This is a slow pace puzzle game and thinker with an interesting subtext and story woven throughout. The puzzles are creative, and varied, and often had me set the game down to think and sleep it over. Honestly, if you like games like Portal, but a little less action, and a lot more philosophy, add this to your library. I'm having fun, that's what's important.

Day 53
TL;DR: A piece of art

After about two times starting the game and someday simply stopping and abandoning it, I finally completed 'The Talos Principle'. One of the best puzzle games I have ever played, even if I hate some segments, they are just part of the experience.

When you first start the game, you are just being set into the world. A voice from somewhere calls out to you, saying you should go to their temple to receive eternal life, for which you have to collect sigils to open new paths.

A sigil is always obtained by solving a singular puzzle, all of which get progressively more difficult to gather throughout. At the beginning, there are only basic elements like jammers that can disrupt almost anything, but only one thing at a time. With later there being more and more elements needed to be unlocked with sigils to get more elements that are required for later puzzles.

About these puzzles, if you have played some 3D puzzle games, they may have a somewhat familiar feeling to them that I cannot actually pinpoint. Which is weird, as the puzzles themselves are unlike anything I have ever played. While becoming increasingly challenging, you always have to keep the level design in mind to know what to do step by step, as you are never able to view the entire puzzle all at once, and if you do a mistake, you may have to redo the steps from the beginning, or you are lucky and are able to salvage it. Either Way, it’s all part of the process and influences how you go about later puzzles.

A very specific mechanic I still have to call out, as that is one of the most extraordinary ones I have yet seen, yet at the same time is one of the most annoying ones that ever existed. This being the later unlocked recall. When activated it records all the movements you do and all the stationary object placements you do in real time, and once you stop the recording, the movements will be played out by a hologram/clone, while you yourself are able to completely interact independently. Even if you are unable to interact with the holograms directly, you can still use them, as they still interact with everything else. It creates this weird dynamic in planning where you have to plan for two players step by step while only playing as a singular one. It’s very well executed, but also has a major flaw by design that cannot be undone. Since everything happens in real-time during recording, you sometimes just have to wait during the recording on panels, in front of things, or even after placing objects. Reason being that your actual player character has enough time to use all the holograms to its advantage, since once the play is over, everything vanishes and you have to record everything from scratch. The same applies for when you made a mistake in the recording. This makes these puzzles drag out, if you don’t quite figure them out fast, which is sad, as the mechanic itself is just such a wonderful idea. This is meant as an example of how interesting and intricately the puzzles are actually designed. But that is not all to this game, as this entire world is a puzzle itself.

As you progress, or are already able to find out during the tutorial, this world is not a real one. It is a virtual one, with you playing as another version of a robot representing the humans of this world. You may know they exist, as you can find their messages strewn throughout the world in the form of QR-Codes, and yet, never once have you seen another one like you.

All of this creates a feeling of making one question what exactly is to be trusted, or is not even fake to begin with. The words by the self proclaimed god ELOHIM are there to reassure you of things and bring you onto a path. But are they actually what you should follow? You are not the only one with these questions. The ones before you also told about such difficulties throughout their journey in their messages.

What's more, this world you are in doesn't seem to even function properly anymore. Even though its physics works perfectly fine, there are visual glitches happening frequently. And while there are no borders - not even invincible ones - to the rest of the world, are still encircled, since if you get close to a certain point, ELOHIM always starts the same speech that gets louder the further you go, up until you just die. Everything just feels like an illusion through which you have to find the truth yourself.

Then, there are also documents that you can access throughout your journey that are saved on terminals, with each terminal having saved different ones on it. They tell the tale of how this world came to be, or philosophical/biblical/historical topics that cover a similar feeling to what you yourself are currently going through among other things. But these too are sometimes a bit corrupted. Some text passages are ineligible, and some have suddenly hexadecimals inserted into them. In both cases, you can only assume what had been written there, while in others, you can decode the hexadecimal to recover text that feels like it belongs somewhere else entirely. It just puts further emphasis on the whole sentiment of melancholy that waves at you through the entire game, even though there is no hint of actual sadness. It adds to a feeling of a serene, yet slowly dying world.

Not only are documents, QR-Codes and ELOHIMs speeches the only story in the game, as there are also audio files that can be found throughout, where a woman that is often referenced through said documents, tells her own story and sentiments of this world, and how much it means to her. As she is the leading force behind this world and how it came to be.

And still, even with all of this, there is still an entire subplot with the software that is the archivist of all the documents, as it has become sentient. It will question your entire being, your principles, your morality and even your creativity. And yet, all it demands are answers, by you. It wants to get to know you, what makes you yourself. Answers only you are able to give.

So what will it be? What answers will you give? Will you choose to follow through with ELOHIMs guidance or are you going to completely ignore it? Or would you rather choose to simply start looking for the secrets of this world, ignoring both?

A fun puzzle game matched well to a dive into thoughts on personhood, civilisation, and immortality.

I feel the mainline puzzles could probably have finished up a bit quicker, the last few start to drag heavily.

One thing that deserves applause is the puzzle design, very few of the puzzles involve very specific placement or twitch reaction which to me is a mark of a good puzzle game - one accessible to a greater number of people with less frustration - in the same vein as the Portal series.

On a side note, the release of the original followed by the timeline of the AI-hype cycle and e/acc movement connects up pretty well in a "wow these people really missed the point of these games".