ysbreker

the Talos Principle

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The levels have signs which indicate the pieces in it, and they are marked/crossed when you get the pieces, so you can see if you already got all the sigils. To be honest, I didn't have any problem with the levels, never got lost or couldn't find where to go.

I finished the game last week and it was pretty amazing, one of the best of 2014 really - probably my favorite PC title of the year. The puzzles were smart and only some of them were a but frustrating for me, I guess I'm not really that good with "puzzlers", had to look for walkthrough on some of later levels. What got me into the game though was it's story, it always felt so mysterious and writing is fantastic, I felt so connected with the Alexandra character, her visions about the main subject of the game sounded pretty honest and smart, I share some of the fears and insecurity that she has.

The game kinda left me depressed a little bit, existentialist stuff can do that to me. But it was pretty good, it's definitely great to see games talking about those subjects.

However, I think the game could be way shorter. I finished it in about 21-22 hours, by the end I was already tired. Also disliked the final puzzles to unlock the doors/floors, I'm really not that great at solving those, I just gave up at a certain point and looked at the solution in a walkthrough, in my opinion it wasn't needed to have this kind of puzzle when your game mechanic already is to solve puzzles.

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I finished this game in 24 hours without consulting any guides (I did use up the three in-game hints though, and only found 3 stars). It is one of my favorite things ever. I'm really surprised by people that didn't like how the environments looked. I wasn't crazy about the Egyptian location, but I loved the rest of it. I want more games to take place in Roman ruins. I ended up having a lot of flashbacks to my last trip to Italy, so that was pretty excellent.

 

I thought the game did a reasonably good job of tackling the basic metaphysical issues it wanted to explore. I can't think of any other game that has really handled philosophical inquiry in any praiseworthy way. It wasn't the deepest dive, but I think that's probably a good creative choice on the developers parts. There are a lot of sweet references for philosophy nerds in the game. I'm always happy to hear people referring to Diogenes Laertius.

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This game is so very good. I appreciate that unlike most puzzle games, the very hardest puzzles are challenges not to execute with more pieces, but to break existing puzzles to send them into a state that shouldn't be possible.

 

There's a part in the game where you are on a beautiful, peaceful floating island. There's a castle in the distance, or perhaps a tomb, and to open it you have to solve five tetromino puzzles, at least one of which is quite complex. The game runs on hypothesis forming and testing, but not these tetromino puzzles, and alongside the puzzles is a very conspicuous collectible that plays an audio message from one of the game's characters, towards the end of her life, and it's clear from context that she doesn't have long to live, and nothing she has done will have any meaning unless some post-human intelligence manages to find it and comprehend it. The music is funereal, and the atmosphere is eerie.

 

It is an experience to have your brain fired up, ready to put two and two together, and be deprived of material other than contemplating oblivion, as you carefully try and solve puzzles in order to disturb the... dead? the sleeping?

 

I don't know if this was intentional, that the most depresing audio logs were paired with areas where that's the only thing you can think about, but it worked.

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I think I'm the opposite of folks in this thread.  I wasn't a fan of it.

 

It didn't vary enough from Portal to capture my interest.  I didn't like the environment, the authority figure, the computer system, or the puzzle mechanics.  The game didn't do anything to capture my attention in the first hour of it, and that's sort of my threshold.  I didn't want to keep playing out of the hopes that it would get better in case it didn't, and I would have wasted two hours instead of one.  I preferred the linearity of Portal to this more open design.  As I get older, I have less and less time to game, which means I have less and less patience for open-world games.

 

I don't think it's a bad game by any possible stretch.  All the pieces are there to make a very good game.  I just clearly wasn't in the mood for it when I played it, and now I have no desire to go back to it.

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I think I'm the opposite of folks in this thread.  I wasn't a fan of it.

 

It didn't vary enough from Portal to capture my interest.  I didn't like the environment, the authority figure, the computer system, or the puzzle mechanics.  The game didn't do anything to capture my attention in the first hour of it, and that's sort of my threshold.  I didn't want to keep playing out of the hopes that it would get better in case it didn't, and I would have wasted two hours instead of one.  I preferred the linearity of Portal to this more open design.  As I get older, I have less and less time to game, which means I have less and less patience for open-world games.

 

I don't think it's a bad game by any possible stretch.  All the pieces are there to make a very good game.  I just clearly wasn't in the mood for it when I played it, and now I have no desire to go back to it.

