LogFAQs > #957566697

27. The Talos Principle (PC, 2014)


Like many puzzle games, The Talos Principle takes a central idea, light-refraction, and uses common puzzle objects like crates and barriers and finds a way to utilize them all in a myriad of ways to create a fulfilling puzzle experience, even tossing in a curveball idea or two. Its difficult to talk about the puzzle elements because I dont know what to say to give the game justice. More than most genres, I think you just have to play pure puzzle games because they will click almost immediately or not at all without much room for middle ground. I will say, and I mentioned this within the past week or so in another topic, that I like puzzle games that are, for lack of a better word, flat in their difficulty. Instead of making you go through progressively difficult puzzles, the puzzles are pretty consistent in their demands, even if the elements in play change. Theres something oddly satisfying about a game whose seventh puzzle might give you the most trouble of them all. The Talos Principle is a perfect example of this where random puzzles here and there caused me to work the hardest to solve.

Anyway, The Talos Principle does a few things that are really neat, even if I didnt truly take advantage of them. One is that you arent required to do every puzzle. How the game works is that it is somewhat open-world. It has been many years since I played this, so my memory is a little hazy as to the specifics. In the various areas of the open world are several puzzles that you can tackle in basically any order. The puzzles let you know this right away, but completing a puzzle rewards you with a certain tetromino. You use these tetrominos to unlock other areas, and the process repeats. The game has multiple endings, and I think one requires you to do all of the puzzles, but you arent forced to do them all to unlock all the puzzles in the game or reach an ending.

Another is that there are several, perhaps even more than I am aware of, puzzles that you can break using the tools at your disposal and even other puzzles. Croteam was pretty self aware of this as an intended system as some puzzles require you to use another puzzle area to solve or to reach an optional collectible, and I want to say there could even be an achievement tied to breaking a puzzle. While I did always try to solve a puzzle the normal way, sometimes I would try to get creative when I hit a wall or I was curious if I could circumvent a portion of the puzzle by doing a certain action. For the most part, I was denied, but once or twice, I got through clearly in a way that was not standard.

While you can basically ignore this, philosophy plays a major role in the game as it basically revolves around it while rarely being in the forefront. Prevalent in the eerily lonely environments are the voice of a disembodied god-like figure, audio logs of a woman, and an apparent real-time conversation with an unknown entity via computers that dole out various philosophical musings. One of these encounters using the computers cut me deep. They asked me a series of questions and came back with a detailed assessment of myself, and it just seemed like a dead ringer for me. I had to take a moment to process the realization. Im sure it was just the case of the Barnum Effect, but I was still blown away. It's not a selling point imo, but it is well-done to the point that it was the deciding factor in calling it my favorite puzzle game over Linelight and the Portals.

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