The Talos Principle

Review

You start off playing an android with seemingly human consciousness but with no idea what it is, where he is, and what his purpose is.

A voice introduces itself as Elohim, the god of the world, which instructs the android to solve a series of puzzles which are meant to test the android’s capacity for consciousness. If the Android is obedient, Elohim promises it eternal life, but if the android decides to disobey Elohim, only death awaits it.

Different endings are available depending on your decisions and types/amount of puzzles completed in the course of the game.

Being a masochist gamer (for lack of a better expression), I refuse to look up online tips whenever I’m stuck. I also have a tendency to want to complete every aspect of the game, which includes additional missions or extras.

Well, bad combination!

I did solve all sigils (99 in total) and puzzles at the tower (6 in total) by myself without resorting to the Internet, and attempted to grab the stars as well. There are a total of 30 stars and I decided to put as much effort into acquiring them as I put with the sigils. In the end, I grabbed … 3 stars! 3 out of 30!!! Believe me, they are insanely difficult to acquire (if you managed to acquire most of them without help, a huge kudos to you!).

One aspect of the game that I found interesting is that once I finished a sigil I had this nice sense of achievement that I rarely had playing other puzzle games. Because the puzzles demand that you think logically and out-of-the-box, it almost feels like your brain is growing.

For a game made in 2014, I also found the graphics awesome, especially since this game had a focus on puzzle and storyline, not really on action. Some critics have praised the voice acting, but I found some of the voices a bit too forced. Elohim, for example, sounded like a stereotypical deity from a TV cartoon character of the 80s.

Of course, the biggest point goes to the storyline. Despite reading a few critics referring to the storyline as shallow and incoherent, I felt the criticisms were unfair. It is true that philosophical debates were kept simple and condensed into three or four paragraphs, but is it reasonable to expect a video game, which main purpose is to entertain, to be akin to a philosophy textbook?

However, I do have two major criticisms.

First, I felt that the puzzles became repetitive at some point. To be sure, no puzzle is the same, and the grading difficulty ensures that you remain challenged. Still, all puzzles require you to use a limited number of devices such as portable jammers, crystalline refractors, boxes, fans and/or clone recording devices. That may sound like a lot, but after you have completed a few dozen puzzles, the novelty quickly dissipates.

With 138 available puzzles (including sigil, star, tower, messenger puzzles), I was already quite tired towards the end… Honestly, unless you revel in solving these sort of puzzles, I think the game could have been curtailed to about half of the puzzles and still retain its appeal. In fact, maybe a bit more variety could have been introduced, in place of a large number of puzzles.

My second criticism relates to the disconnection between the puzzles and the storyline. As mentioned above, the puzzles require you to navigate enclosed areas and retrieve the sigils by avoiding obstacles and use available devices/objects. However, none of these puzzles have any relevance to the philosophical aspects of the story.

In addition, the most interesting messages from the terminal were simply lost among innumerous undecipherable and simply irrelevant (boring) messages. If the story had been better integrated with puzzle solving, that would have made solving the puzzles more fun and would not take such a huge toll on working memory.

Lastly, I should mention that I experienced quite a lot of motion sickness playing The Talos Principle, something I had never experienced with other first-person perspective games. Unfortunately, none of the recommended settings to prevent motion sickness helped much (e.g., disabling the bobbling and blurring, switching to third-person perspective, changing the FOV and the speed). In the end, I was only able to play two/three puzzles daily without feeling nauseated for the remainder of the day.

I did not consider this aspect of the game to the final star rating, because it is likely that it will vary from gamer to gamer. But, be warned, if you are particularly sensitive to motion sickness, you might struggle playing this game for more than 30-40 minutes daily.

Star rating

If you are into puzzles, The Talos Principle is right up your street. There is a shedload of puzzles for you to solve and their increasing difficulty as you progress ensures that you won’t feel unchallenged.

Personally, I felt there were a tad too many puzzles. Reducing the number of puzzles to half while adding a bit more variety, as well as a better puzzle-story integration would have been beneficial in my view.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, I do highly recommend the game, as it is quite challenging and it has an awesome script.

Here, at Mindlybiz, The Talos Principle gets a star rating of 3.5.

Bizarrometer

The Talos Principle is bizarre in the sense that you don’t really know what is happening from the get-go. You start off playing an android which seems conscious, but there isn’t much information about who your makers were or for what purpose they created you.

There is plenty of philosophy of mind involved which quickly adds to the bizarreness. As you progress through the game, you do get occasional hints from Elohim and Milton about what is going on, but you will end up having to piece this sparse information together after finishing the game.

The ending(s) are ambiguous and open to interpretation, but with a few educated guesses and filling in the blanks you will finish the game with a sense of satisfaction.

For this reason, The Talos Principle gets a bizarrometer score of 3.