The Talos Principle

For those of you who haven’t heard of this yet, it’s a first person puzzle game by Croteam (makers of Serious Sam). While it has nothing to do with Portals, it reminds me of Portal 1 & 2 in the way the game is setup with an overarching story and the type of logic needed to solve puzzles. You play as a sentient(?) robot who wakes up in an area made up of ruined buildings and bits of technology (force fields, security bots, turrets) and a god-like voice talking to you. In addition to solving puzzles, you find computer terminals with bits of story via emails/text excerpts.

I’m not terribly far yet, but from what I’ve seen and the trailer for the game, the story seems to revolve around existential issues as well as figuring out what happened to this civilization.

In any case, I’m loving it. It’s got exceptional production values and the puzzles so far are great. Ever since Portal 2, I’ve been looking for new 3D puzzle games but none have really held my interest. Quantum Conundrum seemed promising in concept but was ultimately quite boring. QUBE’s idea was fun for a few minutes. Only Antichamber really worked for me, but not in quite the same way. Finding Talos was a pleasant surprise for me.

There’s a test/demo on Steam as well. http://store.steampowered.com/app/257510/

I can’t believe no one else is playing this. It might be my GOTY.

As I’ve gotten further, it’s introduced puzzles that required work outside of the game with real world resources. This, coupled with the story about “Can an AI be a human?” gels perfectly with the gameplay extremely well. Repeatedly, I feel like I am in the shoes of this test subject and its thoughts and feelings directly map to what I experience in the game. I’m not playing as an AI character, I AM the character.

Mechanics continue to be varied with individual puzzles. It seems like you can get all of the normal objectives by just following the standard progression. Getting all of the star objectives requires progressively more intense problem solving (aforementioned real world resources).

I hope it gets a sale price on Steam during the holiday sale because this game should not be missed.

They said the price it’s at now is the price it’ll stay for the whole sale. Still well worth the money.

I’ll definitely be picking this up when it hits $15.

That’s rather short sighted of them. A decent sale price would move this from hidden gem to selling like hotcakes (even after the sale).

Is it finished? I somehow got the sense from the Steam page that it’s still under development.

Yes it is complete. Game came out about 2 weeks ago.

Yes, I’m playing it and it’s good, an interesting game.

Right now I’m doing the green and yellow puzzles, I’ve done 4 red puzzles but after two of them I noticed they are much harder so I will leave until near the end.

Great game, just wish it had a bit more of an art style to it, rather than (what looks like) re-use Serious Sam environment assets. Guess it keeps the cost down.

Croteam’s anti-piracy tricks are always pretty awesome.

If you pirate The Talos Princicple, you get stuck in the elevator. Forever.

The game is good, I have 33 red pieces already, so I’m close (?) to the end. But you know, I have to play it slowly, at this point is hard so I solve 2-3 puzzles and quit it for the day, it feels draining.

I loved this game at PAX Prime. When I played it there I remarked that it reminded me of Portal in how it gradually introduces you to new concepts, then has confidence in you to learn how to use those concepts. So happy to hear that it lived up to the promise there. Only reason I haven’t bought it yet is that I simply have too much other stuff I want to play now.

The difference is that is less “mind bending” concept than Portal, and it’s more a hardcore puzzle game (which will be good or bad, depending of the player), while Portal was more “mainstream”, a puzzle game for everybody. One of the last puzzles is really challenging, it’s giving me a headache, much more than any Portal 1/2 puzzle in the official campaign.
Also, Portal combined cerebral puzzles with humor doing a nice contrast, here the combination is cerebral puzzles… with more cerebral plot and philosophy. But it’s still a very good game with very interesting ideas.

Is the second puzzle the one who is indicated as “medium” in the first area? I suppose easy is the first one.

You only have to use the box to put the light switch above, that way you can transmit the blue ray without crossing the red ray. The full game explains more clearly the basic concepts as it has a long dozen of “tutorial” puzzles.

I just finished the game. End was as expected. I had to “cheat” twice, one in a normal puzzle (1 guide used) and the other one climbing the tower, I needed some internet help.

The objects you can move usually can “click” on top of the box, the silhouette while they are in your hands snap to the position, surely you didn’t notice that.

Unlocked the elevator. Nice game, I wonder how it will compare to The Witness…

Loving this game for the most part but I do find that it occasionally suffers from something I really dislike in puzzle games: puzzles where you have already identified the solution, but you have trouble executing said solution. For example, there’s a red puzzle where you have to mess with several mines travelling in paths where there’s no room to dodge them so you have to carefully time jamming of various puzzle elements to be able to get where you need to go and back while still bringing your jammers with you. I had to try that about ten times after I’d already figured out what they wanted me to do because you have to be very fast on the draw and do things exactly right or BOOM, back to the start for you. That’s super frustrating. There was also an orange connector puzzle where I was doing the right general steps to solve it, I just needed a connector to be further back so that there would be a slight elevation of the resulting beam and it wouldn’t clash. How would I know that that would work like that?

Those moments have been few and far between, thankfully, but I’ve only just started on the reds so I worry that there will be more.

Road to Gehenna DLC coming.

The game is now 50% off ($19.99) on Steam

This game needs far more discussion, what an interesting game!

So I picked this up during the summer sale, and already am struck by how good it is. My initial fears were that the story and mechanics would be unconnected, but then I got to the tree/ tower. One of the better uses of allegory in a game I’ve ever encountered. Granted there is not much quality competition on that front.

I’m not terribly far yet, only just unlocked world B, but enjoying greatly. I could be slightly farther if I wasn’t trying to puzzle around some of the more tricky bits, i.e. the stars. Are those important to the plot/ progression, or am I only doing them for puzzle reasons?