Tak! (@[email protected])

The Entropy Centre is a first-person puzzle game in a futuristic scifi setting, where the player progresses linearly through a series of puzzle chambers by placing torso-sized cubes onto pressure plate switches, shining lasers into optical receivers, and leveraging physical properties like inertia by means of launch pads, mechanical platforms, conveyor belts, light bridges, and moving columns of air. You manage all this via a handheld gun with some improbable physical properties. There's also a dystopian metaplot where not all is as it seems. This probably all sounds very familiar - TEC leans hard into its Portal roots. The charitable viewpoint is that it's a homage and not a clone, but there's certainly a discussion to be had there. There are a number of original mechanics, though. You get a localized time rewinding device instead of a portal gun. There are some novel types of cubes, including a bouncy one, as well as new fields that transform cubes into different types. There's a chipper AI inside your gun instead of a snarky robot overseer. There are *enemies*. TEC definitely scratches the puzzle itch, but I felt like the first… 8? chapters were pretty monotone. Activate the switches in reverse order, then rewind. Now do the same thing, but with a bouncy block. Now a laser block. Now… etc. I think I found the puzzles around chapter 12 (of 16) the most difficult; I felt like the later ones were mostly simpler puzzles chained together. A special note about the bouncy blocks: a great concept, much more flexible than Portal 2's bouncy goo, but *so* full of papercuts. On a number of the puzzles, I spent significantly more time retrying the bounces than actually figuring out what to do. The enemies: they add some variety to the gameplay, but it turns out that I do not at all enjoy solving even simple puzzles while being targeted by undodgeable shots from every direction. I nitpicked a lot, but The Entropy Centre is probably the third best first-person dystopian scifi puzzle game (portallike) I've played (after the Portal and Talos Principle series). If you liked the other two, give this one a try.