Its a Monday morning as I write this. My day is just beginning and Im getting my to-do list in order. As I check assignments off my list, I stop to remember if there are any games Ive played recently that Ive 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, didnt 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. Its not that I had forgotten what Id played; its just that it was so otherworldly that it feels like I played it in another life entirely.Recommended VideosI dont know how to describe Centum. I dont know how to recommend it. I dont even know if I should. But if all of this has piqued your curiosity already, consider jumping in blind.Centum - Announcement Trailer | PS5 GamesFor 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?RelatedWell, not so much. Centums enigmatic story takes place entirely inside of an AI computer program gone awry. Im trapped inside of a desktop, clicking through programs and playing occasional minigames between reading stray text files. If youve ever had the misfortune of using something like Google Gemini, you know that AI isnt the most reliable narrator. Sometimes it spits out garbled pictures and nonsense information. It resembles the reality we know, but its never quite right. The devil is in the details, and AI loves to get them all wrong.Its through that lens that you can begin to crack Centums 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 cant decode them at first and think Im just too dumb to grasp what Centum is trying to tell me. Its 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. Its the world around me thats incoherent, filled with lies and outright nonsense.Serenity ForgeWho am I in all of that? Thats the puzzle that really draws me in. Im desperate to figure out who the prisoner Im controlling really is. I get flashes of their real life, one seemingly scarred by tragedy. Or at least thats what I think Im 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 thats only half identifiable. Theres an uneasy horror in that, and I choose to believe that its what Centum aims to illustrate through its confounding world.Days after finishing it, I dont really know what I think of Centum. Maybe its a little too obtuse for its own good, confusing long and cryptic writing for depth. Maybe. All I know is that its currently holding a spot in my brain that few games occupy. Its tucked away in a distant lobe, the same one thats responsible for producing my most surreal dreams. Its a half-remembered nightmare that Im trying my best to recall the next morning. Itll stay with me, even if its at a distance. That makes it all the more impactful as it feels like a memory slipping out of my fingertips. Its the same way Im 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.Editors Recommendations