"All I have left is the rational thought. It's up to you to decide whether it's somewhere beyond the wall or simply drawn upon these bricks."

I'm not a big fan of the point-&-click adventure genre. In most games there's a set of mechanics that tell you what you can and cannot do, but in these games there's only one mechanic: interact. Which means you can do everything and nothing. Which forces you to view the game as if it gave you infinite possibilities. So then I hit the ludo-narrative dissonance when almost everything I try to do is impossible. In practice there's always only one or a few things you can do, but you can never truly figure out which because from your perspective you can potentially do anything.

Centum immediately drew me in though. A man stuck in a room and talking to shadows reminded me of Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl, which is a book I began reading while writing my own novella about a man losing his grip on reality. I never finished either of those, just as I was unable to finish this.

You start off having no clue about anything, and the game will repeatedly ask you questions about your past or your identity, and you are allowed to say you don't know. At this point I think what's interesting is that it's essentially asking you to either be your real self or try to engage with the game on its own terms by guessing what role you're supposed to be playing.

"There might be pixel people burning alive in these pixel buildings, unable to escape the pixel fire."

You're asked to figure things out on your own; whom to trust and whom not. Initially I felt like my every decision was valid and moved the story forward. It made me think that the game was about how we engage with games. But by the end of my first "playthrough" I was met with a kind of unsatisfying ending that didn't clear anything up. Then the game told me that it wasn't over and that I should play through a "hacked" version of the campaign, and I did, and again the result was confusing and inconclusive. At which point the "hacked" campaign didn't work anymore, and I was forced to try the standard one again.

This is the point where the game basically fell apart for me. The illusion shattered. I was intentionally making decisions that deviated from my previous "playthroughs," which basically made me feel that same ludo-narrative dissonance I talked about earlier. Now I was trying to win "the game." Whenever I participated in the same dialogues I mostly got the same answers, which made the whole thing feel much more linear than I had originally thought as well.

And still, my third "playthrough" "failed" as well.

What initially seemed like a fascinating interactive story, devolved into a frustrating guessing game.