Centum reminds me of Slay the Princess, a narrative game with an enthralling story, so I reached out to Serenity Forge, the publisher, for a key. As always, this review has no spoilers.

The developer, Hack the Publisher, reiterates in the synopsis the gameplay involves an unreliable narrator. This means the story isn’t clear until the end, if you’re lucky. You play as a programmer attempting to find a child in a world built by an AI. Or do you play as yourself, the Player? You change roles throughout the game but one thing is always clear: save the child.

Playthrough

Gameplay involves reading a bunch of text due to the lack of voice acting. You click and attempt to solve puzzles and make decisions to progress. It’s unclear what decisions you need to make or why. Escape an area? Progress the story? Find answers? This confusion is an intentional part of the game.

The game doesn’t have a horror tag but it involves horror elements. The characters become unnerving and decisions lead to creepy results. Just look at the screenshots here for examples. Thankfully, there are no jump scares!

I enjoyed the first hour of gameplay. I love puzzles and didn’t mind the reading or storyline. About 2ish hours in, around Chapter 3, it became pretty dull. The game makes you switch characters and you lose sight of the Narrator. The story is hard to follow at certain points and you can’t tell if you’re making progress. This is on top of the endless reading of walls of text.

I stuck it out and the game picked back up quickly in Chapter 4. It went from endless paragraphs of text to more puzzles and problem solving. I was quickly able to understand the story.

Conclusion

The ending blew me away! I was pretty impressed overall at the conclusion, which I still don’t fully grasp. This is one of the few games where I needed to fully replay to get a new path of the story to enjoy for a holistic understanding. The price point seems steep but the replayability makes it worthwhile. If you enjoyed Slay the Princess, then Centum will be a blast!