The most damning thing I can say about The Talos Principle II is that it bored me.
The open-world design led to a lot of running back and forth, with large parts of the game spent in dialogues with characters, as well as reading text from terminals. While the writing can be great, I found a lot of the dialogues to be tiresome and not very interesting, like these characters -- many of whom being hundreds of years old -- could hardly break away from retreading the same ground in meandering dialogues. Thus, the story was less consistently engaging than the succinct narrative in the first game.
The puzzles prove to be the true catalysts of the downfall of The Talos Principle II in my mind, however. Out of the 132 main puzzles, there was precisely one which genuinely had me stumped for a while (Thrust Vector, in case you are curious), and probably around two dozen which I felt were true 'puzzles' and not simple busywork. The lack of difficulty in the puzzles meant that on top of spending lots of time running around between puzzles, solving the puzzles themselves often felt like a waste of time, where nothing was learned and nothing much was gained.
Of note is my mention of 'main puzzles'. You see, outside of the usual puzzles, there are also story setpiece sections which feature the player manipulating puzzle elements, and there are monuments. The setpiece sections are generally of an even lower standard of difficulty than the main puzzles, and are busywork to the point of not actually having any numbers or names to identify them with. The monuments exist in three forms: pulling a lever in a location based on an image, map, or other similar clue; shooting a laser into a receptacle; and finding and chasing a 'sprite' around the map. The first of these hardly requires thinking most of the time, the second is a matter of shooting lasers across the map, requiring some tedious laser connector positioning across long distances, and the third can hardly be called a puzzle by any stretch of the imagination. These stars were so tedious and pointless that I did not bother getting them.
With all of that out of the way, my experience was far from negative on the whole. There are definitely many points where the familiar brilliance of the writing shines through -- I was particularly fond of the interactive text adventures in the game. There are some stand-out music tracks I quite liked. The elephant in the room is, however, the graphical presentation. The level of detail is simply absurd, the performance is great (other than the random crashes, of which I experienced 17 in 25 hours), and many of the visual designs of the elements of the environments are simply stunning; I was frequently reminded of the likes of BLAME! and NaissanceE, brought to life in real-time 3D at an unprecedented level of fidelity.
Overall, I found The Talos Principle II to be severely lacking as a puzzle game, and not as compelling on the merits of its narrative as the first game, but still good and definitely worth its low asking price.
That said, shout out to Croteam for putting multiple direct parallels between Shakespeare's The Tempest and the story and setting of this game into the text, in a way which could go over the average player's head and still make for a full experience. I would recommend reading/watching The Tempest on its own merit, but I have been mulling the parallels over in my head for the past day and it's been good fun.
The open-world design led to a lot of running back and forth, with large parts of the game spent in dialogues with characters, as well as reading text from terminals. While the writing can be great, I found a lot of the dialogues to be tiresome and not very interesting, like these characters -- many of whom being hundreds of years old -- could hardly break away from retreading the same ground in meandering dialogues. Thus, the story was less consistently engaging than the succinct narrative in the first game.
The puzzles prove to be the true catalysts of the downfall of The Talos Principle II in my mind, however. Out of the 132 main puzzles, there was precisely one which genuinely had me stumped for a while (Thrust Vector, in case you are curious), and probably around two dozen which I felt were true 'puzzles' and not simple busywork. The lack of difficulty in the puzzles meant that on top of spending lots of time running around between puzzles, solving the puzzles themselves often felt like a waste of time, where nothing was learned and nothing much was gained.
Of note is my mention of 'main puzzles'. You see, outside of the usual puzzles, there are also story setpiece sections which feature the player manipulating puzzle elements, and there are monuments. The setpiece sections are generally of an even lower standard of difficulty than the main puzzles, and are busywork to the point of not actually having any numbers or names to identify them with. The monuments exist in three forms: pulling a lever in a location based on an image, map, or other similar clue; shooting a laser into a receptacle; and finding and chasing a 'sprite' around the map. The first of these hardly requires thinking most of the time, the second is a matter of shooting lasers across the map, requiring some tedious laser connector positioning across long distances, and the third can hardly be called a puzzle by any stretch of the imagination. These stars were so tedious and pointless that I did not bother getting them.
With all of that out of the way, my experience was far from negative on the whole. There are definitely many points where the familiar brilliance of the writing shines through -- I was particularly fond of the interactive text adventures in the game. There are some stand-out music tracks I quite liked. The elephant in the room is, however, the graphical presentation. The level of detail is simply absurd, the performance is great (other than the random crashes, of which I experienced 17 in 25 hours), and many of the visual designs of the elements of the environments are simply stunning; I was frequently reminded of the likes of BLAME! and NaissanceE, brought to life in real-time 3D at an unprecedented level of fidelity.
Overall, I found The Talos Principle II to be severely lacking as a puzzle game, and not as compelling on the merits of its narrative as the first game, but still good and definitely worth its low asking price.
That said, shout out to Croteam for putting multiple direct parallels between Shakespeare's The Tempest and the story and setting of this game into the text, in a way which could go over the average player's head and still make for a full experience. I would recommend reading/watching The Tempest on its own merit, but I have been mulling the parallels over in my head for the past day and it's been good fun.