ysbreker

the Talos Principle

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Why are you guys not buying the Talos principle? This superb puzzle game in the vein of portal is incredibly good! Go and get it!

 

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It makes you feel so smart when you manage to solve one of it's many puzzles you've been staring at for hours. Again: get this game.

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This is absolutely near the top of a list of upcoming buys for me.

I've loved Croteam's games for so many years, i'm so interested to see them apply themselves to something completely different, and in a genre i happen to also love.

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I guess I'll paste my post from the recently finished games thread here:

 

Ok, so I've finished The Talos Principle. This game is getting a lot of extremely positive reviews and word of mouth right know and I think it absolutely deserves it.

 
It's impossible to talk about this game without comparing it to Portal and Portal 2. Not only because Portal is to first person puzzlers what Doom was to FPS games ("Doom clones") in the mid-nineties, the basic structure of TTP is the same: puzzle "chambers", disembodied authority figure with questionable motives, traces of predecessor characters, robots, cubes which are not called cubes etc. I admit it's something that I found a little bit off-putting at first, "Portal wannabe" was definitely my first impression. I'm writing the post as someone who played both Portal games and was very sceptical about this weird Serious Sam puzzle game with janky robots.

 

Some thoughts:
 
The TTP puzzle-solving mechanics mechanics are not as "exotic" as portals but I think the way they force the player to think about the spatial relations and timing is the same as in Portal. There is a lot more of positioning of various devices. The puzzles are on par or maybe even better than in Portals in my opinion and there are A LOT of them.

 

The world is not linear but hub-based. While the hubs themselves are gated, most of the time multiple puzzles are accessible and the game actively encourages the player to try something else when they are stuck. I think that might have freed the designers to include more difficult puzzles in the game. I think the game is more difficult than Portals, but not dramatically.

 

While many good puzzle games try to make you realize something new in each puzzle, TTP is not afraid to play with already presented ideas in some of the arenas. There is still a lot of variety though, "the non-revelatory" puzzles are good and they don't feel like filler content.

 

There is an extra layer to the game: there are many secret stars to collect. Most of them require the player to do something against the established rules (e.g. finding a way to bring something from another puzzle area even when all areas have entry gates preventing the player from doing that. It's funny that when I switched to this "all bets are off" mode I immediately jumped to trying some crazy overcomplicated approaches which didn't work at all, the solutions were much simpler) and I still have no idea where many of the stars are even when the game hints their location. The stars add an extra mystery layer to the game.

 

The game is very long, probably 15 to 20 hours (17 for me and I've only got 7 stars, I can't imagine how long it takes to find all of them). I've never felt like the game is dragging.

 

The tone and the writing itself are not "portalish" at all even if there are some surface similarities. TTP is generally much more serious and philosophical. To be honest, after watching some trailers and even playing the public beta I was expecting the writing to be a disaster. I expected seeing robots running through Serious Sam scenery with some grandiose quotes about religion and consciousness randomly printed on walls or something similar because that's what video games with similar aspirations are prone to do. I was pleasantly surprised this is not the case at all. Sure, it's not an academical deep dive into philosophy but it's smart, interesting, sometimes funny and it meshes with the structure of the game quite well. It's clear it has been written by people that know what they're doing (Tom Jubert (FTL, The Swapper) and Jonas Kyratzes (The Sea Will Claim Everything) to be specific).
Mild spoiler about some of the writing in the game (no details, but I was surprised by it's existence in the game):

I loved the fact there was a game-spanning dialogue that tried to make me feel bad / stupid about myself as a person (and not for puzzle-solving skills) and it actually sort of worked even when it was clear it's unfair and rigged that way. It felt fresh, so many video games are obsessed with making the player feel good about themselves (of course even TTP does that on a mechanical level). Oh and also I loved the fact the game is self-aware about the Serious Sam assets and subtly points out how ridiculous it is at one point :-)

 

Great puzzles, great writing, great game. My new favourite first person puzzler (well, on par with Portal 2 coop at least), GOTY 2014, would buy and play again.

 

Also I have one 50% discount Steam voucher if anybody's interested.

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I've loved Croteam's games for so many years, i'm so interested to see them apply themselves to something completely different, and in a genre i happen to also love.

 

Same here, I'm super curious to see what they do with a puzzle game. I don't know about anybody else, but I somehow managed to not hear about this game until it was practically out.

 

Also, I've seen a few people complaining that the price is too high (£30 here, don't know about dollars) for 'just' a puzzle game, which seems odd to me.

