At PAX West 2024, VGG stopped by the Serenity Forge booth to check out the first playable demo for Centum, a trippy and secretive horror point and click adventure. Read on for an interview with Serenity Forge Project Manager Máté Gecser about Hack the Publisher's early 2025 game Centum.
CENTUM
Developer: Hack the Publisher
Genre: Trippy "point and click"
Platform(s): PC, Xbox Series
Centum is a deeply mysterious game. No two screenshots from what we've seen so far look and feel like they're from the same game. It stirs up a medley of incongruent images in its simultaneously dreary and beautiful pixel art style: a medieval looking prison cell in one shot, an elfish eyepatch-wearing man in front of some kind of urban megastructure in another, and a horrifying rat with a grimacing human's face to top it all off.
Scrolling Centum's store page is just as cryptic. It's described as an "unreliable narrative-driven adventure," looks like a point and click, but also boasts in-game screenshots of a computer interface, an arcade-y racing game, and a visual novel-like dialogue tree.
Needless to say, it's hard to see anything coming with this game, and I went into my time with the demo at PAX West with only an inkling of what to expect.
But, of course, its premise had skyrocketed it to the top of our list, and it was one of our very first stops when we hit the expo hall on day one.
Serenity Forge Project Manager Máté Gecser, who works closely with the game's developers Hack the Publisher, describes the game like this:
"Centum looks like a point and click adventure at the first sight. You are waking up in a prison cell and realizing that you have 100 days to escape. While you are working on your escape route, you are interacting with an AI, with monsters and a bunch of puzzles and minigames, and by the end of the game, you will experience different realities. And, maybe, the main goal is not to escape from the prison, but to change your mind and change your perspective on the world."
When talking to Gecser, the first thing I was desperate to know was what exactly Centum's advertised "fluid reality" offers. He clued us into how that manifests and why Centum's world is constantly shifting.
"The game changes based on your choices. If you restart the game and do other things, it's going to be a totally different game, a totally different story. Because [in Centum], you're playing against an AI that can change what happens around you. And you have to adapt to it; you have to figure out how you can get out of the situation."
Don't fret — that's a purely narrative AI he's referring to, in case you were wondering. And with AI already becoming the inescapable unreliable narrator in the real world, part of today's landscape of disinformation and surveillance technologies, Centum's certainly got an unsettling premise for its horror point and click experience: one where you're constantly being watched, manipulated and seemingly even imprisoned by an artificial intelligence whose motives are shrouded from your view.
What is Centum's gameplay like? Hands-on with the PAX West demo
The build at PAX West 2024 was Centum's first playable demo, and I was lucky enough to be one of the first to get my hands on it. It offered a chance to play the first part of the first chapter. In total, Gecser told us the game will have four chapters and is estimated to be between 5-7 hours of gameplay.
At the start of the Centum demo, you're presented with a sketchy monochrome dreamscape. You've got your feet in the sand, there are poetic ruminations on waves hitting a boat docked nearby, and you watch nature growing and dying on loop.
And then you wake up in a dingy room, with your cat pawing at the arm of your couch and the oppressive view of the degraded world just outside your window.
You are prompted to make an observation about the horrifyingly cramped city that sits in the center of that view. After making a choice, a strange technical pop-up notifies you that something has been updated somewhere. When you finally leave the window, you find that the giant painting in your room has completely changed... and the game's main trick, that fluid reality, becomes a little more clear.
The world is changing and shifting based on your decisions, and you've got to keep up with the artificial intelligence doing it to you to hopefully outwit it in the end. You never know what miniscule choice might change something in your reality, and it makes it feel like everything could be monumental.
And the game will catch onto your tricks over time. If you think you're going to "right choice" your way to a happy ending, Centum will do whatever it can to balance the scales.
"Sometimes the game is depressing. Sometimes you're happy," Gescer said. "Based on what you choose, if you're too happy, the game will make you sad. If you're too sad, the game makes you happy. It's a balancing act all the way through."
Those highs and lows are graded on a curve, of course, he noted. This is a horror game, after all.
The puzzles were creative and usually presented a decent challenge. They hardly communicate anything about what's happening, but somehow you're able to intuit your way to the solutions.
Through the game's first one, I eventually found my way onto a PC in the room. To gain access to it, I had to do a puzzle where you clean up audio tracks so that this strange geometric device emits a noise to scare your cat off of the keyboard.
There, the protagonist's story starts to unfold through obscure emails. There are spam emails that help fill out your understanding of this stagnant world and emails delivering family drama that, despite your best efforts, snowballs out of control pretty quickly. And most importantly, it turns out you're working on some big project, one that your coworkers are starting to get afraid of.
After you finish work for the day, a knock at the door leads you out into a realm that doesn't feel like reality. There's a strange staircase leading to a glowing door, then you're in a room full of mirrors with a strange young boy that you appear to have been looking for. The puzzle here was a bit trickier. It required clicking on the mirrors in a very specific pattern to unearth the secrets of the confusing space.
You are doing all you can to keep up with the constantly shifting chaos in front of you. It's all mired in obscurity; you can't even begin to unravel it in a 15-minute demo. But it's all so intriguing.
I'm not much closer to unraveling the mysteries of the game after our stop at the Serenity Forge booth, but I am so much more intrigued by where it's all headed either way.
If you want to try and decipher this trippy point and click adventure, consider wishlisting the game on Steam ahead of its early 2025 release.
As Gescer told us at the end of our appointment, the game will certainly speak for itself when players finally get their hands on it — and we can't wait to hear what it has to say.
Want to see more like this? Check out all of our PAX West 2024 coverage.
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