CENTUM
You may point, but you may not want to click
You can look out of the window of your cell – either in the city or at home – but you won’t find much respite from the horrors
Developer
Hack The
Publisher
Publisher
Serenity Forge
Format
PC, Xbox Series
Origin
Estonia
Release
Summer
overnight, the sapling in the corner of our dingy cell has sprouted into a full-grown tree. We click on it and are greeted with a string of Russian text. It says something for how quickly this narrative adventure from Estonian developer Hack The Publisher (a name that already suggests a darkly mischievous streak) establishes its unpredictable milieu that we assume this is intentional. It’s only after reaching the end of this early build that we check its bug list and discover it isn’t. Then again, after what we’ve just played, with its metatextual flourishes and multiple layers of fiction, we start to wonder if this, too, isn’t part of the deal.