Over-the-top, indulgent, inelegant extravagance that clouds a better, leaner puzzler
Hello!
This is my first ever review I'm writing on this site, and... BOY, it's a doozy!
I have written most of it before having to come back here to the beginning and warn you that I have been quite critical in my words below.
But the reason why that is, is because I'm passionate about the Logic Puzzle genre, so I needed somewhere to air my grievances about a game I had hoped I would love... but didn't end up actually loving it, sadly.
My rating for this game is a reluctant 7/10 or 7.5/10, which is only reluctant because with some edits, it would have been an 8, 8.5 or even 9/10 game in my mind.
There was so much potential for this game to be a STONE. COLD. CLASSIC. to me.
But in my opinion, it presents alongside some actually really fun and incredible puzzle design and innovative mechanic implementations, and beautiful environments... some of the most inelegant and ill-considered design decisions I've ever encountered in a game in the Logic Puzzle game genre.
And that's why I'm so distraught! I also am trying to be positive, since I'm not sure how small the team is... it may in fact be a big company or a small one, I'm not sure. But I still enjoy that games as unique as this one exist. So I don't want to be seen as punching down, and in which case, I'd be willing to delete this review if that's the case.
Because I'll start by saying one important thing, and this might be the most important - the game's puzzles are fun!
It is (usually) a very nice, logical series of puzzles that add one mechanic at a time, that oftentimes requires thinking that makes you go "Eureka!" and then you implement a solution, and it feels amazing!
But there's also some structural things about this game that I really didn't click with, and that didn't deliver a message very well to me, and it is especially impacting, perhaps because of my expectations for the project - which were, in retrospect, too high.
But can expectations really be high when this is the sequel to the The Talos Principle? One of the arguably most important puzzle games in indie game history - nay, game history full stop? It arrived at such an important time after indie puzzle games were starting to gain traction - that it managed to combine innovative first person puzzle structure with the addition of a hard-hitting, philosophical narrative. It had some surprises, some truly wowing moments (in both gameplay AND story), and even though it was admittedly kinda ugly visually for its time, that ugliness... sort of resonated with the story?
It was this ugly duckling that could fly... and especially with the ancient architectural constraints being concerned with the "high fidelity exaggeration" of positive traits, this resonated with the story's tackling of ideals, of moral aptitude and responsibility, and set within this "ancient architecture" it was a sort of humorous dichotomy in its resonance.
BIG WORDS, I know - and it might seem pretentious. But for anyone who's played the first game, I hope there's at least some appreciation that its aesthetics sort of complimented the story.
But in this? The circumstances have changed. It's 2023, and it's not looking "ugly" anymore. But do the visuals and the structure of the game support its narrative?
I could go through each and every puzzle level, saying how it was good in this way and built nicely - it is still a 7-7.5/10 game based on the coolness of its puzzles alone... they're oftentimes building on each other in (sort-of) elegant ways, with solutions that make you go "that was SO cool!"
But that's... kind of "half" the game here. The narrative and exploration aspects of the game are SO much higher in percentage than the first.
This is the first The Talos Principle game, but they decided to make it "bigger, better" in the usual way that people think about sequels - to double the area provided (nay, triple!), to make lots of NPCs and elegant cinematics with TONS of wonderful animations and sequences... with blaring horns that make you feel like you're in a Marvel movie.
It's the sequel to the first game in the series, where there's an open world slapped onto it. It's got social media, it's got NPCs yapping at you. And yes, they ask a lot of philosophical questions in this beautiful, lush, over-the-top world of trees, trees and... trees and mountains and ice, and snow... and it's made in Unreal Engine 5 (don't forget!) so you better believe that it wants you to know that.
Oh, and there's puzzles too.
And I think that's my gripe. I do enjoy this game. I think there's a lot of nice logic puzzles in here, but I think it would benefit someone to come to this game with the expectation - this story isn't going to blow you away, and this isn't going to make an imprint on you.
