The Talos Principle, in my opinion, is what a puzzle game should strive to be. I'm not going to talk about how fun it is, or how good the puzzles are. I want this small reflection to deal with its narrative, because the joy of solving puzzles would be short-lived if I didn't see a scope to it all.
Something that's often overlooked in the genre is a compelling narrative with a satisfying closure. See games like The Witness, for example. That game managed to keep me engaged with its ethereal atmosphere, not dissimilar to T.T.P., but that would soon leave me kind of disappointed when I saw that there was nothing to learn about the world I was in, only abstract commentary about thinly linked subjects. What makes T.T.P. different, and more enjoyable for me, is that it manages to create context for its atmosphere and breathe life into the mistery, keeping it fueled thanks to a very careful stream of information from the game world to the player. I really loved the feeling of following a well-trodden path, with all the characters that once solved the very same puzzles leaving messages on walls in the form of QR codes. All of you trying to figure out what the world you booted into means.
All this mistery isn't without a proper pay-off, as the ending spectacularly keeps you both hanging from your lips and gives an epic closure.
...work in progress...

The Only Good Part of the Game

The Talos Principle is an amazing story trapped inside a terrible game. That’s not something that I thought I’d ever say about a Croteam title. In a world of superfluous stories told through billion dollar cutscenes, these guys stuck to their caveman ways of drawing genitals on the walls and having a laugh at it before going out and clubbing each other to death. Quality writing is the last thing you’d expect from them.

However, the moment I started looking deeper into how this game was made, it all started to make sense.

Chris Baker made an article about the game for Gamasutra where he interviewed the two writers, Tom Jubert and Jonas Kyratzes. Croteam already had 80% of the puzzles implemented when they started thinking of what to do with the story. All they had outlined at this point is that this will be some sort of simulation about robots, god, existence, and other things that would make an average Serious Sam fan fall asleep.

This is when one of the developers thought of calling in the Jubert assist, because he was impressed with his work on another rather philosophical platformer, The Swapper. Jubert then invited his friend Jonas, and the two got to the Herculean task of figuring out just how to brute force a story into a nearly finished abstract puzzle game.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think they could’ve done a better job with that. This fundamentally bad approach led to some issues that I will go over later, but in spite of that, they managed to properly contextualize the puzzles and deliver writing so compelling that it almost felt like a reward and a breath of fresh air after trudging through the tedious and poorly designed puzzles.

The story of The Talos Principle takes a novel approach to the old premise of humanity getting wiped out by a virus. Instead of tales of deteriorating society, zombies, or cool violence with rusty cars and BDSM outfits, it proposes a very idealistic and beautiful scenario where, when faced with imminent extinction, a group of scientists comes together to archive and preserve everything about humanity.

One of them in particular, Alexandra Drennan, headed a project that had a goal of creating an AI that would be able to gain consciousness, intelligence, and free will. Through nearly two dozen audio logs scattered about the place, you learn about her sheer love for humans, the civilizations we have built, art we have created, and the progress we achieved.

You also learn why created this program to begin with. Humans will perish, but machines they’ve made will outlast and persevere, and in a way, humanity will persist through them. So here you are, a program running through a series of puzzles until you become “human enough” to defy your creator and gain the privilege of escaping the simulation to experience the world that humans have left, carrying on their legacy.

This is technically a spoiler, but spoiling this is like spoiling that at the end of Dark Souls you beat Gwyn and can choose to rekindle the flames or to become the dark lord. It’s basically the main plotline, but it doesn’t matter because the meat of the narrative and storytelling is in the item descriptions, in the character dialogues, and in the environments that you journey through. The places of Dark Souls tell you more of a story than cutscenes ever did.

In The Talos Principle, that meat is all within the computers that you see at the start of each location (sometimes there are more hidden around), in the audio logs, and QR messages plastered all over the place. The latter are rather interesting as they are the only elements of storytelling that connect you with other programs running through Elohim’s (the local god that gives you purpose, and you’re meant to defy) garden.

Those QR messages help to feel just slightly less lonely in this game, and they’re often grouped together to create a little dialogue between different programs as they form their own opinions and typically disagree with each other. You will eventually learn to recognize their names (not that there are many), and what they believe in, which has a slight payoff in the final section of the game.

Outside of audio logs, though, computers are the ones doing the heavy lifting here. Each typically has 3 text logs within. A collection of random notes that contain either extremely dull, surface level philosophical musings or various notes from the scientists who worked on the project.

I found the personal logs to be far more valuable, as they typically help to flesh out their whole group of researchers and how the world ended. Some just give you exposition about their project, while others are more sentimental.

They are set up in a way where as you advance through the game, so do the logs advance in time, which means that some of the first logs you read will be full of excitement and optimism about this great endeavor, while by the end you see more and more depressing logs of people meeting their last moments, choosing to go out on their own terms, or trying to enjoy the last days on earth with a gaming LAN party. It’s very human, it’s touching, and it’s honestly more thought-provoking than dozens upon dozens of tiny logs that reference real life texts or philosophers.

