There’s not many puzzlers that add peril to the headscratching.

Most recent games have had you move from one contained environment to the next, solving a sequence of box puzzles, all while gradually introducing a new mechanic.

Titles like The Turing Test, Q.U.B.E, and Relicta all follow the aforementioned pattern, doing it very well indeed. Yet none of them have really tried to emulate the action you’ll find in Portal.

That sense of running from danger, of constant back and forth witty conversation, of an over-arching plot you need to piece together. It’s a formula that worked so well for Valve, it’s a wonder we haven’t seen many others try to recreate that magic.

Enter The Entropy Centre. On paper, it’s just like everything you’ve seen before. You pick up boxes, drop them on switches, glide and hop between platforms and move through the centre onto the next puzzle.

Where Stubby Games have done a great job here, though, is by humanizing their cast, of adding smart mechanical twists to the mix and keeping up the suspense and intrigue of this curiously desolate facility.

There’s no doubt you’ll get some pangs of Wheatley and Chell interacting with one another as you progress. They converse, try to get to know one another, and sometimes find a mutual ground. This time, though, you’re actually conversing with a gun.

As the last remaining human on Earth – because of course you are – you engage with ASTRA, a superior artificial intelligence, that powers a time-altering tech gun that lets you rewind objects in time.

This presents some fascinating progress possibilities with columns falling on your head and bridges collapsing at your feet. You fire your gun at certain parts of the environment and watch as it all reconstructs or goes back to its original position.

The same applies to crates as you create their pathing around the mini-circuit and try to find ways to position them so they avoid temporary obstacles like forcefields and slopes.

Some puzzles really caused me to sit back and think. A few I raced through rapidly, but others I spent a while experimenting, tweaking things and trying everything to make it through.

Crate pathing is especially cool as the time rewind lasts a fair amount of time, mimicking your movements perfectly. It’s a very smart spin on the genre that creates some really compelling sequences and moments that stick in the memory.

Moments that are also populated with some fun dialogue, giving you a gradual understanding of your environment and the circumstances that have led up to this extinction-level event you’re in the thick of.

Path resetting can be a bit frustrating at times, and sometimes I found it difficult to pick up the boxes and plates needed, especially when trying to raise them up to platform level from one below.

But all told, The Entropy Centre is a really well-designed puzzle game. It’s not as tight as Portal 2, but it’s among the best I’ve played since, giving players a bit of everything with some fun dialogue, intrigue and mystery inbetween.

Verdict

The Entropy Centre keeps players guessing and engaged with some surprisingly thrilling action sequences and well thought out puzzles. The narrative keeps you pressing on, the humour helps it somehow stay light in the most horrific circumstances, and it all comes together brilliantly in one package. Minor gripes aside, this is one of the best you’ll find in the genre since Portal 2 itself.