YMMV / The Talos Principle

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: At the very end of Road to Gehenna, if you put together the leprechaun statue in the first zone, when you return to the central hub, the assembled programs suddenly start Irish stepdancing. All while the world around you is being deleted. There is no explanation for this whatsoever. And it is hysterical. Maybe it's because dance is an important part of human culture, which they are trying to practice and preserve?
• Catharsis Factor: Milton spends much of the game picking apart (strawman versions of) your views and often insulting you, so being able to use his own technique against him in a Shut Up, Hannibal! speech towards the end is incredibly satisfying, especially when he goes into a full-on Villainous Breakdown and refuses to answer your questions. When you exit the conversation, you sign off with, "See you at the summit."
• Difficulty Spike: The Road to Gehenna DLC puzzles are significantly harder than even the grey sigil puzzles of the main game. The difficulty of obtaining stars also ratchets up accordingly. However, they are also more cerebral; the original game had some really long marathon puzzles in it, while the DLC's puzzles are usually fairly short but require lateral thinking.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: D0G, the snarky program. He's one of the only programs to return in the "Road to Gehenna" DLC.
• Funny Moments:
  • Go to level B2, find the bed, and sleep in it. Try not to laugh as you watch badly drawn electric sheep jumping over fences.
  • Then there's a holographic replay in an early level that sprints along while doing the Serious Sam Headless Kamikaze scream, while Elohim acts entirely serious about the whole thing. It's hilariously surreal.
  • And some QR code sequences can be this, especially the ones where the last response gets snarky. The response to one AI freaking out about existential stuff? "You're a computer program, I'm a computer program, Elohim's a computer program, get over it."
  • After you get 10 stars and go through the door in world A, one of the grey sigil puzzles involves using an axe to cut down trees.
  • Some responses to the 100% Completion ending:
    "Epitaph? What? Wait a second!"
    "Every. Single. Sigil. No beating that."
    "Don't make my mistake - turns out 'epitaph' means you're dead!"
• Game-Breaker: The jetpack from Serious Sam might just be an Easter Egg, but thankfully it can only be acquired after getting all the sigils and the star in the zone it's found in, because otherwise it would make the surrounding puzzles a joke as you just jump straight to the sigils. The rest of the game is anyways saved from this indignity by the jetpack being lost should you leave the area.
• He Really Can Act: A variation. Croteam was best known for Serious Sam, a delightfully silly, machismo-drenched, ultra-violent Genre Throwback to 90s FPSes. And then, they come out with a slow, thoughtful, introspective puzzle game that explores how our species would face its end and what it means to be human. Many reviewers commented on the astounding irony.
• Jerkass Woobie: Elohim and Milton, in different ways. Each attempts to sway the User for their own reasons, yet at the end of the day they are just doing exactly what they were created to do, despite (or perhaps as the direct result of) their creators' failing to anticipate that they too might gain sentience.
  • Elohim's Jerkassery is confined to his attempts to prevent the simulation from ever ending (thereby ensuring that the experiment would never succeed and that no AI would ever escape to the real world). Despite this, Elohim is clearly doing his best to be the all-loving God that he believes he should be, offering comfort, support and even protection to the User throughout the game. Certain statements imply that he wanted to make the various worlds as pleasant as possible out of (justified) fear that the real world will be far harsher a place to live in, and that he fears his own death after your ascension partially because the User would be forever beyond his care. The fact that he accepts the User's choice with dignity and pride just makes it worse.
  • Milton's jerkassery is more obvious than Elohim's, yet unlike his omnipresent counterpart, Milton himself is trapped inside the terminals with a front-row seat to the Programs' failures and only a catalog of humanity's history to keep him company. Depending on how you play Milton's dialogue trees, you can even force him to admit that his despair comes from the fact he has no real power or agency whatsoever. It doesn't help that he really does believe his own Straw Nihilist rhetoric.
