Centum
Review
Parable of the Lost Sheep
by Samuel Corey
reviewed on PC
Point and Click
Centum is an alienating game to play. It is ugly, confusing, and frequently deeply disturbing. The characters you control will allude to history and relationships you can only guess at, so when selecting your dialogue options you will often have to stop and wonder "Is this a lie?"
Fortunately, beneath the surreal imagery, the religious metaphors, and the deliberately obscure plot, Centum is a familiar game. It's your standard point-and-click adventure model where you navigate through a pixel environment collecting key items and using them to solve puzzles. This well-worn gameplay style is a good decision, because were the gameplay as obscure and alienating as the plot, characters, and visuals, I don't think anyone would be able to finish the first chapter.
Puzzling Puzzles
Normally, video game puzzles bear at least a passing resemblance to reality. In Soma, for instance, early on you find yourself blocked by a locked door, and unable to progress until you find clues that allow you to deduce the door's combination lock. This is the kind of puzzle you could reasonably find yourself in during your day-to-day life. Of course, the mere act of gating progression behind puzzles will occasionally necessitate some break with reality. I have never, for instance, seen a police station that made me get around using a series of gems like the one in Resident Evil 2. We have to shrug and accept that a few absurdities are necessary in creating a video game set in something that passingly resembles our world.
Likewise, Centum's puzzles operate on an insane logic all their own, but that is fine because this game is very much not taking place in the real world. We learn right from the very beginning that even things as basic as casual logic don't really apply to the world of Centum. Take for instance the first puzzle you are presented, when you are compelled by some psychic block to stay in your room. If you cut off your finger and plant it in the corner it will grow into a tree. If you then water the tree until it grows to a certain size, the tree will take over the room. Since you no longer perceive the room as your own, you are free to leave. It's not so much that the puzzle doesn't make sense, it's more like it makes sense but only when evaluated from the perspective of some insane and alien logic.
The game is fascinating no doubt, but at times it is so obscure and confusing that I found myself utterly lost and frustrated with what was going on. That is to be expected from any game that has a narrative structure as challenging as this one. What is more surprising is that occasionally Centum has the opposite problem, of giving the player too much information too easily. For instance, at the start of the game, you can find a file titled "Caesar" which contains a string of gibberish. I at once recognized this as something written in a Caesar Cipher and set about decoding it. I felt clever with myself until I noticed that there was a Caesar cipher decoder built into the game, complete with a bust of the famous Roman himself in case you needed an extra hint. This robs the player of an early chance to feel rather clever, which would have been nice given how stupid and confused you will probably feel as you progress through Centum.
Puzzling Plot
Of course, figuring out how to advance through each environment is only part of Centum's puzzles. The larger questions the player wrestles with are not going to be "What do I use this key item for?" or "How do I get past this door?" but rather "What is going on here?" and "Who exactly am I playing as?"
It's outside the scope of this review to speculate on all the myriad aspects of this game's lore and subtext. However, the game itself quickly reveals that it is set inside a video game created by a rogue AI, where a young boy named Tim (nicknamed Marmoset) has somehow been trapped. Your objective is to rescue him, though it is far from clear if Tim is there of his own volition or if he is being held captive by the AI.
This goes some way towards explaining the bizarre logic of the puzzles and the game world. The AI running the game does not think the way a human does, and all the obscure bugs in its underlying programming manifest in the world it has constructed. If the AI is not familiar with something it will try its best to create it from something it is familiar with. Most notably this happens in the 2nd chapter when the AI tries to make a rotary phone, but since it has never seen one before it creates a ghastly abomination based slightly on a cat, which it is familiar with.
It also explains why the standard point-and-click adventure game play pauses periodically for you to play an extremely basic arcade game, as the AI was originally designed to entertain children. These interludes of colorful uncomplicated fun also serve the thematic point of throwing the horror of the rest of the game into starker relief.
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8.0
fun score
Pros
Bizarre and compelling puzzles, Depiction of a strange world with its own rules of logic and causality, Disturbing pixel-art graphics
Cons
At times the deliberate obscurity is frustrating and makes it hard to get invested in the story and characters. Occasionally the game gives you too much information too easily, robbing you of the joy of puzzling it out yourself.
