Flory
1 review liked by Flory
I wish I was more ashamed to admit that I have finally become the thing I hated. I normally think video games have incredibly shallow takes on philosophy and moral decisions (often boiling down to "must shoot but make sad"), but the Talos Principle games probe and poke at your ideologies in such interesting ways, to the point of making me think "Woah that's kinda deep" on a few occasions. I had to stop and think about how I was going to respond to questions, only to be made to feel like an idiot when the cloud of dust wafts away my arguments like they were silly.
But The Talos Principle games are much more than an interesting philosophical exercise, and it's because of this I believe that it aids the execution of the former. I think TP2 is a perfect sequel. It takes nearly everything about the first game and expands on it.
The choice to add companions beyond a text-adventure friend and Elohim from the sky was genius, and everyone is so well-written and voice-acted that it lets them take you along on their journey and character arc. You really want to consider their own philosophies and points-of-view, and there is not a single character to felt unmotivated in their actions.
The puzzles, while I wish they were more difficult, had mechanics that were distinct from the original. Thematically however, they felt like a perfect evolution, and no puzzle from this game would have felt out-of-place in the first.
Yeah sure the game isn't without its issues. As mentioned I think the puzzles were a little too easy, and the hub worlds, while beautiful, were a little too big/aimless sometimes. I wanted to feel like I'm exploring but trying to find all the collectibles in an area sometimes felt like a chore because of the size. This game has a lot of walking around.
I think the biggest step-down from the first is the removal of the star puzzles and replacing them with the shrines. There were really only 3 or 4 different puzzles duplicated through 24 shrine puzzles, and I would say only half a dozen were genuinely satisfying to solve. The star puzzles were the strongest part of the first game, making you re-evaluate the geometry of the level or solve a puzzle in a new and interesting way. This time it was more brute force the solution by chasing a cloud of dust, or find a part of the level by accident.
There were a few puzzles where I soft-locked myself, and needed to hit the reset button. I always feel like this is a weakness in puzzle design, but I can mostly forgive it here due to the complexity of certain mechanics making it almost impossible for it not to happen sometimes. There were some mechanics I wasn't too keen on (mostly fiddly ones that you needed to wait for or be in a specific position), but these came around infrequently enough to not be a major bother.
The game does run like ass too.
These two games have been incredibly formative for me, shaping my views on video game design, but also broader societal ideas, and honestly I cannot think of any praise higher than that. A must play.
But The Talos Principle games are much more than an interesting philosophical exercise, and it's because of this I believe that it aids the execution of the former. I think TP2 is a perfect sequel. It takes nearly everything about the first game and expands on it.
The choice to add companions beyond a text-adventure friend and Elohim from the sky was genius, and everyone is so well-written and voice-acted that it lets them take you along on their journey and character arc. You really want to consider their own philosophies and points-of-view, and there is not a single character to felt unmotivated in their actions.
The puzzles, while I wish they were more difficult, had mechanics that were distinct from the original. Thematically however, they felt like a perfect evolution, and no puzzle from this game would have felt out-of-place in the first.
Yeah sure the game isn't without its issues. As mentioned I think the puzzles were a little too easy, and the hub worlds, while beautiful, were a little too big/aimless sometimes. I wanted to feel like I'm exploring but trying to find all the collectibles in an area sometimes felt like a chore because of the size. This game has a lot of walking around.
I think the biggest step-down from the first is the removal of the star puzzles and replacing them with the shrines. There were really only 3 or 4 different puzzles duplicated through 24 shrine puzzles, and I would say only half a dozen were genuinely satisfying to solve. The star puzzles were the strongest part of the first game, making you re-evaluate the geometry of the level or solve a puzzle in a new and interesting way. This time it was more brute force the solution by chasing a cloud of dust, or find a part of the level by accident.
There were a few puzzles where I soft-locked myself, and needed to hit the reset button. I always feel like this is a weakness in puzzle design, but I can mostly forgive it here due to the complexity of certain mechanics making it almost impossible for it not to happen sometimes. There were some mechanics I wasn't too keen on (mostly fiddly ones that you needed to wait for or be in a specific position), but these came around infrequently enough to not be a major bother.
The game does run like ass too.
These two games have been incredibly formative for me, shaping my views on video game design, but also broader societal ideas, and honestly I cannot think of any praise higher than that. A must play.