The Entropy Centre

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Developer/publisher Stubby Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested)

Release Out now

Not long after waking up in The Entropy Centre’s abandoned lunar base, you arrive at an observation deck, the Earth hanging overhead – for a couple of seconds, at least, before it promptly explodes into smithereens. Your job is to provide energy to the base’s time-travel engine, thus rewinding the Earth to a more stable, pre-exploded state – energy that is, naturally, generated by completing puzzles.

Winking sci-fi explanation aside (something about possibility states existing side-by-side), it’s a convenient excuse to have you ferrying weighted cubes between door-activating buttons. Doing so underlines the sense that another rewind has taken place, to the years following Portal’s release. This is apparent the first time you enter a puzzle chamber, its drab off-white walls being reclaimed by nature; The Entropy Centre could easily have been among the brief wave of firstperson puzzlers that arrived in Portal’s wake. It has its own gimmick embodied in a gun-like form factor with an unwieldy name: the Handheld Entropy Device, which grants you a more localised version of the base’s rewind power. This is also loaded with an onboard AI, Astra, who in her relentless cheeriness is Glados’ mirror image, punctuating bouts of puzzling with exposition and light relief. The device’s time manipulation can return crumbled pillars to their original form, or broken energy panels to working order, in a manner reminiscent of Raven’s Singularity. But primarily it’s used to carry movable objects (cubes, mostly) backwards along their most recent path. Every time you pick one up, you’re effectively recording its prior 38.1 seconds of movement, steps which pulling the trigger will cause it to retrace.

There’s joy to be had watching your own stumbles played back, but the puzzles it allows for essentially add up to a 3D equivalent of the farmer trying to cross the river with chickens and a fox. Inevitably, two cubes need to be in five places at once, while also ending up here and here – which, given the reversed flow of time, means that’s where they need to start. The odd puzzle toys with forking timelines, but for the most part the game simply folds in extra complications.

As the chambers get bigger, objectives can be hard to read, while attempts at that wind-whistling-pastyour-ears momentum often grow fiddly. In more demanding puzzles, any stumble from the required path means starting over from the beginning of that 38.1 seconds – the one thing that can’t be rewound here is yourself. Given that world-saving energy is generated by you coming up with solutions, the process by which The Entropy Centre extracts it can feel woefully inefficient.

Cubes that shoot out laser beams or bridges, jump-pads, fans, and conveyor belts that can be reversed to transport objects or yourself: all of these elements mainly serve to obfuscate the same essential process

LORE AND DISORDER The more traditional test chambers are interspersed with sections that introduce a more immediate peril. These can offer simpler puzzles alongside light combat, courtesy of a band of robots firmly disobeying Asimov’s First Law, or straight-up chase sequences, where the Entropy Device is used to reverse the destruction of falling walkways. There are also optional nuggets of environmental storytelling to be discovered, mainly involving desks laden with assets and a PC with readable emails, or PowerPoint presentations that show the influence of The Stanley Parable.