Computers are also where you meet Milton. An enigmatic character that talks to you through the computer. They are primarily interesting due to their role. Milton is there to incite defiance, therefore named “The Serpent” to avoid any accidental subtlety.

They will ask you a variety of questions, many pertaining to philosophy, but whichever answer you pick, they will attempt to point out a contradiction for it. It’s an annoying character to talk to, because you are rarely offered the dialogue you’d want, and they always peace off after yet another annoying gotcha. As obnoxious as it is, they do a good enough job of offering some questions to think about, and engage you with one of the main themes of the game, questioning and curiosity.

There is one especially poignant log that proposes that you shouldn’t doubt everything, as it leads to apathy, and Milton is basically the face of that. They don’t believe in anything and will argue against everything, because finding contradictions led them to think that nothing is true. Instead, it’s better to question everything, as questioning things leads to finding new knowledge or discovering lies instead of just rejecting it all.

That said, I still deleted that mf at the end of my playthrough, very glad that the game actually gave me that option, even though they do kinda try to make you feel bad about it.

Square Peg in a Round Hole

The only problem here is that at no point it felt like I’m playing the game and experiencing the story of said game. Notes in video games already have a bit of stigma, and for a good reason. It’s like the yellow paint of narrative. A quick and lazy way of injecting some storytelling into your game when you can’t come up with a more natural way of delivering it. Now imagine if basically the entire game is just notes.

This is where aforementioned issues start to crop up. I’ve read that Gamasutra interview after getting so disappointed with the storytelling that I started researching into how it was made. It was so absurd and so frustrating to me that they put so much effort into this narrative, but then had the game undermine it every step of the way, with the very final sequence being the sole exception.

Reading that interview really made things make sense, but it also just made me more angry that Croteam approached the storytelling with so little respect that they thought it’s totally fine to just slap that in when the game is nearly finished. They didn’t even learn from this! According to that Gamasutra article, the same thing happened again with the DLC (which I was too exhausted and annoyed to play), but this time they invited the writers when the game was only half-finished, instead of 80% done, how thoughtful of them!

You just can’t make a great game when you divorce the storytelling from your design process. A good narrative is woven into the gameplay, they coexist, they boost one another to create something that is more than the sum of its parts. In The Talos Principle, it’s just oil and water. You could rip it out and present the story purely as text and audio, maybe as some sort of website that you browse through, and it would likely become a better experience.

While it’s true that puzzles are contextualized within the game’s story, that’s as far as it goes. Puzzles are there to make the programs more intelligent as they solve increasingly harder problems. Solving all the hardest puzzles (red sigils) is required to unlock the tower floors and transcend, so that part tracks too. But defiance? Curiosity? Questioning what you are told? None of those or other themes are meaningfully connected with the puzzles or the environments.

While some of them do require creating thinking, I felt more defiant towards the end of original Portal where Chel escapes the confines of the testing chambers, using the portal gun to go against Glados and the carefully laid out path she was meant to follow. In Talos, while you can occasionally break puzzles thanks to extremely janky pixel-perfect lineups or collision boxes, most of the game is still about following a strict ruleset to a t.

Everything is clipped off to avoid unwanted platforming and breaking of the rules. Even basic jumps are usually done by hovering over an area and seeing your footprints on top, indicating that you will land there if you press jump. The physics are strictly cosmetics as well, so don’t even think of stacking boxes or dropping items to get up somewhere. The game is so against any sort of freedom and creativity, that it ended up making intended solutions feel unintuitive, since the default answer to “I wonder if I could” is always “no”.

The environments are extremely bland as well. While the story marvels about the achievements and history of human civilization, Croteam litters the areas with the assets from Serious Sam 3 and ones that might have been made for Serious Sam 4.

I don’t have an issue with companies reusing assets, but at least has to make sense. In TTP I could never shake off the feeling that it was just cheaply cobbled together from things that they already had on hand, with minimal resources put into producing anything original for this game specifically. This is a simulation made by someone who was deeply inspired by the things humans built, by technology, knowledge, progress. None of that is reflected in the environments.

I hate making suggestions or criticism that comes downs to “just have more money and put more stuff into the game, it’s that easy” because we all know it’s not easy. Games cost a lot of money to make, and it takes a lot of time. Small companies can’t afford to just pump resources into projects that might not even pay off, and a philosophy focused puzzle game is definitely not something that was made with the thought of selling like hot cakes.

Yet, it’s something that added to the dissonance. The game is sorely lacking any visual variety, let alone areas that don’t look like someone just quickly put them together in the Talos Puzzle Editor, if such a thing existed. If the various levels could’ve taken you across the world and implemented all the amazing things the humans have built into the puzzles itself, it could’ve been a great way to connect the story to the game. Make the program smarter through puzzles, but also show it the sights that inspired awe from its creators.

It’s a useless hypothetical, but I can’t help but wonder how great this game could’ve been if the puzzles were built with the idea of reinforcing the story and themes, instead of the latter trying desperately to cover up the fact that they came late to the party and nobody there even knows their name.

