The Haunted Hoard: Centum (PS5)

Centum is a game that not only revels in its inscrutability, but the difficulty in understanding it is clearly part of the point. Its storytelling is not so oblique that you feel utterly lost the whole way through, but as you try to grasp onto certain details or struggle to parse what it’s trying to say, it is also happy to remind you it is a story full of falsehoods, making it difficult to try and put together a meaningful interpretation in such a manner that you become inured to trying to make sense of much of it.

 

When you begin Centum though, you’ll be presented with a few things. One is a computer desktop, this actually core to one of the game’s main themes and issues: simulation nihilism. Much of the game will be progressed by opening programs on this computer and then spending an extended period viewing another space, be that a jail cell you’re trying to escape or a concrete playground in some dour city. While at first accessing it by way of computer may feel like a trapping, soon Centum will show that a good deal of its musings relate to the idea of simulated realities. It asks whether there can be anything valid in a falsely created world, if you can trust anything you see even if it is supposedly built from memories of something that might have existed. One way is through the game giving you some illusion of control over the narrative. Much of your interactions in this narrative adventure involve dialogue choices but their impact is unclear and sometimes hard to interpret. You’ll be asked to reply at points where you might have five or more oddly detailed responses that imply your character in-game knows a lot more about what is going on then you as the player do, but besides coloring some fairly arbitrary differences in the game’s mostly similar endings, forging your personality through these choices doesn’t feel that substantial. That may be part of the broader commentary at play, this idea you can make yourself whoever in this simulation but it doesn’t really matter, but it mostly colors a good degree of your interactions as less interesting before you even try to make sense of what is being said.

At first Centum presents itself like a point and click escape room where your choices do have a bit of an impact, but mostly in how a guaranteed event will unfold. The jail cell you find yourself in has objects to click on and interact with, and decisions like whether to partake of a drink or set a rat trap for the disturbing talking vermin in the nearby mouse hole will set you on different paths for how you escape. Perhaps a bit tellingly, this part of the game is in a different program on the in-game desktop from the rest of the adventure to make replaying it easier while the rest of the game is keener to follow a more rigid story-telling structure. You’ll still sometimes find yourself in a room where you need to click on objects or a space where you can talk to characters, but things become more straightforward and only a rare puzzle or a strange little minigame like a brief car race crop up to break away from a lot of information being thrown at you in long stretches. At first, when Centum is playing a lot more on confusion and inscrutability, you’ll see characters speaking less direct ways, hinting at big ideas or hidden agendas, and even observations you make through your dialogue choices are wordy and require a bit of time to consider. In isolation a few can have a nice air of mystery or might sound a bit poetic, but Centum feels like it obscures so much that you don’t have handholds to help your understanding grow and certain details are bound to be forgotten in a haze of characters trying to sound too enigmatic for their own good.

 

As your degree of interaction thins though, Centum can actually start to pull itself together into some more effective story-telling moments and even some scenes that could have been striking if supported well by the rest of the material. At one point, a character is speaking to his estranged mother and you are given a wide range of responses to pick for him, but no matter what you choose, he asserts his will and says everything he’s been meaning to say to her, only for her to reply back that she’s just a simulation of his mother and he wearily replies that he knew that all along. It could have been a strong moment in a narrative that focused more on ideas like the hollowness of generative AI chat bots or maybe the digital disconnect of someone too immersed in tech to prioritize reality, but instead it will likely catch the player by surprise as something more deep and personal pops up between abstract philosophizing. This can happen quite a few times in Centum as there is clearly the talent there for bringing concepts to life but they’re all crowded too closely together. The art can construct many uncomfortable, disturbing, and ominous visuals that give the game its psychological horror touch, some artificial spaces uncanny in less direct ways but also able to put forth something to make you uneasy about what might happen next or what all the obtuse conversations could be building towards. It doesn’t take a full dive into shocking horror because it cares more about its ideas than terrifying you, but it also knows how to craft specific scenes or sights to hold your interest even if information might be bouncing off you because even the dialogue can sometimes feel like it’s trying to be more impressive in appearance than substantial in content.

