Platform:
PC
Released:
March 12, 2025
Publisher:
Serenity Forge
Developer:
Hack The Publisher
An adventure game featuring a time-loop, post-apocalyptic mutants, and a staunchly unreliable narrator, Centum is a narrative title that delights in obscurity and aims to deliver existential angst. It plays on fears of digital subservience and the concept of humanity, leaning on gore and the macabre to evoke a sense of constant dread.
With a mysterious AI serving as both your constant companion and the creator of the game’s world, Centum brings the techno-dystopian horrors of classic grim adventure games such as I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream into the modern-day, for better or worse.
Centum can mostly be described as a point-and-click adventure, tasking you with observing a room or environment and interacting with objects and characters within at your own pace. Your nebulous objective is to “escape” the initial prison cell you find yourself in, though odd interactions and mysterious hints will warp your sense of what “the point” of the game is throughout. You’ll be presented with obscure choices that have immediate consequences but unclear narrative effects, such as drinking a cup of bodily fluids or placing your hand in a rat trap. Some of these serve as solutions to puzzles, while others influence the direction of the narrative and your character’s eventual fate at the end of the game.
Puzzle elements in Centum are scarce outside of its initial time-loop “escape room” sequence, which ultimately improves the experience. There are multiple ways to escape the time loop, but the logic is too esoteric and couched in allegory to make any sense, or to make for a satisfying puzzle-solving experience. The other puzzle instances are mostly par for the course for narrative adventure games, requiring you to enter codes or interpret patterns based on scraps of knowledge found in the environment. Some of the puzzle ideas are neat, such as using the decoder on the game’s PC pause screen to translate messages – I would have liked to see these concepts used more often in the core gameplay.
Outside of static scenes, Centum contains a few arcade-style sequences that shake things up. These are short and sweet – not deep or compelling enough to enjoy on their own, but a decent change of pace from the standard point-and-click gameplay. The threat that your performance in these games could influence the narrative outcome also lends them some urgency, with the game’s AI narrator commenting on your gameplay and adjusting the difficulty on the fly.
Generative AI is both a narrative theme and a motif throughout Centum’s environmental design, with each “level” reflecting a variation of the metaphorical prison the protagonist finds themselves in. There is a consistent hierarchy within each scene’s interactable elements: you’ll always see a window to view the City, something to sleep on, an image on the wall, and a door that leads… somewhere. It’s as though the AI building the world has taken the same prison framework and generated variations of it to suit specific narratives – the prison is now a workspace, or now a playground. It threads together Centum’s world into something unsettlingly familiar, providing enough consistency to make any variation feel surprising.
Unfortunately, the running theme of generative AI also extends to Centum’s writing. Despite numerous localisation teams, much of the prose in the game feels overwritten and flowery to the point of meaninglessness. While it’s fitting in-universe that language would mimic the generated tone and structure of tools like DeepSeek and ChatGPT, it doesn’t make the obscure metaphors and generous slabs of purple prose any less frustrating to parse. I found myself instinctively skimming over chunks of descriptive text, and needed to force myself to go back and review paragraphs in case I’d missed vital narrative cues.
However, the visual design of the game instead expertly leverages this awkward, uncanny sense of artificiality to build Centum’s grotesque world. Shifting between gruesomely detailed pixel art and dream-like sketches, the artwork creates a stifling sense of dystopia. Characters are just so off, from a ghostly “friend” that flickers in and out of glitch-like existence to a literally faceless arm of bureaucracy that constantly bleeds, each one is impeccably crafted to both stoke your heebie-jeebies and invite intrigue.
Centum’s story itself is haunting, compelling, and affecting, and serves the gameplay well to carry you through to its conclusion. There are multiple final outcomes based on your choices, with a final “personality” assessment assigning you a particular archetype that calls back to an early narrative moment and causes you to think about the decisions you’ve made. Despite its hit-or-miss writing, Centum is overall an intriguing cluster of ideas that provokes reflection through the lens of the grotesque – it’s not Slay The Princess, but there’s enough psychological meat here for any light-horror enthusiasts.
7
Good
Positive:
- Beautifully grotesque visual design
- Haunting, compelling narrative and themes
Negative:
- Writing style is floral and dense
- Puzzles are more esoteric than enjoyable
In spite of its obscure, overwritten prose and awkward puzzles, Centum provides a chilling and compelling narrative experience that both devastates and provokes reflection. Its stunning environment design builds a universe that extends beyond the screen, while its grossly uncanny characters evoke a base level of anxiety that is at once compelling and horrifying. Recommended for fans of classic point-and-click spookies who don’t mind a bit of skim-reading.
About the Author
David McNamara
he/him or they/them
David is a proudly queer performing artist and software developer. He spends most of his downtime with a controller in his hands and a lazy beagle on his lap.