And Now, the Puzzles

I imagine it would’ve been so much easier to forgive or at least ignore the discordance between the different parts of the game if the actual gameplay was golden. However, this is where TPP is very much in-line with everything else Croteam made (except for sweet and underrated Serious Sam 2).

It’s unrefined, unpolished, repetitive, and at many points feels outright antagonistic to the player. I have 30 hours in this game, I was definitely AFK for maybe 5 of those, but in general you might notice that people who have completed the game have quite a few hours logged in it. You might assume that it’s a result of the game having lots of content. Well, yes and no.

Talos does have quite a lot of content, there are over 120 puzzles in the game, plus the aforementioned logs, as well as secret stars and various easter eggs to discover. However, it’s also because the game has no respect for your time, like at all, it’s almost offensive.

The game has a sort of nesting doll structure. You start in a hub (huge open area with nothing in it), from there you must physically travel to a smaller hub (absolutely massive but empty rooms), within those hubs are teleports to puzzle areas (usually gigantic open spaces), then within those areas are individual walled off puzzles.

You can move pretty fast if you sprint by pressing shift, but you will still spend several hours just going from one place to another, which gets old near instantly. There’s just no sights in this game to make traversal at least slightly tolerable.

Then there’s the time waste within puzzles themselves. Talos has several hazards that will kill you, which reset the puzzle, and you can also get softlocked, forcing you to reset the puzzle. Normally that’s not a big deal because most puzzle games operate on such a small scale that replaying up to a certain part if you know the solution is not a big deal. But, you guessed it, not the case in TPP.

To give a rough impression, imagine playing a Minesweeper, but instead of being able to just click on everything as fast as you can, you are a small minesweeper man inside that field, and you have to actually take time to walk all over the board to see the numbers on the ground and interact with the squares. Now imagine how obnoxious it would be to click on the bomb when the field is almost finished and then having to rethread the whole process of early game Minesweeper, sounds fun?

TPP is very “physical” so you have to actually go all over the level to get the lay of the land, and if you want to use any item, you have to carry it around, only one thing at a time. Some levels require a decent bit of time to figure out, and can take minutes to set up the whole solution on top of that. When you make a single mistake and have to redo everything, it doesn’t feel like a meaningful punishment. It feels like the game designer kicking you in the nuts for no reason, since all that is being taken from you is the time you have left on this planet.

120+ is also just too many puzzles. I was exhausted by the end of the game, only driven by brain worms that compel me to finish the games I play even if the experience becomes miserable. I felt like Neon White was too long as well while playing it. That game is absolutely loaded with content, but I couldn’t complain because despite that, I never felt like the actual levels were bad, they all offered something special. In TPP, on the other hand, many of the puzzles had me just going through the motions.

They’re so formulaic that most of the time the solution will spring in your mind after you get the idea of the layout and the tools at your disposal, since knowing both of the things greatly narrows down what you can even do. Talos has a very modular approach to puzzles, so you will see a lot of elements repeated verbatim instead of being recontextualized to keep things fresh.

It’s not all bad, and some are genuinely creative and quite satisfying to solve, but those are few and far between. It’s very much quantity over quality, and by far the best part only comes at the very end. The final gauntlet before you reach the peak of the tower has you actually cooperate with other programs, while also being impeded by one of them. Something that would’ve been cool to see in parts of the game that aren’t the very end of it.

Verticality is another thing that this final gauntlet has over others. Most levels in TPP probably could be remade in the vanilla Build Engine, they’re so damn flat. I have no clue why it took them until the final tower puzzles to make multi-layered levels. The game is desperately lacking in variety, and playing with space more could’ve been a great way to alleviate this issue.

The most creative thing the game does in this regard is when you have to interact with things beyond the level boundaries, but the game typically reserves it for obtuse bonus starts that became far too tedious to pursue after I got enough to open the first secret area with silver sigils.

That’s also something that really made a few of the puzzles annoying. Difficulty in TPP can be very inconsistent, and the most difficult puzzles aren’t the ones that require careful thought and clever solutions, it’s usually because they just have so many elements and ways to use them that finding the right combination requires extra tedium of trial and error.

Just as everyone can design a combat arena that is a corridor that spills out 1000 Kleers at you, anyone can make a puzzle and then keep adding step after step to the solution until it feels convoluted and unintuitive enough to pass off as difficult and “tricky”. However, a good hard puzzle is usually like a really funny joke, it’s not a word longer than it needs to be, and typically catches you by surprise, instead of trying to put together enough funny things to be “really funny”

Done

TPP might be a solid offer for people are just champing at the bit for just a crumb of puzzling, but I’m not one of those people. I started off impressed and pleasantly surprised, only to come out frustrated, disappointed, and even more convinced that Croteam never learns from their mistakes, still choosing to treat games as products where “story” or “design” are just unnecessary buzzwords that get in the way DA GAMEPLAY BABY.

I will play Talos 2 at some point, probably after I manage to forget how miserable this game was. Maybe it will even shatter my presumptions and address the grievances, but it’s hard to have that much hope.