The first game to me was akin to The Stanley Parable, or Journey, or Braid, not in the puzzle sense, but in the importance sense - it was an important game. Like, not even pretending. It was truly innovative, and pushed boundaries forward in a way that only a well-placed game could.
The Talos Principle II, in this way, to me, represents everything opposite. It's unimportant, it's just the first game expanded, and it's definitely not well-timed.
But it is fun to play (most times), and I did enjoy returning to it again and again.
It's just that I don't want to point out the elephant in the room, but perhaps I must - this game is marred by the pure existence of The Witness, which is in my humble opinion (and thou can disagree), the better to this game in every aspect.
This game has an open world, but in my opinion, it has very little reason to have so, even narratively. I don't want to get into spoilers, so I won't give narrative spoilers, but if you are already bought in - I mean, come on, if you haven't played the original, go play that, but if you have, then play this. It's simple. It's a decent logic puzzle game and there's not many of them around. It's fine. It's just... fine.
But I wanted so much more.
Because I expected more from this series, this team, these writers.... something truly unique and innovative and thought provoking in a similar vein to the first. And it's just not. It's not challenging the status quo. The open world is there for no reason, really. You could compress it right down. To me, sure, it serves a narrative purpose of impressing the player with a beautiful-looking world so they can ask, "who made all this majesty?" but the downside is that the majesty gets dulled down for a similar reason that a lot of jump-scare-heavy horror games get bogged down in the games medium in particular - because it's flawed by design. Jump scares in media have historically relied on timing, on getting the right momentum and delivering it at just the right moment to be able to release tension - but a lot of jumpscare-heavy games that have a lot of death, game-overs and reloads, lose that tension due to the deaths interrupting the momentum that the game provides. And this isn't to say that jumpscare-heavy games can't be effective - they often are - but they often are designed to subvert that very natural way that jump scares deflate the tension of a horror scene.
And you're probably wondering "why is this reviewer yapping on about jump scares in a game that's primarily about puzzles"? And it's this... just like jump scares by design are a barrier to be overcome in the horror genre, so too do open worlds have an inherent problem to them that necessitates "emptiness" that open worlds have attempted to solve again and again - Bethesda has a formula for how many interaction points it needs within a triangle, Zelda: Breath of the Wild discovered that it needs to structure its "towers" so that you can have points of interest that both lie between it AND just outside of sight. It's the structuring of the nodes of interest that makes it enthralling.
So there's some things inherent to the design of a vast, sprawling open world, and The Talos Principle II does NOT seem to respect this. There's the lack of meaningful interactions in these vast worlds, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of direct commentary that would necessitate their existence. There's also the intense detail in the way that all these models in Talos Principle II have lots of miniscule, incredible detail in the models, combined with some anti-aliasing issues with field of view that make lines jitter and all sorts (sorry if I got the terminology there wrong but hopefully you know what I mean) that means it's this weird uncanny valley between too much detail, and not enough.
There are some environments in this game that are jaw-droppingly awesome, but when they go to designing puzzles around them, there's this weird disconnect between the majesty you see initially, and the fact you have to hop around it for ages just to try to get from A to B, with nary an interaction point in between.
The Witness had a point to its 3D perspective... for in fact, it was a game about perspective itself. And sure, there are many things that the game The Talos Principle II is about story-wise, but do they cohere with the gameplay design? Or was it just some people in a team saying, "Well, wouldn't it be cool if we could wow them with these massive environments?" without considering how it would impact both the playability and the messaging of the thing itself.
And yet, overall, I think the puzzles are pretty good oftentimes.
I sometimes hoped that this game would simply be a level select screen without all the cruft, the decision making - oh, the decision making! There's just so many choices to make, but very little in the way that makes you think any of it matters. And I know how much "Choices Matter" can be a misleading title - because every choice you make in a game matters, but in a Puzzle Game, you'd think that if the team was going to introduce something like "choices in conversations", that it would have something more deep and meaningful to say about the situation... I suppose it doesn't help that many of the interactions are simply you choosing whether you want to ask "Who are you?" and then each NPC tells their backstory off yap without true narrative momentum or reasoning behind it... a story is not made up of simply people standing in a space being asked questions and then you never meet them again.
