The Talos Principle 2 Review

It’s pretty much common knowledge around the GameGrin office now that I get lost in videogames a lot. My ability to traverse game worlds is severely hindered by a combination of ADHD-induced distraction and a general lack of spatial awareness. In fact, I’ve previously been introduced to a game dev as “This is Gary, the only person I’ve seen get lost in a Sonic the Hedgehog game”. It wasn’t even one of the 3D ones; it was Sonic Mania. For this reason, I don’t play as many open-world games as I perhaps might, and I very much enjoy a good puzzle game. The Talos Principle was a game I rarely got lost in, as most of the action took place in small, confined areas that were all neatly ordered and accessible through a set of doors contained in a single corridor. Unfortunately for me,The Talos Principle 2 takes what was great about the first game and puts it into a massive open world with exploration tasks thrown in for good measure. Wish me luck!

In case you didn’t play the first game, it was essentially a first-person puzzler that saw you play as a robot, learning what it is to be human by both solving puzzles and glimpsing small bits of human history via philosophical texts on computer terminals. It’s never said, but it’s strongly implied that humanity has been wiped out by some kind of disease and that’s why you have access to a massive (albeit heavily corrupted) database of human history. The Talos Principle 2 picks up immediately after the end of the first, where this situation is detailed a bit more explicitly, and you learn that by passing the tests, you get to be “born” as the latest and final citizen of New Jerusalem, a city with a fixed population of 1000 robots, all of whom have been painstakingly created over the years in order to bring humanity back to the world after the “Biological Humans” have messed everything up and caused their own downfall. It’s not too hard to see why Croteam have decided to revisit the franchise this year after an eight-year hiatus!

The city of New Jerusalem, crafted especially for this sequel, looks stunning.

Opportune storyline aside, this is a game that does a pretty good job of making you think. The first game was very much steeped in philosophy, and this one makes it even more explicit as the robots battle the dichotomy between the measured growth of no more than 1000 robots versus the unfettered growth of Biological Humans that led to the species getting destroyed. And it’s not just one-sided discussion either; there is a lot of philosophical debate given to varying different viewpoints of the story, with players left to come to their own conclusions. Most of this comes through the form of conversations between you as “1K” and the other characters you’re travelling with, but the terminals of the first game return as research panels, from which you can learn more about the game world as you explore, as well as the now-customary philosophy quotes. There’s also an unnamed social media network that garners as much debate as the ones in our real world, but as everyone is an AI, it’s all much more polite, and nobody makes dummy accounts with silly names like "firethisdork" in order to insult people they’ve never met. If real social media was like this, then I might still use it instead of being a luddite. 

The world is absolutely stunning looking, and whilst I still got quite frustrated with getting lost all the time, at least I could take solace in getting lost in an area that looks beautiful. I would say, though, that whilst difficulty in finding my way round is a personal thing that I won’t hold against Croteam, I do feel that a map would have been a good idea. There’s a thing in the menu that’s called a map, but it’s basically just a list of puzzles and doesn’t give any idea of where anything is in relation to anything else. There’s a compass bar at the top of the screen that has objective icons on it, and the world is well signposted, so it’s generally not too hard to find your way around, but a scatter graph is not a map, and I object to being told that it is one. There was a point where at the end of the first act of the game, I had to make my way back to the helicopter we came in on back at the beginning. This wasn’t marked, and I spent a good half an hour before I realised I had to take a train back to the starting area in order to find it. I play video games in order to avoid such mundane things as remembering where I parked!

This is not a map!

But you don’t want to hear about how much I got lost, do you? The important thing here, above all else, is how well the game plays. And I’m pleased to say it’s just as brilliant as the first one. Most of the puzzles in the early half of the game are pretty straightforward, but as you get used to the mechanics, they get linearly harder, with a pretty steady difficulty curve. You never quite feel like it’s impossible, but I certainly found a number that had me skipping over them and coming back later. Just like the first game, you get puzzles in groups and you can complete them in any order you feel like, which makes it less of a game breaker if you get stuck on one. Most of the areas also have a couple of spare puzzles, so if you can’t complete any of the main eight, then you can complete one of those instead to fulfil the requirements instead. 

A few of the mechanics from the first game have returned, like connecting light beams and jamming doors to gain access to areas, but these have been complemented by a huge number of other techniques, including magic hole-making machines, on-demand clones, RGB converters that take in two lights of red, green, and blue and emit the third colour (I know that’s not how light works, but we’ll let them off because sci-fi). Only so many of these mechanics are ever used at a time, so although puzzles get complex, they never get inaccessible. Like in the first game, you can get help from an external source. In the first game, it was finding the resting place of the messengers, and in this game, it’s finding sparks of Prometheus. I never found the resting place of the messengers in game one until very late in the game, and similarly, I never found any of the sparks, so I had to just complete all the puzzles the old-fashioned way. It was worth it, though, as there’s such a sense of satisfaction in finally spotting the one thing that you missed for the last 20 minutes staring at a puzzle.

 If you like pretty lights, you're in luck.

Everything is supplanted by a really nice chilled-out soundtrack. A lot of synth and ambient-style electronic sound is heard throughout, very much evocative of someone like Jean-Michelle Jarre. I enjoyed it, although sometimes a particular motif is linked to an area, and it can be a little disjointed when you reach the edge of the area, and it suddenly changes. Again, it’s only a small problem and is unlikely to have much effect on your enjoyment of the game. 

Overall, The Talos Principle 2 is everything the first game was, but with a whole lot more work focused on the storyline and world. I’m not usually a big fan of fully open-world puzzle games, but it does add a real sense of post-apocalyptic isolation that fits the theme perfectly, so it’s definitely the right choice here. The only complaint that I have is that I would have preferred a map, but otherwise, this is a perfect sequel to one of the best puzzle games ever made, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend getting a copy of this to flex your cerebrum a little, both with the puzzles, and the underlying philosophical quandaries.

Wait, why does a robot need binoculars?