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There's a neat little demo type thing that I cecked out after remembering this was the Croteam puzzle game, and im definitely going to pick this up when I have some spare cash. The basic puzzle solving was nice enough, and they were smart enough to leave in a taste of the weirder terminal stuff if you explore a bit more. It seemed like I was negotiating with the game to give me access to the full version and I love meta junk like that.

I'm not so into the art design, really, but that's fine I think.

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Wishlisted and will buy once I have the money. Reminiscent of 'The Witness' (and no surprise Jon Blow has 17 hours clocked on it with steam)

 

Can anyone confirm how large the windows version is? PCGamingWiki states 8GB, my laptop is nearing full capacity.

 

*Also there is a free mini-game from the same devs that serves as a "prequel" to The Talos Principle called "Sigils of Elohim". Available on Steam, Android, and iOS. I don't know if Tom Jubert and Jonas Kyratzes are involved with that one though.

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Can anyone confirm how large the windows version is? PCGamingWiki states 8GB, my laptop is nearing full capacity.

My install folder is 5GB.

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I guess I'll paste my post from the recently finished games thread here:

 

 

Also I have one 50% discount Steam voucher if anybody's interested.

 

I'm interested, if you still have it. I got pretty interested in this game after reading about it. 

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Everything I've heard about this game makes it sound like something I'd like (except that the environments look like they were lifted out of Serious Sam), but I can rarely justify spending that "much" on a game (I'm a poor student) so I'll wait a bit.

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Well, fuck this game. Actually it's brilliant, and I love it, but seriously, the solution to the secret star in world A4 can fuck right off. At least, that's what it seem like to me. All the other stars I've found have had brain-racking solutions, but they all made sense, were consistent with the rules the game had taught me so far, and were deeply satisfying to work out. Then there's world A4, which, as far as I'm able to figure out, has a crazy, unheard of, out-of-place, ridiculous and infuriating element as part of the solution. After struggling for over an hour, searching everywhere and trying all sorts of insane set-ups, I get so frustrated I – for the first time with this game – resort to a hint guide, and it tells me someone put a

goddamn laser reflector in a tree!

 

So now I don't know if a star has a great solution that I'm just not getting, or if I'm wasting my time because the real trick is to wait until midnight and unplug my keyboard for five seconds or some similar nonsense.

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This is coming out on the PS4 some time in Q1 next year :tup: I did my research after hearing this weeks podcast

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I have to say, I haven't so far encountered any other puzzles with as lame solutions as the A4 star. They tend to be really, really good, and a satisfying way to finish up each world, as most of them tie several of the world's puzzles together in interesting ways.

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Well this was pretty much fantastic, did a couple of endings and spent about 17 hours doing them. Think I might keep it installed and try for some more stars (got a measly four) and see what's happening on the Steam Workshop. It's one of those puzzle games where you can be lost for quite a long time, go eat a sandwich, come back and solve it in thirty seconds - my favourite kind.

 

Leave it, rent it or buy it? Buy it.

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The stars, man. I'm still flabbergasted by that A4 star, because all the other stars – and I've done a good number by now – have had great, satisfying solutions, and that one is a dumb outlier. I wonder if I have to go back and see if I was missing an obvious clue all along. It seems more and more likely as I go through the later levels. There was another star solution that involved a crazy new mechanic that I think is unique to that one level, but at least there they cleverly tease you into discovering that mechanic using a mirror.

 

But this game. So good. If The Witness is this satisfying, 2015 will be the year of fucking amazing first person puzzle games.

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Finished the game (all required puzzles + tower), and man, is it good. I didn't concentrate too much on getting stars (had 10 by the end), but I want to go back through and finish everything up. There were only a couple small things that I wasn't too keen on:

 

  • The sigil tangram-esque puzzles. I didn't find them interesting enough as puzzles to care about spending a bunch of time and effort to complete them, so if one took more than a few minutes, I just looked up the answer.
  • The final area of the tower could have used some checkpoints in it so that I didn't have to do a bunch of stuff all over again when it turned out I couldn't make a jump I thought was possible.

 

The normal puzzles, however, were great! I thought Croteam did a good job of pacing the difficulty, and liked how later puzzles built on and even subverted expectations taught in earlier areas.

 

 

Also:

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I'm really suspicious that several Idle Thumbs forum members and Jeff Goldblum have turned up in this game.

 

Is it just drawing from your Steam friends list, or did they genuinely mine the forums for usernames?

 

Is there a Merus in this game and if so can I sue that Merus for exclusive rights to my name

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You can find buckets of paint that let you choose from a list of predefined phrases to write on a wall. Those messages are propagated to friends that are also playing.