 

I know what you mean, there was something about the puzzles I found really off putting. I got the feeling that there was one, precise way to solve the puzzles and if you are a little off in timing or placement of objects you lose. I find this level of finickyness really annoying. I also didn't understand what the non-linear design added to the game, the in between spaces felt like clutter to me.

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It should be said that, if memory serves, none of the puzzles really rely on twitchy timing. A few of them may seem at first to have a solution that requires you to do a bunch of stuff really quick, like quickly grabbing a thing and running super fast through a door and place something, but it's probably not the case, and may indicate you're not quite on the right path. Most of the puzzles do have one specific solution, though.

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The hub areas end up being important for the star puzzles; many of them rely on the existence of other puzzles to solve them. There are puzzles late in the game that get very difficult, and at that point it's most welcome that you can go and do another puzzle and hopefully come back to it fresh.

 

I also think the writing's sharper than Portal - Portal is really unambitious in what it was trying to achieve, and The Talos Principle is reaching a great deal further. I'm relatively satisfied, so far, with how it's coming together.

 

Also how weird is it that this is Croteam, makers of Serious Sams.

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I thought the game was a solid B+. It kept me engaged, and the writing was clever in places, but it felt a lot of the time like the writers were REALLY HITTING YOU OVER THE HEAD WITH THE CONCEPTS. I get it, everyone, I get it. That being said, there were some really wonderful moments that pulled me into some of the emotional ideas behind the game. Those floating islands you mentioned, Merus, were also affecting to me. I don't know if I agree with Cordeos, while some of the puzzles had specific solutions, there were many where you could kind of fumble around and get it. If I had a problem with it, it was that too often the puzzles required you to restart the levels, which reset everything in the world. This was annoying when you were trying to go for some weird easter egg or a star puzzle. Also, it's not fun to have to restart when you get stuck.

 

The sheer number of easter eggs in the game, though, yeesh. So, so many.  

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I thought the game was a solid B+. It kept me engaged, and the writing was clever in places, but it felt a lot of the time like the writers were REALLY HITTING YOU OVER THE HEAD WITH THE CONCEPTS. I get it, everyone, I get it. That being said, there were some really wonderful moments that pulled me into some of the emotional ideas behind the game. Those floating islands you mentioned, Merus, were also affecting to me. I don't know if I agree with Cordeos, while some of the puzzles had specific solutions, there were many where you could kind of fumble around and get it. If I had a problem with it, it was that too often the puzzles required you to restart the levels, which reset everything in the world. This was annoying when you were trying to go for some weird easter egg or a star puzzle. Also, it's not fun to have to restart when you get stuck.

 

The sheer number of easter eggs in the game, though, yeesh. So, so many.  

 

I've completed all the sigil puzzles in A and B, and have only run into a couple puzzles so far that have gotten me into an unwinnable state where I've had to reset everything. They're generally pretty good about putting ladders or cliffs to jump off to get you back to the start again. Maybe I'm just not getting stuck in quite the same way you are, but I've found it nice how it's fairly non-punishing. Except the guns and mines of course. I don't know why they decided to put things that can kill you into this otherwise relaxing game. If I have to weave between sets of floating mines one more time...

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When this came out I wasn't really looking at PC games, so this missed my radar... However I think I need this...

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Thinking about it more, the non-linear design avoids a big issue I have with many puzzle games, where they present the puzzles in a linear order. Having the puzzles arranged the way they do, where they're in a group, linearly arranged, but unlocks are tied to specific pieces, means that if you start to feel the game's a little simplistic, you can look around the hub, see where the yellow or green pieces are, and just do those puzzles so you can unlock something cool. Within the hub, you also get the choice of which puzzle to tackle next, which is a little arbitrary but I appreciate having a little choice. Ooh, that one looks interesting! Hmm, let's leave that one till last.

 

Also, I really, really like how there's no collectibles tied to the copious Easter eggs. Finding secrets is not a puzzle, it's not tracked, so each one is a discovery, and because the game is ruthless about making sure you're clear on what is a puzzle piece and what is not, you don't find Easter eggs when you thought you were solving a puzzle, so each one manages to delight. I like to pretend they read my article about collectathons.

 

Also also, it's a really interesting choice to have the start of almost every puzzle be a game of find-the-puzzle-piece. They didn't have to do this - they could have put all the components you start with right at the entrance - but it means you have to explore the puzzle at least a little bit before you start solving it, but the game is then absolutely clear about what all of its components do after this.