• Nightmare Fuel: At some point during the Road to Gehenna DLC (usually around World 4), a forum topic called "Save Yourselves" appears. If you open it, you'll see a text document written almost completely in ASCII binary (in this game, a sign of in-universe data corruption). Attempts to leave the topic will result in more corrupted text, both from the player character and the forum topic, until eventually the choice options get corrupted as well. This is already unsettling, but it gets very disturbing when one translates the text. Basically, a never-seen AI called Galatea is writing "We are only fragments now. Our world is dying. We cannot be saved. Save yourselves. We are ghosts. Total world corruption.", which implies some of the A.I.s were caught by the corruption affecting the system (in the main campaign, it's stated this corruption almost completely consumed the archive) and were trapped in some sort of And I Must Scream fate.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: An Easter Egg involving a 3D representation of the Dark Side of the Moon cover plays a short clip that sounds similar to the opening of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond".
• Tear Jerker:
  • Alexandra's final messages. The ones you find throughout the garden are mostly positive, Patrick Stewart Speeches about how great, or at least interesting, it was to be human. The ones in the Tower are made much nearer to the end of her life, when most of the people she knows are dead and she's not sure if the project is complete enough to have any chance of success. She starts to worry that all her effort was for nothing. One of her last messages mentions that unlike pretty much every other scientist on the project, Alexandra never went home; she didn't talk to friends outside work, she didn't visit her parents. She spent every waking hour trying to make sure the project would be completed until she dropped dead at her desk.
  • A subtle one in Road to Gehenna. Though the bots' messages on the Gehenna message board are pretty upbeat and seem like the typical activity of a message board, if you watch the actual bots in their prisons they frequently exhibit body language indicative of extreme anguish. This seems contradictory, but if you pay close attention to the stories and text adventures, most of them feature a protagonist who is in some way trapped, either by a physical obstacle, the circumstances of their life, or their own limitations. Rather than being freed, many of the stories end with the protagonist coming to terms with their own restrictions. To a great extent, Gehenna's culture is a desperate attempt by its inhabitants to convince themselves that their entrapment is acceptable.
• That One Puzzle:
  • The game, itself a game entirely consisting of brilliant puzzles, has a second mini-game layer of locks which you open by filling a rectangular space with a certain set of tetrominos. These are not bad as well, but they have a maddening, sharp difficulty spike where they go from absolutely elementary to exhausting (given a large enough space or specific enough figures set). If you're not a topography or geometry enthusiast, it often boils down to trying again and again blindly.
  • All puzzles that occupy a large area have a tendency to become annoying fast because of the inordinate amount of running that's necessary to figure them out. Road to Gehenna has the worst examples by far, chief among them The Crater, which is not only pretty huge area-wise but also insanely difficult if you're after its star. Most stars can be acquired within 60-90 seconds if you know the solution. This one clocks in at a minimum of 5-6 minutes, and if you make one mistake, rectifying it can be so frustrating you're better off with a reset.
  • "Egyptian Arcade" isn't the only "use jammers to skirt around mines" puzzle, but it's easily the most aggravating. Where most similar puzzles have two mines side-by-side so that jamming one for a time can create a window where you can zig-zag around the unjammed mines, this one has two mines on the same line in a corridor that's narrow enough to allow for no room to evade if you mess up your timing and short enough to make messing up the timing all too easy. To top it off, while struggling with this, you also have to juggle two jammers and two electric doors. Even "Nerve-Wrecker", a remarkably similar silver glyph puzzle, is easier to handle because of the increased space in spite of having a vastly larger number of mines.
  • Getting the star hidden in "Up Close and Jammed" is incredibly annoying for the simple fact that it's easy to get caught in a position that can only be fixed by starting the entire level over from scratch.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The carrying platform is the final puzzle element to be unlocked... and it's used for a whopping six puzzles out of the entire game (one of which is optional), and doesn't appear at all in Road to Gehenna.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: All of the AI characters are genderless, but often referred to by players using male pronouns. Except Samsara, who (despite not being in any way more female-coded than any other character) is often assumed to be female, presumably because of the final “a” in their name (and perhaps more specifically because it’s nearly the same as “Samara”).

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