What is Entropy? Three things we can tell you.
Every couple of days, someone new asks us what Entropy is. It's the first question people have about Wonderfall, and honestly, the one we're most tempted to answer in full. We won't. The whole game is Léon finding out, and we'd like that discovery to be yours too.
So here are three things that won't spoil anything. The rest, you'll learn in the Paris we've built for you.
1. It doesn't destroy. It ages.
Entropy isn't fire, flood, or bombardment. It's a quieter kind of catastrophe. The matter it touches doesn't break, it gets old. Stone softens. Iron fatigues. Mortar crumbles. What's left, once a building has given up, is a fine dark blue sand that drifts into streets and doorways like a new kind of weather.
That sand is everywhere in Wonderfall. It's also the reason Léon can do what he does, but that's a story for another post.
2. It makes people sick.
Entropy doesn't distinguish between a cathedral and a lung. Since the middle of the 19th century, Parisians have watched each other slow down, cough, forget, and fade. The poor suffered first and suffered worst, their bodies worn down by pollution and overcrowding long before the wealthy admitted the disease could touch them too. By the time our story begins, it has a name, an Academy devoted to studying it, and still no cure.
Everyone Léon has ever met has lived with Entropy inside them. Everyone except Léon.
3. It's older than anyone suspects.
The Academy's first confirmed Entropy readings come from the mid-1800s. The phenomenon is far older than that. For centuries it lived inside the ordinary wear of time, too faint to be named. It only grew undeniable as the industrial age progressed and the process accelerated. Whatever set it in motion happened in a much earlier Paris.
That's as much as we'll say about that.
And the fourth thing?
The fourth thing is what started it. Léon will find out on his way to Notre-Dame, and we'd like you to find out with him…
Add Wonderfall to your wishlist and come stand in the blue sand with us.