Centum coming soon ... or so it claims 

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Surreal, "unreliable narrative-driven" adventure announced for PC and Xbox platforms

For those who like their games as twisty and mind-bending as possible, there's good news on the horizon in the form of the surreal upcoming pixel art adventure Centum. 

I could tell you what this game is about... but could you believe me? Should you? Narrators can be entirely unreliable, after all, and how would you know if they were? This doubt and uncertainty about narrative reliability lies at the heart of Centum, in which the only thing you know for sure is that "you're a prisoner in a cell. You have to escape." Actually, that's not really true. In fact, rather than having a single protagonist to control, here "players shape the behavior of an artificial intelligence through their choices, guiding it towards different outcomes and experiences." (You knew AI was going to factor in somewhere.) But how do you make informed decisions when nothing is what it seems, and "everything – characters, objects, even the world itself – may be a lie?" 

Created by Hack The Publisher (who, deceptively, is not the game's publisher – Serenity Forge is), Centum is a first-person pixel art adventure that presents a "series of daunting scenarios, each shrouded in uncertainty and enigma." Combining visual novel-style dialogues with point-and-click interactions, the game promises (threatens?) that "every click and decision is remembered, forcing you to grapple with the unreliable nature of the narrator's hints and guidance." In this way, it "challenges traditional gaming conventions by weaving an intricate narrative where reality is as fluid as the mind of its narrator." The only thing you can truly control is your choices, which will "influence the character's ego states" and alter the course of the story – hopefully for the better, as "one wrong move might cost you everything." Not surprisingly, the game is designed to be replayable, with "hidden variables persisting between game runs" to ensure that "no two experiences are alike."

There is no firm target release date for Centum, leaving its claim of "coming soon" on Xbox consoles and Steam for Windows PC entirely open to interpretation, but we should see it launch sometime this summer (unless, of course, you live in the southern hemisphere, in which case that's not true at all).  

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