ysbreker

the Talos Principle

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The base game was a favourite of mine, and i'm now "close" to finishing the DLC (want to get all the stars) after picking it up during the steam sale.

 

The writing is hilarious (see Goldboom), and quite touching at times, and a lot of fun! Still one of the best explorations of existential ideas i've played since The Swapper.

 

The "bildungsroman" interactive text adventure was pretty depressing

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Played this for like 6 hours today absolutely loving it. Little worried about going back for those stars though :/ re-exploring whole levels... might start to sour the experience.

I missed a lot of stars along the way as early on i assumed I'd get some abilities later on that would help, so quickly gave up.

I recently jumped in to A1 to see if I grab that star, fuck trudging all over that place again. They could at least sign post which direction they're in.

If you go through the big church door does the game end?... No don't tell me, I'll save that till last, wanna climb that tower first

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Played this for like 6 hours today absolutely loving it. Little worried about going back for those stars though :/ re-exploring whole levels... might start to sour the experience.

 

I'd suggest just ignoring the stars, they are not a part of the core game experience and they can be pretty frustrating and pace-braking. That's what I did for the most part. You can always decide to go back and search for them after finishing the game.

 

I actually think that including this type of extra/secret layer into a game can make it worse. The intention behind it is to provide something extra for players that are really into the game but given the strong completionist impulses of many players it makes the experience needlessly frustrating to a lot of people. Even making it really well hidden doesn't help with the Internet existing, e.g. I've seen many people having a very negative opinion about Braid because collecting the stars is frustrating and even kind of broken in one place (when it's pretty clear it's intentional and there's almost zero chance the player would even notice the stars being in the game without reading about them online).

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There's stars in braid???? Just googled it, wow

I got a couple more Talos stars today, I quit trying after a few minutes if I can't get my head around what I need to do, I just want to get enough to get through one of the star doors... If it ends up being more of those gardens, I'll happily skip them. Don't tell me ;)

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Definitely just focus on climbing the tower for your first playthrough. Don't worry about the stars or the "big church door".

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:tup: In that case I'm probably very near the end, just three worlds to go I think and I've already accessed the 5 floor.

The "what happened to the humans" and "what is the point of this" narratives have really got there hooks in me. The later only dawning on me as I played last night

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In fact I would recommend going to the big church door before going up the tower, but yes, saves are very important there. There's no going back.

 

I got about 20% of the stars my first time through. Mainly the ones that involved getting a piece of equipment outside it's puzzle. When I went back to try and get more, I looked up a video of a couple being hidden behind weeds or difficult jumps and decided that's not the type of puzzling I wanted to do.

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The ps4 keeps every save, or at least the last ten saves. Easy enough to revert back if I end up in a stone tombbbb.

There's no way I'm going back for all the stars, I've got too many other things to play. Also the witness will be out in like 3 weeks? Should have a little distance between these two games. Don't want to be burnt out on puzzles

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Since The Witness has been brought up, I want to talk about one aspect of The Talos Principle that bothers me, which is made obvious when comparing it to The Witness (or at least my impression of what The Witness will be like).

 

TTP is visually beautiful, but I often feel like the visual design contains a lot of overly distracting stuff. There will be little alcoves, ruins, piles of rocks, or winding paths, that at first glance seem like they could be important, or serve a functional or narrative purpose, but almost always end up being decorative instead. My default mode of game-playing is to explore environments quite thoroughly (i.e. completionist impulse), and that's how I played TTP at first. The game environments feel simultaneously too vast and sparse, and too busy for this mode of play to be sustainable however, so now I use the speed up time function to quickly pass over many areas of the game.

 

On the other hand, the game does hide a lot of stuff in the environment, and so encourages focused exploration. I just find it slightly frustrating that most of the time this exploration does not seem to lead to anything important, or feel inherently interesting.

 

I've been following the development blog of The Witness, and from what i've read it seems to be concerned to a greater extent than any other game I can think of, with consistently and comprehensively justifying the existence of everything in the game. Notably the devs and artists have received consultation from actual architects about the most "minor" of details. I expect exploration in the Witness will feel like its own reward.

 

It's probably a bit unfair to compare The Witness to TTP in this regard, since the visual fidelity and more pronounced realism of the latter creates all sorts of challenges and expectations that the former can more easily avoid. I should also point out that there are a lot a of interesting world-building details throughout the game (e.g. the accuracy of the Roman bricks), and that whatever issues I have with TTP are shared by most other games with large environments.

 

It's also interesting to consider whether my frustration with not knowing if some aspect of the environmental design is meaningful or purposeful, is in any way similar to the uncertainty and difficulty actual archaeologists go through when theorising about real historical remains. Or in more abstract philosophical terms, what things are and "why" they exist.

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I kinda liked that to be honest. I never did go deep on getting all the stars or easter eggs in TPP, but it was refreshing to see a puzzle game be fully willing to throw meaningless details in. It feels more real to have actual details like that, not just have everything honed to exactly what you need. Even though yes the game is explicitly in a simulation, I feel like probably that constrast was part of the point.

 

Hearing that about the Witness is a tad offputting because it feels overly clinical and fake. I'm probably just extrapolating from what you said too much, but it makes me think of the early Portal levels, which are intentionally manufactured to be exact testing chambers with no fluff. I enjoyed this game being the intentional antithesis of that.

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I generally do like the "messiness" as well, and the tension of not knowing what part of the simulation is or isn't meaningful fits nicely with the themes of the rest of the game. I just feel like i'm actively ignoring a lot of the game, and wonder if a more stylised presentation would have made things feel less distracting to me.

 

I don't think I explained my comparison with The Witness very well, since I agree with your feelings about clinically exacting environments, but consider The Witness to be the opposite of that. There's a lot of "fluff" in The Witness too, but the fluff has been designed in a way that is supposed to feel natural and rich in history. For example, building designs are informed by their function and placement in the environment, and take into account the physical properties of wood, stone, etc. in construction (http://the-witness.net/news/2015/06/polishing-the-architecture/). A lot of thought has also been put in to infusing backstory and a sense of history in to the visual design of things (http://the-witness.net/news/2011/12/architecture-in-the-witness/).

 

I guess the main reason I feel weird about TTP isn't because some environments don't contribute functionally to the gameplay, it's because it uses the iconography of classical Roman, Egyptian etc. architecture, so I'm expecting to be able to find details about their "real life" functionality that I can infer a history from, but end up feeling unsatisfied when that doesn't exist. But actually, the worlds are simulations anyway, so obviously they wouldn't have a physical history to them, and are designed to feel unreal (visual glitches etc.). The entire game is concerned with existentialism, so i'd like to think this uneasy feeling is evoked intentionally.

 

I'd love to read some behind the scenes stuff about TTP, I did a quick search and found Tom Jubert's blog: http://tom-jubert.blogspot.com . Not much writing about TTP though.

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Ah then I like the sound of that. And it makes it more Myst-like (I think, I have not played Myst). 

 

I agree about the details actually being superficial and flat, but I do again think that maybe it's intentional. The entire point is about trying to create a true rich experience that a simple simulation couldn't manage. (at least this is what I took the 'true' ending to mean) So it stands to reason that a simulation of rich histories can only be surface level.

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I honestly didn't know that there was any real information about the witness out there. As far as I knew it was a silent date on the calendar and that's it.

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