While The Entropy Centre has plenty of qualities that help it stand out, even before release it had drawn comparisons to similar games like Portal or the influential indie hit Braid. It’s likely The Entropy Centre was influenced by these titles to help jumpstart development given the developer’s size, but the game’s story and take on time-bending mechanics elevate it beyond other puzzle games. By unifying story and gameplay, The Entropy Centre is an excellent example of harmonized design.

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The Entropy Centre’s Premise and Comparisons

The Entropy Centre’s premise is fairly straightforward, throwing the player directly into action. Waking up dazed and confused in a rundown facility, players take the role of Aria Adams alongside their quirky AI “Astra,” who is contained within a handheld entropy device - this game’s parallel to a portal gun from the Portal series that instead rewinds time. Though the device and its ability to harvest entropy energy comes close to being a MacGuffin, it’s reflective of the center’s core objective to rewind time.

Specifically, The Entropy Centre is designed to be a safeguard for Earth, monitoring it from the moon to track impending disasters, rewind the planet’s timeline, and then transmit data back to humanity so that they can avert impending demise. When the player is introduced to this, the planet is in the middle of a cataclysm and the facility seems abandoned, leaving nobody to save Earth. From here, The Entropy Centre focuses players on solving puzzles to collect entropy energy and repair the facility in order to turn back the clock on Earth’s destruction.

Early into the game, any player could point out the parallels between The Entropy Centre and similar titles. Portal comparisons are abundant, including rundown abandoned scientific facilities, strange test chambers to solve, or physics-defying gun-like devices. Even Astra could be considered a chirpier AI counterpart to Wheatley or GLaDOS. Time reversal and exploiting this ability to solve puzzles is reminiscent of Braid’s time mechanics, though The Entropy Centre expands this beyond rewinding everything on-screen.

What Makes The Entropy Centre Different

The Entropy Centre serves is a better example of how story and gameplay can inform one another than some of its contemporaries. For instance, Portal and its defining features like GLaDOS or Aperture Labs don’t directly tie into the portal mechanics beyond serving as the subject of one research project at the facility, while Braid’s time manipulation is hardly connected to a story about obsession and abuse. Meanwhile, The Entropy Centre’s time-reversal mechanic is directly connected to its plot, which allows its plot to capitalize on the game’s relationship with time.

Though Aria and Astra are able to successfully rewind the Earth, it’s revealed that this isn’t their first time doing so. As an explanation for center’s derelict condition, Aria’s memory loss, and Earth’s destruction, players can piece together that Earth’s destruction is inevitable, meaning the overuse of rewinding time can’t save it anymore. With the central focus of the game being about reversing time, Aria rewinds Earth regardless, knowing it will force her into a time loop.

The Entropy Centre is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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