You are locked in a prison cell. You have no idea who you are and each night, an enigmatic figure appears to remind you that you await your “judgement”, but what are you being judged for?
Hack The Publisher’s Centum is a narrative-driven psychological horror game about a rogue AI. We start by booting up a computer and opening a _100.bat file which pulls us into a simulation of a dingey cell that we must escape before “judgement” is cast on us by a multi-headed figure who visits us at the end of each day. We have a select number of days and therefore a limited amount of actions when it comes to working out how to escape, having to reset when we run out of time.
We don’t know who we are or why we are in the cell. Outside is a dystopian city that we can observe and reflect on, often thinking of certain monologue questions in the process which the player is able to choose a response to. If we peer into the hole in the wall, we will discover a horrifying rat with a disfigured, human-like face which accuses us of starting a war by “throwing the first stone”, yet we have no idea what war we are supposed to have caused and what we did to set it in motion.
In fact, this sums up Centum as a whole for me. It’s filled to the brim with enigmatic monologues and philosophical questions, often presented in the form of heavily descriptive ramblings or memories drawn up by our protagonist or other characters. I can’t remember the last time I felt so disoriented by a game’s plot and so unable to piece together what was happening and what half the text I was flicking through even meant. You are presented with dialogue choices which apparently impact the behaviour of the AI but half the time I didn’t understand the question I had been presented with, its context or what the answer choices I was given even meant. While this form of obscure storytelling will appeal and intrigue some players, I found it heavily frustrating to be constantly unsure if I fully understood the plot and, in turn, I ended up not caring at all.
While Centum appears to be an escape room-style puzzle game from first appearance, it’s important to know that it certainly is not and bears a heavier resemblance to a visual novel. While we start off having to work out how to escape our prison cell by repeating the simulation until we find the correct sequence, this is essentially where that style of gameplay ends. In fact, at roughly midway through the game, the gameplay ceases almost entirely in exchange of the player working their way through the plot by clicking through endless dialogue boxes.
While there were a couple of puzzles that I enjoyed solving, there were plenty that I had no idea what the solution was and ended up solving them by pure luck alone. This also applies to the escape room elements as some of the solutions didn’t make sense at all. Later on, when the gameplay almost entirely consists of clicking through dialogue, the “puzzles” involve eventually exhausting dialogue until the character you’re talking to gives you an item that another needs or a future character will want.
Thrown in are some minigames which, while following the ongoing fourth-wall-breaking theme of ‘you are in a video game’, felt really out of place in terms of gameplay. One was a boring and drawn out retro RPG-style minigame which involved traversing through a maze and working out how to open doors to the next section, another was a buggy arcade-style driving game where we had to move out of the way of oncoming traffic. This works into my theory that maybe the developer had a story they really wanted to tell and the writing to boot but couldn’t decide on the gameplay format.
Even the dialogue choices often felt exhausting. On top of trying to decipher the conversations, characters often drill in the point they’re trying to make by going over it again and again. I found that sometimes a character would say something and we were given dialogue options to respond to that (not questions, just comments), but the conversation would just keep looping around to their original comment and we’d have to cycle through all the responses in order to move the hell on. In turn, the dialogue could often feel unnatural, as if I were trying to get an AI chatbot to understand what I’m saying by cycling through different options, which is again, oddly fitting for the overall themes of the game but also frustrating in terms of gameplay.
In terms of audio and visuals, Centum absolutely nails the grim, dystopian feel of its bleak world. While the soundtrack can get a little repetitive at times, its ambient tunes suit the surreal and dream-like nature of the game really well.
Visually, Centum is brimming with style. In fact, while it seems that the game doesn’t know what it wants to be in in terms of gameplay, it absolutely owns its visual style. During the generic point-and-click gameplay segments, it uses a pixelated yet detailed art style, but zooms in on full illustrations when speaking to other characters or looking at items of interest. Some of the illustrations are seriously creepy, making Centum feel far more unsettling. There were also sketchy animated segments during memory monologues which were also beautifully done, using a lined-style with white and red colours against a black background to create a dream-like effect.
While Centum’s storyline wasn’t for me, there will certainly be players who will enjoy its academic-style of writing and enigmatic story. Unfortunately it was not the game I thought it would be and although that would be fine if it had taken on a specific gameplay genre and stuck with it, the fact that it turned into a text box marathon towards the end made it a slog to finish.
Jess reviewed Centum on PC with a provided review copy.
