The Entropy Centre

My first hour with The Entropy Centre felt uncomfortably familiar, and I mean that as a compliment. You wake up as Aria, an amnesiac puzzle operative, inside a crumbling space station orbiting a planet that has just exploded. Your only company is ASTRA, a wisecracking AI living inside a rifle-shaped entropy device. The Portal DNA is loud and proud here. But stick with it past that initial deja vu, because the core mechanic - rewinding individual objects through time rather than punching holes in space - turns out to be genuinely its own thing, and one of the more satisfying puzzle inventions in recent memory. The way the rewind system works is this: you record the movement of an object, then play that recording backwards. A cube you placed on a pressure switch twenty seconds ago can be rewound back there from across the room, meaning you solve puzzles by designing the solution first and then executing it in reverse. In practice that means standing at the end of a puzzle, mentally walking backwards to the start, and then setting each piece in motion so the rewind does the heavy lifting. Blocks that activate floor plates, jump pads that launch you to high ledges, laser cubes that redirect beams, bridge blocks that span gaps, conveyor belts, object-transforming gates - each new element arrives one sector at a time across 15 acts, and the game never overwhelms you with too many moving parts at once. The difficulty has a wave pattern: early puzzles in each sector ease you into a new element, then the later ones in that same sector tighten the screws. You will breeze through some chambers in two minutes and then stare at the next one for fifteen, which is exactly the rhythm a puzzle game should have. Outside the puzzle rooms the game mixes in light combat against worker bots (rewind their projectiles back at them), chase sequences through collapsing architecture, and platforming through halls held together by overgrown plant life and crumbling concrete. The combat sections are the weakest part - the bot encounters feel like interruptions rather than additions, and more than a few reviewers agreed they outstay their welcome. The collapse-and-sprint sequences work better because they use the same rewind thinking at speed, which creates genuine urgency without switching the game's brain off. The story is told mostly through scattered terminal emails and the growing banter between Aria and ASTRA. That relationship carries surprising emotional weight by the final acts, helped by strong voice performances from Chloe Taylor and Kasey Miracle. Narrative pacing is uneven in the middle stretch, and some of the lore's bigger questions are left deliberately vague in ways that will frustrate players who want clean answers. Visually it is competent but not impressive - interior corridors recycle assets often enough to feel samey, while the exterior shots of Earth from orbit look genuinely striking. The soundtrack is excellent throughout and does a lot of atmospheric heavy lifting. Replay value is thin. There are per-puzzle timers and scattered intel collectibles on terminal computers, but once the credits roll there is little structural reason to return. For a puzzle game running eight to twelve hours depending on your brain speed, that is an acceptable trade. The Entropy Centre launched in a solid state and holds an 89% positive rating on Steam from over four thousand reviews, which puts it comfortably in the upper tier of first-person puzzlers released in this decade. If you bounced off Portal because spatial reasoning never clicked, this one might actually be more approachable - thinking backwards is a different cognitive mode and some players find it more intuitive. If you loved Portal and have been disappointed by every spiritual successor since, this is the one that finally delivers.

Alex · Scout Team

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