I can’t stop thinking about this enigmatic new game about AI

It’s a Monday morning as I write this. My day is just beginning and I’m getting my to-do list in order. As I check assignments off my list, I stop to remember if there are any games I’ve played recently that I’ve been meaning to write about. None that I can remember. After all, my weekend was spent watching wrestling and an Oscars-adjacent live stream with friends.

No, wait. I played something too, didn’t I? My head is hazy (probably from excessive pizza consumption), but a game starts to come back into focus. Something weird. Unsettling. What was it called? Centum. Was it an indigestion-induced fever dream? My Steam account begs to differ, reminding me that I went on a three-hour point and click odyssey over the weekend between social gatherings. It’s not that I had forgotten what I’d played; it’s just that it was so otherworldly that it feels like I played it in another life entirely.

I don’t know how to describe Centum. I don’t know how to recommend it. I don’t even know if I should. But if all of this has piqued your curiosity already, consider jumping in blind.

For those of you who need a little more to go on, Centum is a very cryptic point and click adventure game out today on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Nintendo Switch. Its premise sounds simple enough at its most fundamental level: You are a prisoner and you must break free. The most simplified (and misleading) explanation I could give is that Centum sticks players into a series of rooms and asks them to click around to solve puzzles and escape. In its first room, I need to find chalk to draw a figure on a wall, figure out how to deal with a rat problem, and wipe down a dirty window with a cloth. That all sounds familiar, enough, right?

Well, not so much. Centum’s enigmatic story takes place entirely inside of an AI computer program gone awry. I’m trapped inside of a desktop, clicking through programs and playing occasional minigames between reading stray text files. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of using something like Google Gemini, you know that AI isn’t the most reliable narrator. Sometimes it spits out garbled pictures and nonsense information. It resembles the reality we know, but it’s never quite right. The devil is in the details, and AI loves to get them all wrong.

It’s through that lens that you can begin to crack Centum’s initially impenetrable shell. In between puzzle solving, I find myself having conversations with a range of creeps and weirdos. They all talk in philosophical riddles. I can’t decode them at first and think I’m just too dumb to grasp what Centum is trying to tell me. It’s the same way I feel when I hear academics debating philosophy, tossing out references that fly over my head. The deeper I get, the more I begin to accept that I may not be the problem. It’s the world around me that’s incoherent, filled with lies and outright nonsense.

Who am I in all of that? That’s the puzzle that really draws me in. I’m desperate to figure out who the prisoner I’m controlling really is. I get flashes of their real life, one seemingly scarred by tragedy. Or at least that’s what I think I’m seeing. Centum teases me at every turn, even switching up my identity at one point. My memories are hazy, lost inside of a hallucinating machine that has consumed me and spit out some version of myself that’s only half identifiable. There’s an uneasy horror in that, and I choose to believe that it’s what Centum aims to illustrate through its confounding world.

Days after finishing it, I don’t really know what I think of Centum. Maybe it’s a little too obtuse for its own good, confusing long and cryptic writing for depth. Maybe. All I know is that it’s currently holding a spot in my brain that few games occupy. It’s tucked away in a distant lobe, the same one that’s responsible for producing my most surreal dreams. It’s a half-remembered nightmare that I’m trying my best to recall the next morning. It’ll stay with me, even if it’s at a distance. That makes it all the more impactful as it feels like a memory slipping out of my fingertips. It’s the same way I’m starting to feel in my waking hours as the world around me disintegrates into misinformation at the hands of imperfect machines.

Centum is out now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Nintendo Switch.