It’s a Monday morning as I write this. My day is simply starting and I’m getting my to-do record so as. As I examine assignments off my record, I discontinue to keep in mind if there are any video games I’ve performed just lately that I’ve been that means to write down about. None that I can keep in mind. In spite of everything, my weekend was spent watching wrestling and an Oscars-adjacent dwell stream with mates.
No, wait. I performed one thing too, didn’t I? My head is hazy (most likely from extreme pizza consumption), however a recreation begins to approach again into focus. One thing bizarre. Unsettling. What was it known as? Centum. Was it an indigestion-induced fever dream? My Steam account begs to vary, reminding me that I went on a three-hour level and click on odyssey over the weekend between social gatherings. It’s not that I had forgotten what I’d performed; it’s simply that it was so otherworldly that it seems like I performed it in one other life completely.
I don’t know the best way to recount Centum. I don’t know the best way to suggest it. I don’t even know if I ought to. But when all of this has piqued your curiosity already, contemplate leaping in blind.
Centum – Announcement Trailer | PS5 Video games
For these of you who want a limited extra to move on, Centum is a really cryptic level and click on journey recreation out at this time on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Sequence X/S, PC, and Nintendo Swap. Its premise sounds easy sufficient at its most elementary degree: You’re a prisoner and you could wreck free. Essentially the most simplified (and deceptive) clarification I may give is that Centum sticks gamers right into a sequence of rooms and asks them to click on round to resolve puzzles and escape. In its first room, I would like to search out chalk to attract a determine on a wall, work out the best way to cope with a rat downside, and wipe down a grimy window with a material. That each one sounds acquainted, sufficient, factual?
Properly, not a lot. Centum’s enigmatic fable takes space completely within an AI laptop program gone awry. I’m trapped within a desktop, clicking by means of applications and enjoying occasional minigames between studying stray textual content information. If you happen to’ve ever had the misfortune of utilizing one thing like Google Gemini, you already know that AI isn’t probably the most dependable narrator. Typically it spits out garbled footage and nonsense data. It resembles the truth we all know, however it’s by no means fairly factual. The satan is in the small print, and AI likes to rep all of them erroneous.
It’s by means of that lens you can inaugurate to crack Centum’s initially impenetrable shell. In between puzzle fixing, I discover myself having conversations with a variety of creeps and weirdos. All of them speak in philosophical riddles. I can’t decode them at first and contemplate I’m simply too dumb to understand what Centum is making an attempt to order me. It’s the identical means I really feel once I hear lecturers debating philosophy, tossing out references that flee over my head. The deeper I rep, the extra I inaugurate to simply accept that I will not be the downside. It’s the world round me that’s incoherent, full of lies and outright nonsense.
Serenity Forge
Who am I in all of that? That’s the puzzle that basically attracts me in. I’m eager to work out who the prisoner I’m controlling actually is. I rep flashes of their actual life, one seemingly scarred by tragedy. Or not less than that’s what I contemplate I’m seeing. Centum teases me at each flip, even switching up my id at one level. My recollections are hazy, misplaced within a hallucinating machine that has consumed me and spit out some model of myself that’s solely half of identifiable. There’s an uneasy horror in that, and I decide to imagine that it’s what Centum goals for instance by means of its confounding world.
Days after ending it, I don’t actually know what I contemplate of Centum. Possibly it’s a limited too obtuse for its personal profitable, complicated lengthy and cryptic writing for depth. Possibly. All I do know is that it’s at the moment holding a spot in my mind that few video games occupy. It’s tucked away in a distant lobe, the identical one which’s liable for producing my most surreal desires. It’s a half-remembered nightmare that I’m making an attempt my finest to recall the subsequent morning. It’ll stick with me, even when it’s at a distance. That makes it all of the extra impactful because it seems like a reminiscence slipping out of my fingertips. It’s the identical means I’m beginning to really feel in my waking hours because the world round me disintegrates into misinformation by the hands of imperfect machines.
Centum is out now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Sequence X/S, PC, and Nintendo Swap.
