

I assume this was added to tie in with the idea that the player is inside a simulation, but I found the noise very grating when I was trying to focus on a puzzle and disorienting when the item that flashed was right in my face. My second issue was that the mood was often broken by occasional “visual glitches” where a solid object would temporarily flash as static and make an associated static noise. walls), but because effort had been put into placing statues, particularly broken statues, all over every world it ruined some of the appeal that they were all posed and broken in exactly the same way. First was that the visual assets were reused a lot. I did have two issues in this area however. Every world I immediately ran around to see all the edges and nooks to look for story related content and to see the view. The atmosphere of this game is amazing and certainly the kind of thing I love taking a moment to line up screen shots for. Each of these is accompanied by calm music and a beautiful landscape. There are five distinct environments in The Talos Principle: 1) Brick-walled park 2) Egyptian desert 3) Gothic cemetery 4) Snowy mountaintop 5) Industrial ice land. Which might’ve been fine if my companion hadn’t pointed out all the flaws in my logic and left me frustrated trying to explain myself. There are a lot of options for describing what you actually think, but I still found the options unsuitable for describing my own views and as a result ended up in a debate about things I didn’t really believe. There’s also a companion you’re able to regularly message, starting not too far into the game, who challenges your own philosophy about consciousness and what it means to be a person. Many of the documents are philosophical or religious in nature and pose questions about what it means to be human, what’s the meaning of life, and what death is. Through messages and short text documents you learn their history and thoughts.

The story focuses on the people who came before you in the world, both the humans who built it and the others like you running around in it. If I had to describe the game in three words it would be “Puzzles and Philosophy”. The story and discussions are a major highlight of The Talos Principle. Message left by the recurring character Sheep Other times recorder puzzles explicitly needed you to just turn it on and wait for long periods of time without doing anything, which just isn’t rewarding gameplay. This led to often turning the recorder on and waiting around extra long at each step you did to make sure your future self would have plenty of time to accomplish their tasks. It was easy to get items locked in inaccessible locations when the recorder ran out.

Of particular note was the recorder, which you use to record a doppelganger, was very prone to causing resets. I also often wished I could manually save a puzzle in one partially-completed arrangement so that I could safely experiment on a solution that if it failed would require to me reset the whole thing. Often you’d be able to figure out what you needed to do way faster than you could execute it and the shuffling of items from one area to another became tedious. As puzzles got larger and longer however, there became a problem of item shuffling.