However, during the game’s longest stretch of just sitting back and learning about its world, you are curiously given a lot more concrete narrative details but to an unclear end. A tale is woven about a city where deliberately mutated citizens known as Rats have recently escaped, the player speaking with a fair few of them and the people eager to round them up. You’re given a good bit of time to understand these new characters and their situation and while there are still mysteries surrounding them, Centum does a better job of crafting interest and making its indirect language feel more meaningful. Funnily enough though, it doesn’t feel like this stretch about the Rats has major significance in the grander themes or narrative of Centum, almost an isolated chapter that technically connects but also undermines itself here or there because you sometimes get reminders this is all in a simulation once more, so you can’t be sure how much you should pay attention and might not realize this segment will be as lengthy and detailed as it turns out being. It can’t travel its full distance either because it is not the focus so the potential in the people you meet and their plight isn’t as deep as it could have been, but it starts to build a solid base that could have been a strong jumping off point if it had greater plot importance.

 

You’re almost guaranteed to come out the other side of Centum wondering what the point of certain parts were save to maybe bring up questions about its themes rather than providing deeper thoughts or answers. In some ways, that feels like the point of Centum though. It brings up an idea and then looks to you to ponder it rather than taking strong stances, but that also means that the simulation nihilism can run a bit rampant since there’s no grand unifying ethos to help contextualize other moments. That lack of understanding though feels like the point but in a somewhat hollow way, where you wonder why you invested time in a story that can’t seem to figure out what it wants to say at times and ends up saying so much it drowns out its effective moments.

THE VERDICT: Centum loses itself in its vagueness when it’s not outright being oblique on purpose. A good deal of this comes from its focus on its strongest theme, simulation nihilism addressed in some effective moments that swing in different directions that can make for striking moments but also show the game to be non-committal as it prefers to raise question after question without allowing itself to delve deeper into the topic and say more about it. It can sometimes find itself for small periods like the secondary narrative about the mutated Rats that could have been molded into more, but despite a strong way with words and some very strong unnerving imagery to add to the uncomfortable mood, Centum too often gets lost on its way to finding whatever points it wants to make and the player ends up lost alongside it.

 

And so, I give Centum for PlayStation 5…

A TERRIBLE rating. Talent misapplied can’t save a sinking ship, and the hole in Centum’s boat is there from the start. A player has some degree of faith in a game that what’s being said and shown will have purpose or meaning and Centum delights in subverting that or gets side-tracked with some new idea that might not connect well to the rest of the experience. There are many pieces that could be captivating if used properly, the pixel art frequently impresses or could be disturbing if there was more value placed in what you were seeing, and while you can pick about some of the visual metaphors, you’re bombarded with a lot of information that clouds up your ability to make sense of it. It isn’t so inscrutable that it is a completely aimless adventure, the simulation angle remains a persistent focus, even if it also leads to some of the more annoying touches like having to pop out of a scene and use a translator from the computer desktop to parse gibberish comments. The city with its Rats teases a bigger world but one that also feels irrelevant, and unfortunately things being irrelevant is not always a critique since the game does like to lie or pull the rug out and say it was all simulated rather than providing an honest interaction. It can set its desired moods and tones because it does know how to use art and words for emotional effect, but provoking more than immediate reactions to isolated parts seems out of Centum’s grasp. While the stretch where you’re meeting characters and doing not much else but talking is the least interactive section, almost a visual novel compared to the small attempts at puzzle solving or point and click play seen elsewhere, it does show Centum could narrow its focus to good effect and more structured moments could have allowed its best parts to hit properly instead of being oases of quality in a desert of disorientation.

 

Centum was probably right to play into horror game elements. It’s a genre where being a bit cryptic is accepted by fans and some interpretative legwork being left to the player is better accepted than with other genres, and it’s also a type of game that can lean on emotions like uncertainty and discomfort as part of the intended experience. However, Centum doesn’t wield its vagueness with care, and while it clearly has many ideas, it doesn’t commit to conveying them in ways that are enticing regardless of their level of clarity. There are parts that still come through, but it feels like someone mixed together various jigsaw puzzles and you don’t have every piece to finish them all anyway. You want to see enough to be able to at least guess at what the game is trying to do and the strong artistic direction and wielding of words suggest there is something philosophical underpinning it all, but for a game that leans so much on trying to parse its messages, it doesn’t seem too sure about what it wants to say with its mishmash of ideas.