The Entropy Centre Review (Zaubermuffin)
I've played the demo when it came out and thought that it was an interesting concept, but probably not worth the money, so I've waited for a sale later down the road. Later down the road is now, and 9 chapters in I would say that my initial feeling was right, and even discounted it's still... something. If I had to name this game as something, I would like to say it tries hard to be Portal 2, in both setting and aesthetics, but falls short. Not so much on aesthetics, but definitely on the gameplay.
The main game mechanic is the selling point, but also annoying: A good chunk of puzzles involves necessary backtracking. You can't see the entire puzzle solution in one go for some levels, because parts are hidden behind doors, on other levels, or both. So you're starting to solve it to the best of your abilities, only to then figure out that you need one step at the beginning and can do it all over again. The puzzle difficulty is, from my point of view, varying wildly. Most puzzles are rather trivial, some are annoying to set up, and rarely you have a really hard/non-obvious puzzle, smashed between two trivial ones. There's no real difficulty grade that I could see. It's a bit all over the place.
The puzzle elements are also rather rough and in my opinion not very well done. For example, the jumping box is super small and puzzles that involve jumping from one platform to another repeatedly get incredibly frustrating because you can't really strife while in air - so you better hope that your initial jump and placement of the boxes was correct, otherwise you can return to the beginning, set up the puzzle, and do it all over again. I didn't expect this to be a precision platformer.
What makes it even more frustrating is the save system: There's no way (that I could find) to save or quicksave a level. The game dictates when it wants to save, and it's not super obvious when this happens. I've had finished some levels, quit the game, only to find out that I had to do them all over again - because I hadn't hit the autosave point.
Then we have the... really weird combat levels that happen sometimes. In-between two puzzles with unlimited time and no stress, you're suddenly in a cutscene, then some chase, then some fight. Of course, if you die, you can restart the entire level, because as mentioned before, save points aren't really happening inside a level. Meaning: You can run away for two minutes, miss a jump, fall through a gap, fall to your death, and re-do the entire thing from scratch. Several times.
The story seems neat, although I'm not entirely sure about it at this point, especially about the find-all-clues bits. The aesthetics are nice and well-made, but they can't make up for the previous points.
It's an interesting concept, but when compared to Portal 2 and its mods (some which deal with "time" as a concept too, and much better in my opinion) and workshop maps, or games like Talos Principle, the Entropy Centre is just not enjoyable.