The Talos Principle reviews

The Talos Principle:

This is my favourite puzzle game. Its bread and butter gameplay is solving puzzles in 3d environments. There's a set of tools used across them in different combinations but the very core is connecting beams to open doors or activate things, and figuring out how to sequence your actions and position your tools to enable the right connections at the right times. While the core puzzle solving experience is very good, two things on the side elevate the overall experience.

The story is excellent. It's presented in the form of terminals you interact with and audio logs to listen to which slowly reveal what's the deal with the world. There are really just a couple of story threads, but they are good ones and fit perfectly with the mechanical themes without getting in the way of it.

What really puts the whole experience over the top is the stars. In addition to the core puzzles, each area has stars to collect which are required for the true ending. Some of them are boring and just hidden in a bush somewhere, but the interesting ones ask you to think outside the box and break the rules, which is what really makes the game memorable.

My one main gripe with the game is that it drags towards the end. At least in my subjective experience, it could have done with one or two fewer regular areas and/or held back on how large the individual puzzles got late in the game. Meanwhile, the environment has a lot of vulnerabilities for unintended rulebreaking. In some cases that takes comparable work to just solving the puzzles and still gives you that giddy feeling of getting away with something, but in others it just trivialises the puzzles. Personally I had a hard time turning down the opportunities I saw as the game encouraged that kind of a thing to a certain extent, and I had been worn down to just wanting to move ahead and see what kind of set pieces the game would have for the very end, so there was a segment there that I left feeling unsatisfied.

If you're planning to play the game, here's what I'd recommend to look up. The tetromino door puzzles are easy for the most part but get tedious towards the end. Nothing really wrong with them but if you aren't enjoying them and choose to skip them, you will lose absolutely nothing. I don't think there are any objectives that would be an issue once you've located them, but if you've gone through an area and solved all the puzzles and know there's a star somewhere in there, spoiler it. There are some uninteresting ones that are just plain hidden somewhere, and if it involves an actual puzzle you should be able to stop between learning where it is and getting the puzzle's solution. And as a special mention, even if you are avoiding spoilers for anything else, when you see a large clock on the ground early on, look up that shit immediately. That one star puzzle is completely unlike anything else in the game and several kinds of stupid.

(This is all for the original, there's also a remake that I haven't played myself which is the same game reimplemented on the sequel's engine which has an additional small expansion, QoL improvements to the clunkiest puzzle mechanic in the game, and no idea how much else in the minor details)


Road to Gehenna DLC:

The DLC holds a side story in a side area. Its puzzles are consistently very good and in difficulty on par and for the most part not above the later areas of the main game. Disappointingly it has very little of the rulebreaking that made the base game special. The lore is mostly light and whimsical as opposed to the main game's serious and philosophical tone and there's a lot of it relative to the amount of puzzle content, to the point that at times it felt like a chore to catch up to everything I had unlocked. It has some good moments but in a very different way than the base game.

In the puzzles it was clear that the developers had wisened up to some of the naughty tricks you could pull off in the base game, as when I went sniffing for those right away, I found very little, and much of what I did find turned out to be intended routes despite not looking like that at first, sometimes even for the puzzle itself rather than stars. There were still a couple of spots where I managed to break containment in pretty obviously unintended ways. This wasn't a significant issue but it did make some areas feel ever so slightly wrong and make me second-guess what exactly the game was expecting of me.

The same recommendations apply as for the base game. There are some dumb stars here too. Other than the hard to locate ones there was at least one where the star and the way to get to it were easy to see, but finding the exact spot within the puzzle areas that would give you an unobstructed line to the connector was painful.


The Talos Principle 2:

The sequel aims for being like the original, but more. It has a "real" story with talking characters and everything, and vastly bigger areas, which ends up a two steps forwards two steps back kind of deal.

