The Entropy Centre Review (Grodis)
TLDR:
7/10 If it is your first time playing a puzzle game (since you likely wont encounter the glaring issues with this game)
3/10 If you have played portal or other more complicated puzzle games
The Entropy Centre will always be compared to it's predecessor in first-person puzzelers, portal 1 and 2. Does it hold up? Not at all. There are way too much puzzles that are introductory, they play around with the basics of a certain puzzle element, but never go in-depth. Out of the 100 or so puzzles in this game, I would say roughly ~70% are made this way. And even some of the more advanced puzzles are shockingly easy, taking me a maximum of 3 minutes to figure out then another 2-4 minutes to execute (with the exception being the final puzzle, which is actually hard. Taking me 26 minutes). They don't utilize an interaction you have never thought of before, instead they do more steps of the mechanic you are already familiar with. In the end, the puzzles feel more like chores than puzzles.
The only thing holding up this game is the amazing visuals, music and sound design, with some parts of the story and dialogue being compelling too. But a lot of the good story elements are in the computer terminals which are placed along the puzzles. Problem is that there are so many computers that are just decorative and are not powered, which you have to check since they might have a good piece of the story. The story and character dialogue sometimes feels disconnected, where the severity of the situation is not taken into account and it just feels... off. It also suffers from many clichés of personal sacrifice and doesn't connect at all.
But this is all overshadowed by the puzzlebreaking exploits and bugs that are in this game. An exploit in this game is to blue-box jump, where you rewind time of the box while you are mid-air. I do not think this is intended since you can't interact with objects while taking them back in time. But you can just stop rewinding time mid-jump and resume rewinding after the bounce. It is very tricky to do and was actually the most fun I had with this game.
The Good:
- Music is probably the best soundtrack I have heard this year.
- The Game looks incredibly good
- The sound design backs up the visuals
The Meh
- The dialogue goes from cute and charming to annoying and cringe.
- The story written within computer terminals is good but there are so many computers that you have to check for all the time, only for them to be powered down, like the last 25 computers you checked.
- The reason why your character dies if they walk in too deep water is never explained (it is not poisoned water)
- Some of the escape sequences feel unnatural
The Bad
- The game holds your hand way too much, like explaining what a treadmill does.
- Puzzlebreaking exploits, you can cheese ~10 puzzles using elite gamer skills by jumping with the blue boxes.
- Puzzlebreaking bugs, if you stack 2 blue boxes on top of eachother they both bounce up, allowing you to grab both (since you can manipulate time).
- Puzzles elements like cubes can sometimes be brought through the final door of a puzzle due to poor puzzle design. If you do that, the game just deletes the item in front of you. (instead of just having a deletion-grid like in portal) Also a missed opportunity to reward smarter players for figuring out ways to beat the puzzle better.
- The duration you can rewind objects back in time is limited, about 38 seconds. After that time is up your last position is the one you had 38 seconds ago, instead of on the button like you had prepared. This wouldn't be so bad except that it sometimes changes to 43 seconds in some levels where there is only 1 cube. This feels more like the engine limitation than deliberate choice, and in the final level your time is too limited to do a certain solution (I found another one).
- Sometimes you have to redo parts of a puzzle because the level design does not account for that physics of objects is not deterministic. A launched cube can sometimes randomly bounce off the platform you were aiming at.
- Walked outside of the map 2 times, 1 of them even seeing through walls.
- The game crashed 2 times, but checkpoints are generous so you are right back.
- Also found a way to softlock myself in an escape sequence
- The bridge cubes often project bridges through concrete walls (which they are not supposed to do), happened more than 10 times during my playthrough.
- The story is really dull if you don't check the terminals. Spoiler -> You are stuck in a time-loop, the end.
I wouldn't mind as much if the puzzle design was still simple but not exploitable or if it was more complex. But there is a general lack of QA with this game that is inexcusable. I did not really go looking out of my way to exploit this game and still found this much wrong with it. 3/10