Centum (2025)

Developer: Hack the Publisher

I’ve played a few Serenity Forge games and came to recognize and trust their name as a publisher, so that put Centum on my radar when it popped up on my Steam page at release. Since I choose the games I want to play and review (based on what I know I might like), usually my reviews skew positive. However, this is one of those cases where a game turned out to be quite different from the expectation I had for it. Centum is a point-and-click puzzle adventure game about being trapped in a story (computer program) with an unreliable narrator. Centum has the polish and vibes of a cool horror game, but largely felt like it had no real purpose, had incoherent dialogue options, and a chore to get through.

Centum starts you off with very little information and you have a singular goal of escaping a jail cell. You’re not sure who you are, but you know you want to escape. In the introduction, you are greeted by a strange being who asks you some nonsensical questions, which you can answer with an equally nonsensical, wordy set of 5 answers. I figured at this introduction that these questions would make sense later, that you would get to make the choice again in the future once you had more context (spoiler alert - nope, not the case, it never made sense). You can do different things to get closer to your escape from the jail cell, like setting a trap for a rat, watering a plant, or playing with strange items found in the room. There is something incredibly ominous about the door out from this cell, and what lies beyond it. The horror of this door and the character who you encounter here is probably the most compelling of the game, but unfortunately that doesn’t really continue throughout. Centum also has a computer desktop interface which you can use to run programs, check the internet browser, and decipher strange notes. You can start your jail cell attempt over at any point by running the program again.

Okay this part was pretty funny, especially the badly-drawn Among Us character.

The reason I was drawn to Centum was because of its detailed art style, evoking early PC point-and-click adventure games. Combing that with mystery and subtle horror vibes it gave off, I was convinced to picked it up without looking into it too much. The aesthetics of this game are absolutely the best thing about it, and I especially like the environments they built that feel realistic but just a little “off” in a creepy way. The character designs are also quite weird and unique, some arguably disturbing, but I wouldn’t mind that so much if their designs made a little more sense within the context. There’s not too much to talk about on the sound side, as a lot of the game is pretty silent. Also, I can’t find the soundtrack for this game anywhere, so unfortunately, I wasn’t able to refresh my memory on this. However, I do like the eerie, lullaby-like songs, like the one you hear at the credits scene.

These dystopian environments such as these are genuinely so sick to look at and make me wish I had enjoyed this game more.

Solving the puzzle of the jail cell is decently enjoyable, since there’s different approaches you can take and lots of little details to explore. However, about an hour in, I made it out of the cell and the game began to go downhill for me. I was given more nonsensical dialogue choices, picking my answer based on what seemed weirdest or just straight up choosing at random. Despite being offered different long and complex dialogue choices, often they all took you to the same conclusion. It felt at times that the game was just padding the runtime with dialogue that wasn’t interesting or useful. I should mention that before I hit the 2-hour mark, I realized this game was really not doing it for me, and I put in a refund request with Steam. However, since I had spread out my playtime too much, by the time I put in that request it had been more than two weeks since I purchased it, so the request was denied. I thought well, if I must keep it, let me give it another try. I pushed through, coming upon occasional moments where the story would get more interesting. There are “PC” mini-games along the way, none of them I cared for too much, but they do help break up the different sections. Another thing I expected from this game was interesting puzzles - there definitely were some, but it wasn’t really a puzzle game. I enjoyed using clues from the desktop interface to figure out how to solve something in the current world, since you often had to decipher these clues to make them useful. However, there were other puzzles, like figuring out the strange cube frequencies, that didn’t really feel as satisfying. Also, this is a pretty specific complaint, but I would say that this game is accurate to its “steam deck verified” rating for 99% of the game: the exception being a specific tic-tac-toe game near the end. I was stuck on this for way too long before I finally thought to try it on my PC, where it worked just fine.

There are some cool but fucked-up looking characters that added a lot of intrigue to the game. However, asking them questions usually just brings more questions.

I would say that much, if not most, of the dialogue in Centum feels pretentious and useless to help my understanding of the world. I started to get really annoyed that even mid-game or later, when you’d expect to know what’s going on, you are still being asked questions that are basically incoherent and expected to think that this game is “deep” and “mysterious.” However, you also get more bits of lore and explanation through messages that start to appear on your desktop, so I began to slightly understand the characters involved in the story. Many of these notes you find serve to help figure out puzzles, while some are back-and-forth email conversations that don’t feel like they add much context at all. It’s not under the last chapter or two of the game that things start to make a little bit of sense, and even then, it’s not in a “ah-ha!” way, but in a “oh… okay then” kind of way. I can at least say I liked that these final chapters had more characters to converse with, rather than just internal dialogue and reading computer notes. Personally, I find that both the “unreliable narrator” trope and the “you’re aware you’re inside a game” trope have been largely overdone, and in better ways than done here. Not to mention that it’s a trope I don’t really care for, as I enjoyed OneShot more than this game but still didn’t enjoy it all that much.

Answering a bunch of questions with different types of word salad answers all to just be given a personality test result at the end of the game.

Centum felt much longer than the 6 hours it took me to beat it, but I am proud of myself for completing it and seeing it through. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend this game, as I didn’t feel it brought any kind of satisfying conclusion at the end. Sure, it has decent replay value, since you can choose to approach things in a different way and get more achievements, but for me that’s not something that sounds appealing at all. Centum feels like a game that at its inception had a cool concept, theoretically, but didn’t translate well, like some vital pieces got lost along the way. It wasn’t fun to play for much of its time and it seems to alienate the player in its quest to be indecipherable and obscure. I’ve played plenty of “artistic” games that are less about enjoyment and more about an impactful message and I can see the value in that, but in contrast, Centum felt empty and left me confused about what it was all for.

Centum is available on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S

Played on: PC (Steam Deck)

Last Played: 5/14/2025

Playtime: 6 hrs