Serenity Forge, despite its name, seems to specialize in games that are meant to upset or disturb you. It’s probably best known for publishing the premium edition of Doki Doki Literature Club in 2021 or for the extended cut of Slay the Princess, but it’s got a full roster of high weirdness on offer. It takes a very particular company to release a physical edition of LISA: The Painful.
Centum (Latin for “hundred”) was one of several new games that was half-hidden in Serenity Forge’s booth at last year’s PAX West, and it was easily the least suited to a convention environment. No one involved in its production was around to explain anything about it, and Serenity Forge’s representative seemed just as confused as I was. For a minute I wondered if, in keeping with the game’s general theme, even Serenity Forge didn’t know what it was or why it was at their booth.
As far as I can tell, Centum is a point-and-click adventure which is initially presented as a long-lost, half-broken computer game from roughly 1992. You begin as an unnamed, unseen prisoner in a cell somewhere in a doomed city, and who is evaluated every night by a judge who always accuses you of lying no matter what you say. Your only potential allies are a malformed rat who lives inside the wall and something that might be a ghost.
On the other hand, you can alt-tab to a computer desktop at any time, which contains a number of encoded documents and a couple of .bat files, one of which has the power to start your prison stay over from scratch. Another warns you that you’ve only got 3 days before the simulation stops.
Right from the start, Centum features some of the most obtuse puzzles I’ve ever seen. I briefly talked about my personal scale of overall adventure game impenetrability last month in my column on Slender Threads, and the only thing keeping Centum from being a 10 on that scale is that it never gives you that many things that you can do at any given time.
Even so, it often presents the player with no guidelines whatsoever, either mechanically or narratively. I routinely ran into dead ends where I either had to progress by simply experimenting until something worked, or wander around until I hit some invisible trigger.
In the end, that turns out to be part of the point. Centum eventually describes itself, near its endgame, as a series of “inescapable escape rooms.” You aren’t meant to find a way out, and escaping from one prison often leads you to another. Instead, it’s about how you choose to react to a seemingly unwinnable situation, and what you as the player take away from the overall experience.
I’ve seen several games bill themselves as “Lynchian,” most recently Alice’s Lullaby, but Centum is one of the first times I’ve seen a game that really rolled up its sleeves and earned the label. For the first half, there’s some real ambiguity about what’s happening, and why, and who your character actually is. If you stopped at roughly the halfway point, you could make a solid textual argument that Centum is about a decaying virtual world, the last hallucination of a dying programmer, and/or the fugue dream of a depressed shut-in.
It’s almost disappointing when, near its end, it actually slows down to explain much of what’s happened. As confusing as Centum initially is, it wraps up on a straightforward note, and I’m honestly not sure how much that damages the overall experience. It might’ve been better if it had deliberately kept that early sense of ambiguity all the way through. There are still questions after the end, but not as many as I expected.
As it is, Centum is memorable and creepy, but it’s hard to give it any kind of unqualified recommendation. Centum is the sort of project that rides the ragged edge between a visual novel and a game, with some incredible art and dialogue, but its deliberate inaccessibility is an issue. This is meant for a very specific audience, and I’d imagine you already know from context whether or not you’re in it.
On my end, I’m glad it exists, but if I’d been playing it on my own I’d have dropped it after the first 30 minutes. A game that’s deliberately being obtuse to make a point is, at the end of the day, still obtuse.
[Centum, developed by Hack the Publisher and published by Serenity Forge, is now available for PlayStation 4&5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam for $14.99. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a Serenity Forge representative.]
