Idle Thoughts

Does it not follow from first principles that a great puzzle game can be appreciated despite its bloated storyline? (★★★★☆)

The Talos Principle 2 is another one of those games that has the unenviable task of outdoing its spectacular predecessor. Alongside Antichamber, the first Talos Principle is my favorite “Portal-like first-person puzzle-game-with-a-gimmick”. Talos doesn’t have much of a gimmick, really, since the puzzles are a pretty standard mix of lasers and pressure switches. What it does have is an impeccable sense of mood that goes a very long way to sell the game. The fact that the game is set outside, the theme of ruins, the sounds of crickets chirping, the music, all of it is very calming. Imagine if the game was set in some stock-asset warehouse. Ew! Even the religious mumbo-jumbo and philosophical/existential layer added on top is kind of soothing too. If this were a review for the first game, it’d get the highest and (maybe) most coveted Idle Thoughts award : (★★★★★). Look at all those stars!

So what about the Talos Principle 2? It still does a lot of the things the original did well, but if I could describe it in one word, it would be this: overindulgence. It’s a longer game with more areas, more puzzles, more gimmicks and, crucially, much, much, much more to say for itself.

Seriously, the game will not shut up, ever.

Let’s give some context first. I respect that the devs broadened their horizons for the sequel. The protagonist of the first game escaped their predicament and, many years later, you awake as a robot in a new “humanity” of a thousand robots (I’ll stick with the quotation marks, thank you. It doesn’t quite sit well with me that these tin cans think they’re human). Some shenanigans happen just as you are born and, what do you know, soon you’re out there exploring an antiquity-themed island full of puzzles. Before that, however, you are actually allowed to visit the robots’ new city, chat with a dozen people, explore a few buildings and feel the pulse of this new civilization. The robots have built a shrine dedicated to cats, that’s cute. This part alone can last a few hours and is completely optional. A lesser game would just handwave that part away to save money and voice-over work. Kudos for that.

But the yapping doesn’t stop there. You bring a team with you to the puzzle island, so forget about any sense of quiet reflection. There’s mandatory cutscene dialogue, optional crew conversations, radio messages during gameplay, radio messages that interrupt gameplay, audio logs, computer text files, fricking dream sequences, etc. It’s all quite bloated. I swear, there are multiple conversations about a cat peeing on wires. There’s even a bit where characters act like sock puppets for the author and complain about a quote from G.K. Chesterton.

Worst of all, every “human” has their mind directly connected to social media. Everyone being mentally on a stupid Internet forum 24/7 is probably the most frightening science fiction concept I’ve heard in a long time.

From time to time, you get to respond something. People want your opinion on what’s going on. Surprisingly, you’ll sometimes instantly convince the person you’re talking to, or you’ll get some predictable philosophical judo performed on you. Everyone wants to know what you “feel” about this mysterious puzzle island and everyone is pretty damn well going to tell you what they feel about it. Again and again. It’s like going on a nature hike with a thousand philosophy undergrads chiming in.

You want to know why I think there is a mysterious puzzle island? Because it’s a puzzle game. Stop questioning the premise!

You want to know why I think marvellous technology like teleportation is reduced to a gimmick inside a little room? Because it’s a puzzle game. Stop lampshading!

“Hey, do you have a minute to re-litigate for the third time this hour the entire meaning of life, the universe and everything?” NO. Besides, nevermind the philosophical questions and the dangers, you know I’m going to explore anyway. I paid for this. Puzzle game, remember?

Like its predecessor, Talos 2 is a game about Big Philosophical Questions. The question in the first game is: “What is a person?” Here, fittingly, the Big Philosophical Questions are not about the individual, but about society: “What is morality?” “What is the purpose of civilization?” and, more pragmatically, “Can humanity be trusted not to blow itself up with its own technological advances?”.

Mild spoiler incoming: it turns out the island was created by Athena, aka robot numero uno, aka the protagonist of the first game. It was easy for her to do, you see, because she has figured out “The Theory of Everything”. Yes, the game really calls it that, capital letters and all. What does it do? Well, Everything, duh: space travel, energy production, resurrection, teleportation, creating matter. Obviously, this Theory of Everything is dangerous as well. Can humanity be trusted not to burn itself with fire? That’s the whole metaphor of the game, except it’s also literal, since Prometheus shows up to talk to you about fire safety. Really.

As an aside, it’s weird to me that a game about scientific progress has such a messiah complex. The robots exclusively fawn over a single human (the fleshy kind) as their creator. No scientific advance is the work of one person. How could one woman complete such a huge AI project on her own? Did she single-handedly build the massive dam that powers the high-tech lab inside? Then, Athena, who happens to have the same voice as this creator, discovers (almost) single-handedly “The Theory of Everything” in the woods using scavenged equipment. It makes Einstein look like a drooling dum-dum by comparison. This is such an egregious case of sloppy writing called the Himalaya Complex : look guys, the character I’m writing is the greatest, the bestest at everything and has invented the mostest marvelousest invention in the worldest!!!

So can humanity be trusted? You’re allowed to chime in multiple times and the other robots have opinions that run the whole gamut of possibilities, but it’s obvious the author thought there was a “right” answer to the question. The character of Byron the techno-optimist is clearly the one that’s right about everything and his position is: “Yes, we’ll figure it out, trust me, it’ll turn out alright, everyone else is a worrywart”.