There are plot beats in this game, but since the game often wants so hard to be a narrative exploration game, and then wants so hard to be a puzzle game, both suffer. In the first game, they were intertwined, because the narrative was something you could dive deeply into optionally and only if you wanted, but in this, it's cinematic, and on-the-beat, and it demands your attention. So it leaves very little room for the puzzles to marinate.
The puzzles are really fun. They are.
They're lasers and they're mirrors and they're all sorts of mechanics I shouldn't talk about but... they are fun. And they are the reason I kept going.
If the game was merely just the puzzles without the narrative and the exploring, I think I'd knock it up a half star or a full one.
But as it is, there are a select number of zones, with numbered puzzles that you walk to. There's a compass that shows you the direction of the numbered puzzles that you can go to, so there's almost no reason to have an overworld as it is, except perhaps to be able to see towers and stuff from afar, but I soon ended up not caring because I didn't have to use any spatial awareness because I could just book it to the next number and there'd be relatively no obstacles in my way.
Perhaps there's a different version of the game where there were no numbered puzzles, and you had to navigate your way through the puzzles one by one, and - oh wait, that does happen in the megastructures! Which are honestly the best part of the game. The megastructures combine the elements that you've encountered before in really cool ways, causing you to even spatially see things from afar, and ask yourself "oh, so how do I get there?" and then you use your mechanics that you've learned to get there.
There is a game that has done this particular "using mechanics outside of the levels" more wonderfully and succinctly than The Talos Principle II.
And no, it's not The Witness (although that is the true, obvious answer.)
The game is Taiji, a game that openly admits a direct inspiration from The Witness... but ends up more innovative than The Talos Principle in expanding on The Witness's ideas.
It actually does the whole "use tetrominoes you find" idea (sort of) in its overworld, but limits its toolset and uses it to its full potential to unlock non-linear routes.
Another fantastic game that does this arguably even MORE elegantly than The Witness or Taiji is a game called A Monster's Expedition, which takes maybe even 5 mechanics (as opposed to what I estimate to be The Talos Principle's - probably around 25 mechanics or so... including variants), and uses that limited toolset to its full potential.
Oh wait - there was also another game that limited its toolset to better potential than The Talos Principle II, and it's... The Talos Principle! (the first one)
Okay, I might be getting a little snarky and annoyed here, but the fact is I'm being hard on a game that infuriates me due to its design decisions... and yet.... I still kind of don't hate it overall? I might even like it? Which I'm sorry for those who have read it so far but I really just needed to get all this off my chest. Because I've been complaining about it to my friends here and there and I don't think it sounds very nice to them, so I'll just leave it here.
I could go on and on about messaging, and how the narrative is presented through the dialogue doesn't really hit in specific moments, but we could be here all day, and I don't even know if my writing here has been nice to read.
I just needed a place to vent.
But in short, I think The Talos Principle II represents a unique genre that I didn't want to die. In a way, I hope people love and want more of this - not because I think it represents elegant storytelling and design. On the contrary, I really, truly believe it is a mess storytelling-wise.
But I still hope for this genre.
Kind of like a robot hoping for a civilization to thrive, I hope that Logic Puzzle games thrive, even in spite of their imperfections.
Perhaps there is some resonance of the game's story with me after all.
Ah well. Guess I'll have to jog 20km to get to my next destination, solve it in 2 minutes, then jog 20km to get somewhere else.
It's a joke. Something us humans can do. Ah... yes. Us... humans. *eyes flash blue*
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I thought it was a tad easy too, I remember struggling in the last few normal puzzles of the first game, in this one I almost missed the "spent 20 minutes in a single puzzle" achievement. I still need to do the gold puzzles, but overall, even if easier, I thoroughly enjoyed 2 more.
