VideoGame The Talos Principle base game review
Widely praised as the game of the year of 2014, The Talos Principle is a puzzle-platformer which can probably be summarized in the following way:
The Good: It reminded me of Portal 2 in a good way.
The Bad: It was not Portal 2.
The Ugly: It kind of wanted to be Portal 2.
Like Portal 2, this game features a seemingly omnipotent voice which tells you what to do, while another character subtly influences you to disobey said booming voice from the sky.
And like Portal 2, this is a puzzle game.
However, where Portal 2 is cerebral, The Talos Principle is philosophical.
The story aspect of the game is quite good, and the whole game does a great job of invoking a feeling of profundity but also underlying desperation. You find messages left behind by various previous people, with version numbers after their names, and, if you pay close attention, you might notice a name or two from your Steam friends list. This is no coincidence – it is possible for you yourself to find paint buckets to leave behind messages to future folks who go through. Interestingly, this also hints at the nature of the world – as well as where you’re going in the end – and as you progress through the game, you unlock more and more messages you can leave behind for your buddies.
What the game is really about is the central question of what it means to be human. The titular Talos Principle is a concept from Greek mythology – Talos being a massive automaton made of bronze, animated by ichor put in his body by Zeus (or Hephestus, depending on the myth) himself to animate him and give him life. In the end, when the ichor is drained from his body, he dies as a human would if they exsanguinated, thus proving him to be “human” in a sense. Much of the game’s philosophical conversations with Milton – and many of the documents in the computer – talk about the question of what it means to be human, and the question of whether or not the AIs they are creating – which you are one of – are “human” in a sense.
However, the actual puzzle part of the game is totally disconnected from the story.
The puzzle gameplay itself takes the form of picking up and moving devices around in the world in order to solve problems. There are only six such devices in the game, and about midway through the game it seems like the game runs out of ways to do new and interesting things with them, starting to throw a lot of pretty repetitive puzzles at you. It is only towards the end of the game that the creators get creative again, leading to some pretty interesting puzzles in the endgame, though some are also overly long.
The game also has some puzzles which are mostly difficult because it hides essential components in the scenery, which is very frustrating when you don't realize you're a piece short or can't find what you're looking for.
That said, the early and late puzzles are both pretty satisfying.
Overall, this is a good game, but not perfect.
VideoGame Road to Gehenna DLC review
The events of Road to Gehenna take place after the end of The Talos Principle. Uriel, one of Elohim’s messengers, is tasked to go to Gehenna, a place where Elohim banished all the AI processes who didn’t follow his orders. This is the total sum of your interaction with Elohim; he speaks a few lines at the beginning and a few lines at the very, very end, but he receives no real additional characterization or focus.
Instead, this game focuses on the AI processes who are banished to Gehenna. The only way to interact with them is via their message boards, which they’ve set up on the terminals in Gehenna. As you free the various AI processes, you get more messages to read and possibly respond to on the boards, and uncover the secret of Gehenna.
Except that the secret is pretty obvious from the get-go – Gehenna is like any other internet community, and the game sort of centers around the situational irony/humor of reading a bunch of people in a community talking to each other on a messageboard, with its own internal rivalries and characters and such.
The problem is, this just isn’t very engrossing – your interactions with most of the characters is fairly sporadic, and there are 17 AI processes (plus Uriel himself) whom you interact with. The result is that none of them are particularly well-characterized, and while it works okay, I was not left caring about almost any of the characters. Honestly, only Mr Mulciber ended up seeming all that interesting, and while Admin was in principle interesting, in practice he is simply not developed well enough over the course of the game, nor does he exhibit the sort of personality you saw out of the Milton Library Assistant in the first game.
Because it is extremely obvious from early on what is going on the game is lacking in any sense of mystery or discovery. In the first game, you gradually uncover what is going on, as well as what your purpose is and why you are doing the things you’re doing, and what the purpose of the world is. Here, you hold all the answers from the beginning of the game, and over the course of the game you can comfort others as you free them (via the messageboard terminals; you cannot directly interact with anyone).
The puzzles, conversely, are quite good, but are intended to be difficult, as they are more difficult than the endgame puzzles of the previous game. They are pretty cerebral, encouraging you to abuse the level design in order to succeed in ways that the original game mostly reserved for star puzzles, as well as making clever use of the few components you're giving. There are still a few problematic puzzles here and there where essential components are hidden from the player in scenery, though.
All in all, the puzzles are good and the plotline and story are mediocre.
If you liked the puzzles in the first game, especially the more clever ones, you will probably like this DLC.
If you're more story-oriented, you will probably be disappointed.
VideoGame Very good, but with a few problems...
The Talos Principle does really well as a Portal-like puzzle game. The controls are intuitive and getting your way around the puzzles is pretty intuitive as well... for the most part. The puzzles are bound to keep you occupied for long hours, and many of them will provide a sense of accomplishment if you manage to complete them on your own.
However, there are two major problems with the puzzle design...
The first is that on numerous occasions, the game fails to explain certain mechanics to you and inform you that you are capable of doing this or that. This results in you wandering aimlessly around the level until you either stumble upon the solution via sheer dumb luck, or look it up on YouTube in defeat, only to exclaim "HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT?!?" when you see where the problem was.
The second problem is that there is a number of situations where the level layout and/or the placement of vital objects is so unintuitive that you can end up trying to figure out the solution to no avail, and when you inevitably look it up on YouTube, you will realize that the entire problem was that you missed an object hidden behind a wall, the inclusion of which makes the solution instantly clear.
Also, I admire the developers for trying to go with such a serious subject matter for the narrative, but I found that even though all the philosophical babble seemed mildly interesting at first, it slowly started getting on my nerves as the time went on. The fact that you don't get the full picture until the very end only makes matters worse, as I started thinking that the puzzles and the narrative are completely detached from one another, and the game would do perfectly fine without the latter. Turns out that it really IS vital to the experience, but you won't know that before the aforementioned very end. My recommendation is, have faith in the developers, but don't bother yourself with the random texts on the computers or the floating radio recordings, unless you really want to.
In the end, The Talos Principle is a pretty surprising game in various aspects (positively, that is) and definitely worth checking out. I just wish it had more of the Valve polish when it comes to puzzle design. I'd say it's somewhere around 8/10.