I liked the story overall. It keeps the first game's tone and has incredible high points. It also has some downright hokey elements and more importantly major pacing issues, which exacerbate the game's biggest problem: those bigger areas don't actually improve the game in any way besides offering impressive visuals, but they do make you spend ridiculous amounts of time just getting from one place to another instead of working on puzzles or following the story. The beginning of the game is a massive drag with the game tossing you to explore the city before the first real puzzles, the story giving you little to get invested in until a bit later on, and moving between the puzzles being a huge pain once you finally get to some. Once you get settled in, the middle areas are relatively smooth, and then at the very end there are multiple areas that make you run around so much if felt like deliberate hazing.

The puzzles were good. Very consistently very good. The most basic components of the first game's puzzles are still here while rotating out weaker objects and introducing new ones which mostly play well. I need to underline that having great puzzles is kind of a big deal for a puzzle game and together with the better parts of the story it's why I ultimately left feeling very positive about the game, even though there's more to say about the annoying parts.

The biggest disappointment relative to expectations was that the "extra" puzzles, which were made the first game special, are gutted and replaced with trash. There are three types of them, of which two are menial non-puzzles, and one that in concept is close to the first game's stars asks you to connect a beam of a specific colour to a receiver outside of the puzzles. The one in the very first area is fair and straightforward but even that one is just a little annoying because of the distances involved. Every single one beyond that involves making use of hidden crap somewhere, mostly but not exclusively meaning fixed connectors placed somewhere in the terrain specifically for this, turning the task into the same kind of hidden object hunt as the others.

I started the game with no outside help but by the end of that first main area I had already looked up maps, and starting from second area I looked up solutions to all the "stars" too, keeping up both through the whole game with zero regrets. Also this may have been obvious to everyone else, but it took me quite a few areas until I realised that the "remnants" are something you can go touch for story exposition audio recordings, unlike "anomalies" which look very similar but don't do anything besides looking fancy.


Road to Elysium DLC:

The DLC consists of three additional mini campaigns with their own themes in both puzzles and story. Looking up maps is recommended again.

Orpheus Ascending puzzles are about connection priority in longer chains or webs of different colours, for 16 regular + finale + 3 golden puzzles. It's mostly variation on that theme in a way that feels like the main game would have explored the same ideas in less than half as many, and some of the later ones are challenging mostly just for getting large and messy. The story is about love. It's all very mid. A fine enough installment of more of the same as long as you manage your expectations. The gold puzzles are hard; initially I solved one of them in such a finicky way that it felt likely unintended, while the two others I left for after the other DLCs and ended up spoilering, given how annoying some puzzles in this campaign had been and suspecting bullshit. Turned out they were fair actually.

Isle of the Blessed is literally the beach episode. The cast of the main game is on a vacation some time after the events of the main game. The puzzles, 27 regular + finale + 3 golden, are canonically an exhibition instead of obstacles for some grand task. There are some serious moments as the cast sorts out their personal relations and figures out their future, but the most there is at stake in solving the puzzles is impressing a (robot) girl, and the tone is lighthearted for the most part. The puzzles aren't tied to a specific theme and have nice variety. It's a good, well-rounded expansion of more of the same as what you played the base game for. Also just like the base game, the big set piece at the end involves only very light puzzling, and lots of navigating a disorientingly large and multidimensional annoying maze. The main game style stars are back too. Pandoras are solvable by just making use of what you get in the puzzles, but it's still just looking for possible angles, sometimes through dense foliage, and you won't miss out on much if you do look up the solutions. Definitely look up the sphinx button locations.

Into the Abyss fleshes out certain TTP2 events experienced by another character. The tone is darker than usual with the story being about a desperate moment and the puzzle difficulty, in 16 regular + 8 golden, being the highest among the two games and their expansions. Or that's how I thought early on but I feel it may be a bit of an exaggeration, they are definitely on the harder end but maybe not actually at the very top. The story is solid though the darkness feels gratuitous at times, while the puzzles are very good and much like a harder version of Isle of the Blessed.