Only few golden doors made some effort but other than that too easy to rise among better puzzle games. Good divercity though so it was fun to play at least. Didn't like the story and text it dumped though. So flat and unispiring. And goddam there was some running around with those stupid star puzzles. No way they were even remotely fun.
Yeah, this game is almost like the antithesis of The Witness - overbloated, with too much detail and not enough thought put into the details. Open worlds with no real reason to have them other than to show off the environments made in Unreal Engine 5 that look simultaneously beautiful and garishly ugly, like a Thomas Kinkade painting, The game functions as a philosophical quiz of sorts, but at the sacrifice of any sort of characterisation or dramatic tension, feeling like the story of one of those flash platformer puzzlers stretched out to 20+ hours.
The puzzles are good, though, and apart from the annoying combination of intro puzzles and actual logic puzzles due to a hard limit of "8 per world", they were well-designed and I found myself being drawn back again and again until the end. Gosh does look still like an asset flip, though, even after all these years. Your fancy lighting systems can't fool me! You're still using the Asset Store, aren't you?
I still enjoyed it, though, perhaps partially and in spite of the fact that "logic puzzle" is my favourite genre of game, and I'm just super passionate about structure of games like this.
Let me say again just in case - I like this game overall. I just think it would have done better to just be a level select screen at this point, since the sprawling "let's make everything bigger" thing did NOT do the game any favours.
I'm getting towards the end, and the philosophy is really starting to get grating. I want to get back to puzzles and somebody's quizzing me on what I believe, but none of the many options reflect what I actually think, then I get challenged on what I don't actually believe. Wish the philosophy in the story was less a "quiz" where they have a rebuttal to whatever you choose, with no option to just say you know a lot of the topics being discussed, and more something that feels organic and less forced. Because up til this point the character has been a stand-in for yourself so I see no reason to "roleplay" someone who doesn't know these concepts. I dunno.
When talking to Miltohim in the second-to-last zone it just felt like a developer stand-in going "AH, so you THINK you know philosophy? BE GOOD, have you heard of that?" and i'm like "yes... yes of course" and they're like "BET YOU HAVEN'T" so it's this weird gotcha that feels so pretentious. (i like the game overall but dang)
Ending puzzle was way better than that of TP1,, somehow.. Rest of the puzzles were mostly too easy//too tedious.. Getting around was also too tedious,, this shouldnt have been as open world as it ended up.. Writing varied between extremely good and mildly cringe.. I want to give it a 9 on principle but Im compelled to lower to an 8.. Sorry Croteam,, better luck on TP3,, that is if you make it from the ending that isnt horrific and unsatisfying
Thought about this for about 15 more minutes and decided that on average I actually liked the puzzles here more than in TP1,, but less than in RtG.. There were so many mechanics I forgot from the first game,, this one fails at QoL in navigation but does so much more in its puzzle design.. The higher ease is a symptom of the higher QoL.. Hesitant 9
I didn't like it as much as the first game and I agree with most of the criticisms (star puzzles, exploration) but the core puzzles were really god imo and the final set is just fantastic
it's a good game but the flaws are apparent and so while it does some things better, it does other things worse. overall I think most would prefer Talos 1 + Gehenna, but this is a good one if you thought Talos 1 + Gehenna was too hard for you, as the difficulty curve is much easier and more gradual.
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Note: Unlike reviews, comments are considered temporary and may be deleted/purged without notice.The puzzles are good, though, and apart from the annoying combination of intro puzzles and actual logic puzzles due to a hard limit of "8 per world", they were well-designed and I found myself being drawn back again and again until the end. Gosh does look still like an asset flip, though, even after all these years. Your fancy lighting systems can't fool me! You're still using the Asset Store, aren't you?
I still enjoyed it, though, perhaps partially and in spite of the fact that "logic puzzle" is my favourite genre of game, and I'm just super passionate about structure of games like this.