The Talos Principle 2 - Road to Elysium Review

It’s often said that you can have too much of a good thing, and there’s likely to be some truth in that idiom. Indeed, 18-year-old Gary would have something to say on the matter, at least, he would following that night he imbibed more than a bottle of apple schnapps and became particularly ill as a result. Over two decades later, I still can’t drink the vile green stuff. But puzzles can’t make you ill, and they don’t leave a horrible sticky residue on everything either, so surely you can’t have too many of them, right? I decided to try and find out with the Road to Elysium DLC, now available for The Talos Principle 2, but be aware that much like that fateful evening in the early 2000s spoiled my enjoyment of sweet shots, this review will contain spoilers for the first game.

With three standalone mini-stories, you get a good bang for your buck with this package. Orpheus Ascending gives a bit more backstory to the disaster that was hinted at throughout the main game. Second up is Isle of the Blessed, which gives us more of the delightfully-charming-but-awkward Yakut as he takes on puzzles with his newly-found family on a beautiful island-cum-museum. The fiendishly-difficult Into the Abyss rounds up the trio; It takes place in a simulation which allows us to see through Byrons's eyes, revealing what happened while he was trapped inside the simulations within the megastructure during the events of the main game.

If you want to know what happened to Byron during the later part of the game, this DLC will tell you more.

You can play all three in any order, but the difficulty ramp is such that it's probably best to attempt them in the order they are presented on screen. In quite a nice touch, though, you can play them separately, as each DLC has a unique save file. This means that if you get stuck on a puzzle – and you will – then you can go play one of the other DLCs to give your brain a rest. Well, not a rest, more a change of task, but you know what they say about a change being as good as a rest. That difficulty is something that I probably ought to address too. If you thought some of the later puzzles in the main game were tricky, these are even more so. Each chapter culminates in one giant meta puzzle, much like the final section of the main game with the heaven and hell puzzles. There’s very little respite, and some of them need particularly precise positioning, meaning that there were a few occasions where I found myself abandoning a solution as not feasible, only to come back to it later and realise that it would work if I moved an element a little bit in one direction. I feel like the main game was more forgiving in this respect. 

One thing I wasn’t hugely keen on, was the recurring themes throughout. For example, Orpheus Ascending is largely made up of puzzles that see you crossing light beams, and whilst this is a clever mechanic, I felt there was a bit of a sense of diminishing returns over time. The puzzles in the main game did have linked mechanics across areas, but the chapters in this DLC are a bit bigger than the main game’s locations, so the variations on a theme approach didn’t work as well here for me. It didn’t stop me from enjoying it, but I think I would have liked to see some more variety. 

DO cross the streams.

The thing that I was most pleased to see was a deepening of the lore behind the game world. We learn a lot more about events that are only spoken of briefly, and I was really pleased to see Yakut come out of his shell and gain confidence as I progressed through the second chapter. The third chapter tells us so much more about Athena, and how her anxiety and self-doubt had made things so much difficult for the founder. There are a number of arguments between her and other characters in this simulation, but rather than being replays of actual events, they represent the fictional arguments that she has had in her own head with these characters, as she made assumptions about their reactions to her actions. As someone with anxiety myself, who does this quite a lot, it was a pretty accurate portrayal of how it can feel to wrestle with one's own lack of confidence. Just like in the main game, Croteam has done a wonderful job of analysing humanity and demonstrating it through the minds of robots. 

I was incredibly fond of The Talos Principle 2, and this DLC is just as polished and well-written as the game that it bolts into. I will admit that I have yet to complete all of it, due to that aforementioned high difficulty, but I’ve been dipping back in and out of it in small doses for a while now, and I can’t see that stopping until I’ve eventually cracked all of the puzzles. A little repetition and a fiendish challenge certainly are the only small downsides, and neither detract from the fact that this is a fantastic addition to what was already a fantastic game. If you loved The Talos Principle 2, like I did, then you will love this.

The island paradise section was a particular favourite for me, and looked stunning.