copy my homework, can you please at least remember to put your own name on it?”

Now, just to be clear, I do not think that copycats are inherently bad, as long as they copy their source well and present us with something well worth playing in their own right. However, if you’re going to make something that’s deliberately so similar to another game, you know I’m going to have to compare it to that game, right?

Think I’m going too far? Your female protagonist awakens in a deserted technological facility with no memory of where she is, what happened before, or how long she’s been out of it. The primary character who speaks to you throughout the game is an AI companion who is constantly making passive aggressive comments to you and is obsessed with you taking tests, with those tests forming the main gameplay throughout the game. And you’ll be interacting with those tests primarily through the use of a fancy futuristic gun that doesn’t shoot bullets, but instead does some high-concept sci-fi thing that enables you to do things that would be otherwise impossible.

I suppose if they copied the actual portal gun itself, people wouldn’t have any choice but to call this game a shameless rip-off, so instead what your entropy gun does is rewind time for an object, allowing you to bring it backwards through its movement in order to solve puzzles, which often require placing cubes on pressure-sensitive switches and… oops, we’re back in Portal territory again.

Okay, look, before I get too negative with this, let’s make things clear – the puzzles in this game are fairly well-thought out, and the rewinding-time concept is not just here as a last-minute replacement, but actually has strong ties to the game’s central plot. What’s more, where Portal is mostly focused on your interactions with the AI characters you encounter, The Entropy Center’s plot is much bigger in scope than your interactions with a few other characters.

This is good too, because your most consistent companion in the game, Astra, just cannot hold a candle to GLaDOS. She’s chipper, polite, and encouraging, all while being extremely unhelpful and uninformative, which makes it all the more frustrating when both you and Aria want to know just what the heck is going on, and it makes Astra’s passive-aggressive comments seem out of character for her. At the very least, the voice acting for both Aria and Astra is very good, even if the writing for the characters isn’t always the best.

The 3D presentation is also fairly decent here, though it loses points for being visually very similar to Portal 2, depicting a once-sterile research facility that has long ago fallen to disrepair and is now overgrown with plants. At the very least, there’s some good detail here, though I honestly feel like Portal 2 did this better over a decade ago.

Meanwhile, the soundtrack is good when it works, being cinematic and dramatic… right up until it sometimes cuts out for seemingly no reason, making for a laughable moment when surely the game was aiming for something more intense. It’s so bizarre too, because otherwise this game seems pretty polished, but when the music instantly dies (all that’s missing is a record scratch), it makes the game seem amateurish.

In the end, The Entropy Centre is a very poor-man’s version of a First-Person Puzzle game like Portal, and while I have to commend it on choosing a great game to imitate, and I definitely believe it does many things well, its similarity to the Portal games makes all of the ways this game is inferior stick out like a sore thumb. Having said that, if you’ve played the two Portal games to death and are looking for another experience that’s extremely similar, I think you’ll enjoy this – just don’t expect it to be similar in quality, character, or originality.

tl;dr – The Entropy Centre is a First-Person Puzzle that seems to want to copy the Portal series even more so than games in this genre often do. This game takes much of what Portal does, replaces the portal gun with a time-rewinding gun, and then does just about everything a bit worse than Portal… which is to say this is still a good Puzzle game, but it’s hard to play it without constantly thinking how Portal does everything better.

Grade: B–

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}