I really really wanted to love this as much as I loved the first one but it feels... incomplete? And not like cyberpunk 2077 was literally incomplete. Like, it's definitely a complete game. They have the puzzles and the story worked out, there's very few bugs, and it's pretty polished despite the game being really hard for my PC to run smoothly.
It's just... it feels so antithetical to all puzzle design. The first one slowly built upon the knowledge you learned throughout, just like every other puzzle game before it and many after it. But in this one they decided that each new world needed a new mechanic and just left it at that, so there's 12 new worlds with 12 new mechanics and they're then forced to spend 4 of the 8 levels of each world teaching you the new mechanic. This just means that there are very few puzzles that were truly mindbending or broke my brain or anything just because everything was so easy. The lost puzzles should've been hard but most I did were almost painfully easy. It's odd like the first game was really hard. Most people struggle with it. So I expected this to be a continuation and it just... wasn't? And not to mention the story really interrupts the puzzle gameplay. There's SO MUCH WALKING. It's amazing that this took 9 years. Maybe they should've given it 2 more?
I still feel like my $25 was justified, because I did have fun, but it was so disappointing that the previous game from 2014 with like 3 mechanics and boxy levels and 99% of those levels being cheese-able to... this. In 2023.
I can really see what they were going for but it felt like a misstep. I know the original writer intended for there to be 3 of these games so I really hope that this is just the usual "middle of the trilogy" problems and not something deeper. Maybe in Talos 3 we'll get more expansion on all these new mechanics.
It's just... it feels so antithetical to all puzzle design. The first one slowly built upon the knowledge you learned throughout, just like every other puzzle game before it and many after it. But in this one they decided that each new world needed a new mechanic and just left it at that, so there's 12 new worlds with 12 new mechanics and they're then forced to spend 4 of the 8 levels of each world teaching you the new mechanic. This just means that there are very few puzzles that were truly mindbending or broke my brain or anything just because everything was so easy. The lost puzzles should've been hard but most I did were almost painfully easy. It's odd like the first game was really hard. Most people struggle with it. So I expected this to be a continuation and it just... wasn't? And not to mention the story really interrupts the puzzle gameplay. There's SO MUCH WALKING. It's amazing that this took 9 years. Maybe they should've given it 2 more?
I still feel like my $25 was justified, because I did have fun, but it was so disappointing that the previous game from 2014 with like 3 mechanics and boxy levels and 99% of those levels being cheese-able to... this. In 2023.
I can really see what they were going for but it felt like a misstep. I know the original writer intended for there to be 3 of these games so I really hope that this is just the usual "middle of the trilogy" problems and not something deeper. Maybe in Talos 3 we'll get more expansion on all these new mechanics.