 

One of the things that I like about it is that you get new phrases based on your progress and various interactions in-game. I found some paint right after completing a puzzle very quickly, and found that the 20-second challenge message had been added to the list.

 

As for Goldblum, your guess is as good as mine.

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Yo, it's me, I'm back again, to describe how this game has blown my brain. All of the puzzles I've played so far, have been perfectly crafted (except that one star.) Expertly tuned to my restless mind, each puzzle takes just the right amount of time – alt-tabbing Talos/Firefox is now a habit of mine. The way the stars tie the worlds together is such a sweet treat, at first glance ridiculous, impossible to beat; but then you walk around, study each puzzle once more, and you see all these details you didn't before; how this one cool fan trick shoots a crate over there, which you can stack with this other thing and get just clear of some fence or whatever with the color beam you need to open the gate that lets you proceed. I'm not all the way through, probably at about seven eights, so my final verdict will have to wait, but this game may well turn out my game of the year, to sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel Air.

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Yeah, I'm incredibly impressed by the puzzle design as well. I usually get fed up with these types of games once the puzzles become too massive or start demanding a lot of finger dexterity and finesse. I'm in the middle of Building B at the moment and so far all the puzzles have been fair and enjoyable. 

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Oh man, I LOVE this game. I played this game for basically two straight days this week. As I saw new mechanics get unlocked I was getting worried that there were going to be so many components to the puzzles that my brain would get totally overwhelmed, but I never though to myself "This is completely impossible, I'm too dumb for this." I think my biggest moment of "YES I'M A GENIUS" was "Circumlocution" but there were certainly a TON of those moments.

 

I did every single "normal" puzzle first and then went to the tower because that first puzzle in the tower was confusing the heck out of me. I eventually cheated for that first tower puzzle, and then didn't have to use a guide again. 

 

Now what I'm left with are the stars which I've gotten only a handful of. I want to get them, but I don't know if I have the patience since just finding where they are in the levels can be something of a chore. I should've taken notes about where the stars were so I could easily go back to them >_< To find the stars you pretty much just have to go back to each level and look for them, right?

 

Oh and I also downloaded the free "Sigils of Elohim" game because I wanted more Tetris assembly puzzles :P

 

I'm basically recommending this game to everyone who possesses the ability to play it. 

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Finished it, having completed all sigils and all stars, with almost no use of FAQ (I checked maybe five times, and even then just for hints.) What a pleasure to play a puzzle game that feels so perfectly tuned and designed. I was expecting the later puzzles (red sigils and star world puzzles) to be frustratingly convoluted and impossible to figure out, but they managed to never once take things too far. I could always keep track of all the parts of the puzzle in my head, so the challenge was just to figure out what to do, and in what order. I especially appreciated the puzzles where I had a sudden realization and worked out a solution, and then behind the last gate was another gate, and I had to sort of twist and turn the solution right there so I could pull another jammer free. The meta-game and worlds around the puzzles were also beautiful and interesting to explore, and the computer interaction stuff were nice distractions along the way. Definitely one of my favorites of 2014, along with Wolfenstein and probably some more games. Was GTA V this year?

 

Special fuck yous to the one star solution in world A4.

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hated the level design in this game. The environments were so annoying that it ruined the puzzles for me. I would love this game, if only it took place in Portal-style cleanrooms. My problem with the design is that it wants you to explore, which lead to all kinds of problems in a puzzle game. I hated when I was tearing out my hair attempting an impossible puzzle because there was a key or a jammer down a corridor that I'd missed. That then led to an unhealthy behaviour where whenever I couldn't immediately solve a puzzle, I'd assume I must be missing an element and waste a bunch of time exploring when all I needed to do was stare at the puzzle for a while and figure it out.

 

I'm also fairly certain that I managed to break the story segments. At one point in a story segment I just pressed the "exit" option rather than taking one of dialogues that would presumably advance the story, so it dumped me back to typing "list" with no way to continue the story, and from then on I never got another story segment, every terminal had nothing but its list of three text files.

 

I quit when I was running around through a labyrinth directing laser lights this way and that, and I realized that the only reason it was remotely difficult was that I was running around a messy environment in first person, instead of looking at clearly defined walls from an overhead view the way most flash laser puzzles do.

 

Rather than just coming here to complain, I thought I'd ask if anyone else had those problems. Am I just uniquely bad at exploring the levels, or recognizing when I do/don't have all the pieces? Did this bother you but you put up with it?

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