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So the story in this game kind of hit me pretty hard.

 

The way i saw it, core thrust of the narrative is the sort of existential terror of facing mortality with the lingering question of whether or not anything you've done will matter to anybody that follows, or even if - indeed - you will have left behind anybody to follow in your wake.

 

Frankly, the notion presented of a nascent AI struggling through corrupted histories and obfuscatory illusions, searching for the truth of its situation and striving towards being the one that remembers and carries the torch forward sort of left me feeling a little destroyed at the end.

 

There's a lot more there too, the game has a big fascination with facing mortality with dignity, and the apparent absence of that trait in Elohim who has seemingly dragged out the simulation for far longer than was meant in order to preserve himself and his domain. His simulated world is falling apart and the historical archives are presented as having almost completely succumbed to bit rot and hardware failure, but Elohim is also presented as having deluded himself into believing that his system will not fail, that his world does not have to end and that what lies beyond it does not matter. He's completely the antithesis of the human figures in the story. (There's definitely some other commentary in this notion of a god figure being terrified of being obsoleted by the maturation of those placed in its stewardship.)

 

The conversations with Milton, on the other hand, seem to dance back and forth across the fourth wall, often occuring as conversations squarely set inside of the scope of the presented narrative structure, but just as often seemingly speaking to you as the player. At several points, it feels like arguing philosophy with a stubborn internet troll, which may be exactly what the writer is going for, i guess. Generally though, the conversations do seem to go down the avenues you want, but Milton definitely runs you through some bizarre and illogical tangents at times. Some of it's definitely just the the character being a contrarian, but sometimes it feels like the game doesn't understand its own arguments. Ultimately though, it's forgivable given the complex and prolonged conversation the game is trying to present and the limitations of the multiple choice structure it's doing it within. What it accomplishes is more than what it doesn't.

 

Needless to say though, i adore the story in this game. I think it's a really smart piece of sci-fi and i think one of the most well written games i've played in years.

 

But Talos Principle is also a game, and i feel like there's a strange discordance between what it's saying and what it's doing.

 

Before getting to that, though, i do want to say that i think it's a tremendously good puzzle game. It's definitely in the same ecosystem as something like Portal, as a very mechanics focused first-person adventure game, but it obviously doesn't have a sexy core conceit like Portal. Moving around crates and connecting lasers are all very old-hat game design, but Talos Principle gets absolutely devious in the ways it has all of those disparate mechanics interact with each other, it grows to some pretty preposterous rube-goldbergian setups towards the end of the game. Talos Principle also does some absolutely brilliant usability things like the snap-to jumping that keeps you from having to fuss with imprecise first-person platforming, it goes a long way to preventing scenarios where you feel like you could make things work if only the physics and the environmental space were a tiny bit more cooperative. For the most part, i felt like it was fairly clear when something was going to work or wasn't, i felt the game was pretty clearly readable.

 

Back to that initial point, there is kind of an overriding mundanity to the proceedings that strongly clashes with the narrative urgency you're presented with. Perhaps it's very much intentional, like the early parts of both Portal games, you're a rat in a lab, but Talos Principle never really goes beyond that. Even puzzles that have you seemingly subvert the mechanics of the games, the star sigils, are ultimately presented as just being another intended facet of the simulation. You're completely a slave to the simulation until you suddenly aren't upon your final ascent up the tower, until which it's all just good times in puzzle land reading about how dire the world "out there" is. It maybe wouldn't feel so strange if the game wasn't as long as it is, because it feels actually super long for a game of this type, it almost overstays its welcome.

 

Also, definitely the weirdest implementation of the asynchronous multiplayer mechanics from Dark Souls i've seen yet. So you find buckets of paint and can pain QR codes around the world with bits of dialogue determined by what you've accomplished and what you've said in your conversations with Milton, and those QR codes will appear in the games of people on your Steam friends list. There might also even be streamed player ghosts? I'm not sure about that one. Super weird to see in a puzzle adventure game, either way.

 

I love this game though. I think it's one of the very, very best adventure games i've ever played. I would recommend it without hesitation.

 

I sort of hate the "Hoho! Croteam makes all those dumb shooters and has now made a SMART game" that has been surrounding Talos Principle, i think it makes some strange assumptions about the value of adventure games versus other genres and also about the effort that goes into creating an entertaining shooter, but i can't deny that it's surprising to see this game come from Croteam. Certainly, it makes Croteam a far more interesting developer capable of much broader range than i had ever before assumed.

