The Entropy Centre (

2022

) ½

It is a little dismissive to call a game X, but worse in every way. That said, there are times when you should be dismissive. Dismissing obvious, derivative crap is a key part of a critic's job description, not to mention it can be rather fun. Not Tonight [2018] really is just Papers Please [2013] but worse in every way. Super POTUS Trump [2017] is just Paper Mario [2000] but worse in every way. And the Entropy Centre is just Portal [2007]  but worse in every way.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: You awake in the ruins of an abandoned scientific facility and must navigate a variety of puzzles making use of a gun with reality-warping properties all while a robotic voice talks to you periodically. In terms of aesthetics, setting, and gameplay, this isn't a homage in the way that The Witness [2016] apes Myst [1993], but rather a shameless ripoff. I understand the temptation, as Valve is in no hurry to break their streak and release a game with 3 in the title but surely it would have been better to take your unique puzzle mechanic and place it in a unique environment rather than just giving us Portal [2007] again. Especially when your game is not going to be done any favors by invoking one of the best puzzle games of all time.

The unique puzzle mechanic here is your ability to selectively rewind an object through time, which you will primarily use to move cubes onto various switches. Consequently, the Entropy Centre is a time travel story. The problem is that the game's writers have given no thought whatsoever to the mechanics of this time travel. Now you can get away with this when you are just sending one man and one robot back to 1980s Los Angeles to kill an improbably important waitress, al la The Terminator (1984). However, if you're going to make time travel a thing that happens routinely and repeatedly, where the entire planet and everyone on it are regularly transported back in time and the workers on the time machine are regularly sent back in time themselves, perhaps you should think about the implications of it for more than a few seconds.

The premise here is that The Entropy Centre is based on the moon, and whenever Earth suffers a cataclysmic event the workers at the Centre rewind the entire planet. Since they are not on the surface of the planet they are not affected by this rewind. However, as anyone who has even the most basic grasp on cosmology will tell you: both the Earth and the Moon are constantly in motion, so rewinding the Earth and not the Moon will disrupt the Moon's orbit of the Earth! Expect tidal waves at the very least every time the planet is rewound, and that's assuming they don't accidentally rewind the Earth into the moon and end all life on both. It gets even worse when you remember that the universe is constantly expanding, so getting the Earth and the moon back into the correct position while keeping one stuck at the same time becomes an impossibility.

It's not just the position of the heavenly bodies that poses an issue here. The game seems to have no idea what kind of power it has given the entropy center and its handlers. The Centre can and does rewind Earth 100 years. It then has to abandon the station because it doesn't have enough time to get energy to keep rewinding the earth. Hey, you dummies, you have a time machine. You can make all the time that you need. Just rewind earth a century and you've bought yourself an entire lifetime of breathing room. This all reeks of the game wanting the entire facility to be abandoned (to better imitate Portal [2007]) and have no idea how to plausibly make the center abandoned.

In addition to bungling basic rules of astronomy and its own mechanics for time travel, the game also feels the need to bungle its own political and moral messaging. The problem with the Entropy Centre you see is that after saving the world through the power of time travel innumerable times, the people on Earth stop listening to the Centre, and the disasters that they rewound Earth to prevent start to repeat. It fits nicely with the current year politics that traces all manner of problems back to the unwillingness of regular people to follow the instructions of credentialed experts, from global warming to vaccine adoption.

I may take issue with this stance on a practical level, as it was a group of highly credentialed, recognized experts that were responsible for America's strategy in Vietnam and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, but this is an ideological dispute. Intelligent people can hold differing opinions and even make universally appealing art based on them. The problem is that in the case of the plot of the Entropy Centre, the position of the creators makes no sense. The cataclysm we see in the game is not one caused by human stupidity or greed. This is not an ecological collapse, global warming, or nuclear war. No, the cataclysm the Entropy Centre is trying to prevent is the earth just spontaneously exploding one day! It seems almost cruel that the Centre is rewinding Earth a few years into the past and telling the people on the surface “Hey, just FYI the planet is going to explode soon, you better get on that PDQ.” Why did you write it this way?

Of course, story and world-building are only one component of a video game and not even the primary one. A solid core of gameplay can let you forgive all sorts of idiocy in the story department. I don't find myself wondering how Princess Peach managed to get herself captured by Bowser for the millionth time during Super Mario Odyssey [2017] because I'm too captivated by the precise and responsive platforming. Too bad that this is where The Entropy Centre really earns its “Portal [2007] but worse in every way” distinction.

The central mechanic of the game is using your time gun to reverse cubes into strategic positions allowing you to traverse the various puzzle rooms. Any player with some degree of brain activity will quickly realize that the solution to almost every puzzle is to move the cubes into the position you will want them in last, followed by the one you want them last but one until you arrive at the position they will be in first. Then you can just reverse the cube into the positions you need. Later puzzles will get slightly more complicated, but the same core strategy will be applicable from start to finish.

The puzzles never evolve beyond the most obvious application of the time reversal mechanic, resulting in a game that is not exactly a mental workout. Indeed, even a dummy like me who struggles with puzzles as complicated as the ones in Baba is You [2019], will be able to solve pretty much every puzzle in the game in well under ten minutes. The only exception is the ones that require finicky jumping and bounce pads that are easy to screw up not because the puzzle is challenging but because First Person platforming where you can't see your feet is always going to be annoying.

Something more was needed to make these puzzles engaging. Perhaps giving you the option to move puzzle pieces forward through time instead of just backward. Maybe a greater focus on changing time in the environments rather than just always changing the position of the different blocks. As it stands though, the puzzles are unsatisfying and repetitive. A fitting companion to the game's unsatisfying story and themes.