To be fair, it’s refreshing to see the value of humanity stated plainly and openly. Well, “humanity”. It’s still robots after all. I can also credit the game for having a techno-optimist message. It’s not really a popular stance these days. Saying technology is making us all worse off is very much in vogue. I mean, you’re not a techno-optimist, are you? That would make you some kind of weird tech bro with a manifesto. I suppose that in hindsight most techno-pessimism is quaint. Did electric lighting destroy our ability to sleep? Did the word processor destroy the written word? Being called a Luddite is usually pejorative, after all. Then again, maybe the cell phone or artificial intelligence are one technological advance too far. Maybe an atomic war will end up happening. What the hell do I know? What the hell does anyone know?

Anyway, the point I’m getting at here is that they completely messed up the delicate balance between puzzles, introspective mood and overt philosophical messages.

Despite this 1000-word rant, the game is still solid because the puzzles themselves are good and the natural environments you solve them in are beautiful and varied.

It’s a bit harder to write a novel on why the puzzles are good, though.

I find puzzles to be a particularly hard subject to talk about critically. Often, either it “clicks” or it doesn’t. The things that a puzzle designer can do are often in the margins. As for Talos 2, first and foremost, it’s a matter of structure. You can tackle the 10 puzzles in a zone in any order and you can usually access three zones at once. That’s 30 puzzles you can attempt at one time. If the puzzles were presented in rigid sequence, you’d be out of luck if you couldn’t solve the one in front of you. Here, you have options if you get stuck. Just flitter about from one puzzle to another, maximizing your patience and the chance you’ll get your eureka moment.

Besides, you only need to solve 8 puzzles per area, so the other two are extra coursework or maybe alternatives if those happen to be easier for you. Hidden “sparks” can also be spent to skip a puzzle and still get its token. There’s absolutely no penalty for doing this and the spark can be regained by solving the puzzle normally. Since sparks are rare, this mechanic can only be used sparingly, but it’s an elegant solution.

Talos 2 removed all violent puzzle elements from the original, like turrets and mines. Good, these didn’t really fit the theme. Instead, what’s particularly noteworthy about Talos 2 is that the game is split in 12 areas and every new region introduces a new tool. Okay, some “tools” barely qualify as such, like a platform where you can switch one item for another. The rest is fairly interesting: some are related to lasers, like color inverters or the tool that converts two colors into a third one on the RGB spectrum, others are more physics-based like gravity shifting beams or outright portable teleporters.

At first, I wasn’t too sure about this idea. Once you’ve finished one new tool’s region, it is mostly left by the wayside except for the occasional guest appearance. Most tools don’t get to do much outside of the zone they star in and since the game introduces new things constantly, the puzzles are usually on the level of a tutorial. So yeah, Talos 2 is fairly easy. I’m not so sure it’s a bad thing. It makes the puzzles themselves flow briskly. Well, except for the puzzles mixed with the tedious story segments set inside the Megastructure. Plus, despite more than doubling the amount of mechanics in the game, each one meshes quite well with the overall design.

Anyway, if the main game was too easy for you, there’s the DLC which is split in three episodes. Some quick notes, in point form:

• Orpheus Ascending: This DLC is all about edge cases when lasers collide, i.e. sometimes you need to intentionally have lasers block each other to let another one through. This is frankly my least favorite mechanic in the game: unclear, finicky and not particularly fun to implement. Despite this, this DLC is actually fairly easy since the puzzles have very small possibility spaces. It’s almost as if this DLC is a tutorial for something else… Story-wise, here you are again constantly bombarded with heartfelt, profound, but frankly inopportune quotes about love. Can’t a robot solve some puzzles in peace?

• Isle of the Blessed: Now this is the good one. A tropical island with 30 medium-hard puzzles to be tackled freely in any order, split up into three groups of 10. It’s like getting a brand new set of three zones from the main game. Best of all, since each tool has been introduced already, you get a nice mix of everything. Interestingly enough, this DLC confirms that the techno-optimist route was the correct, cannon choice. Told ya! It’s like the author is doing a victory lap, writing about how everything is going so well since super technology has been embraced, including the fact that every single skeptic has had a change of heart.

• Into the Abyss: If everything else was too simple for you, this is the hard stuff. The game will take pity on you if you can complete 8 of the initial 16 puzzles and consider you a winner. There’s another 8 puzzles after that if you crave some extra punishment. Annoyingly, almost half of the puzzles are harder versions of the “lasers collide” puzzles from Orpheus Ascending. Meh. To be fair, the DLC features multiple large-scale, spectacular puzzles, like a sun and moon orrery you can climb on through gravity and a massive moving wall that has to be stopped with well-placed lasers. Those are the highlight of this mode.

With the DLC, Talos 2 is a very long game. Heck, there’s almost too many puzzles, more than 200 including the DLC. Then again, I can’t be that tired of the game since I’m looking forward to the remaster of the first game coming out in a month. To be honest, I have a feeling I’m going to prefer the first game with a facelift rather than the sequel despite its new bells and whistles. We’ll find out soon.