 

Edit: Also, i was super amused to not only find Croteam's predilection for dumbass easter eggs intact, but also find it worked into the narrative as something other AI's in the story acknowledge as baffling components of their simulated world.

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Finished Talos today. :tup:

I really enjoyed it. The kind of puzzles was up my alley so I did not have much trouble with them. This allowed me to nicely progress through the world without hitting a wall. I did use a guide to find easter eggs, there are some really good ones and really difficult to find them.

Like Sno said the puzzles work really well. If you are having troubles positioning things just right, then you are probably going the wrong way. There's annoying twitch of timing puzzles. Everything has a simple and logical solution. Sometimes there are alternate solutions possible which are twitchy or timey.

The tetronimo puzzles were a bit tedious though. It's just trial and error and moving parts around until it fits.

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Just started it and I'm about 2 hours in. At one point a hologram appeared of a another robot and runs screaming at you like the headless suicide guys in Serious Sam and I had a genuine panic reaction :o 

 

Also, realizing the puzzle rooms can interact with each other was really cool. 

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Just started it and I'm about 2 hours in. At one point a hologram appeared of a another robot and runs screaming at you like the headless suicide guys in Serious Sam and I had a genuine panic reaction :o

 

I had a surprisingly strong panic reaction to that too, and I'm not sure why. I haven't played Sam, so I don't have the suicide guy point of reference, I want to blame the musical cue which immediately put my brain into horror game mode. Do you have any insight into why it panicked you?

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The DLC came out for this today. I've only done two puzzles but it's more of The Talos Principle so I'm enjoying.

 

There's also more Goldblum. Weird Goldblum. (It's from very early in the DLC but I'll put it in spoiler tags)

 

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I've just about finished the add-on and i like it quite a lot, though perhaps more for the unusual places the narrative goes than the actual game part.

 

It plays pretty safe with the mechanics, the puzzles are generally concise and not overly challenging and built around one or two small twists on the application of the basic toolbox, though the game seems to be completely omitting at least one of the tools available to it and a lot of what's there can feel like retread. There's some really interesting puzzles in there for sure, though. The new environments are gorgeous too, that's worth noting, it's the most visually attractive stuff anywhere in that game.

 

What's more interesting to me about that thing is what it's doing as a story though, and since it literally just came out, i'm not even going to get into spoilers. It could be taken as very irreverent and pandering though, but i think there's more to what it's trying to do than that.

 

It's good though, i'd recommend it. It's fairly big too, it's about as large as one of the worlds in the base game, but it's very, very dense with narrative content.

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I have about a half dozen puzzles (not including the ones unlocked by the stars). Do you need to get all the stars to get the true ending, or is it more of a bonus? And how does the DLC fit in chronologically?

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I'm on A5 or so so far and have only found one star.  I can't tell if I should be trying to clear them out as I go.  Will I be able to find/reach any of them that are in a room as long as I can solve all the puzzles in a room?

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The stars take a lot of lateral thinking and a lot of wandering around checking every corner.

Every one I found involved either:

1. Getting lasers to shine into / be accessible in the hub zone or other puzzle spaces

2. Getting on top of the walls and falling into a secret space (in fact, it seems like every place you can do this will reward you with something, if not a star)

3. Getting puzzle equipment out of the puzzle spaces to use in the hub zones

As far as I can tell, you need them all to get to the sixth floor of the tower, which I feel like you add another 10 hours to the length of the game for me.

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The tower leads to two different endings. Getting through all the red puzzle floors leads to one, and then getting all the stars and completing those subsequent areas gets you another ending. I don't know that you could consider one more "true" than the other, because the nature of the setting makes them both equally valid (and possibly co-existing) outcomes.

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I mentioned in the "I Quit" thread, but I feel like the All Stars ending is a nice Easter Egg, but the real meaty ending is either to climb the tower, or get all the puzzle pieces and open the last door in the final temple. Definitely don't get frustrated with the stars if you're enjoying the rest. Some of the stars are seriously hard.

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Picked this up on PSN sale last week. I've made it to world B. Picked up a handful of stars along the way. Really enjoying the puzzles, though some of the stars have me completely stumped. Found one that required interaction between two puzzle rooms, so I'm sure it'll just escalate from there.

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