![]() ![]() This review is vague to the point where it hurts me, but I’ve given you as much knowledge as I can about the mechanics of the game without ruining any puzzles-you play in first-person, and you manipulate objects (lasers, boxes, fans, et cetera) to progress through a series of test chambers. Suddenly you’re eight hours in and gasping because you just found a crucial text and unraveled a key part of the larger whole and it’s hit you so hard you half-stand up out of your chair. Each individual fragment of story is so small, but it’s like mosaic tiles. There are also going to be people, like me, who think it’s one of the best stories this year. There are people who read that last paragraph and already rolled their eyes and decided not to play this game, I’m sure. There are people that are going to play this game and think it’s pseudo-philosophical pretention masquerading as something more. The Talos Principle walks a very fine line. Each terminal has two or three texts which deal with everything from the works of Immanuel Kant to chatroom logs to personal emails to a translated story of Anubis. And then there are the computer terminals, which house the Archive-a vast databank of texts, mostly corrupted. There are QR Codes imprinted on the walls, left by other people who came through the Garden. There’s Elohim himself, who warns you away from temptation. The story plays out in a number of threads. Why? What is your purpose? Is your purpose just to solve puzzles? You awake in a Garden, brought to life by a being named Elohim (Hebrew for “god” and/or “God”). It’s heady stuff, especially for a video game to tackle. (Click to expand and read for a taste of what The Talos Principle is like.) Where Portal is full of dry humor and spawned a thousand memes, The Talos Principle is a morose reflection on mortality, on what happens after we die, on the pursuit of truth and what it means to be human. I want to disabuse you of that right from the start. A bit here, a bit there, put it together, try to make sense of it.” The text makes sense in its story context too, but I have no doubt it was an important philosophy in developing The Talos Principle also. ![]() There’s a text you’ll discover early in the game that says, “The way I see it, the world doesn’t come with a manual. The Talos Principle ‘s tangled network of laser beams and boxes and fans and signal jammers is packed with revelatory moments. Almost too excellent, in fact-since the game was only twenty levels long, it felt like you were still unraveling the full potential of portals when you finished the last bit. Portal was excellent at the “A-Ha!” moment. That’s really not why The Talos Principle is so great though. There’s nothing as iconic in the puzzle mechanics as the Portal Gun, but redirecting lasers certainly feels familiar (to say nothing of the ubiquitous cubes and red switches on the floor). Each finished puzzle unlocks a Sigil, and collecting enough Sigils unlocks new puzzle mechanics and doors to even more puzzles. The Talos Principle‘s puzzles are arranged in discrete rooms, similar to Portal‘s test chambers. The purpose of yours will be to overcome the puzzles as well as find the real answer to the dilemmas, which include your identity and the general meaning of things, if this is possible.It’s not because of the surface similarities, though those certainly abound. You can choose your behaviour, from more faithful to more doubtful. While solving puzzles, an unidentifiable beholder, introducing itself as a god, and behaving like an artificial intelligence, talks, opening philosophical questions before you. It is possible to go backwards in time, undoing game play, like in Braid. ![]() You exploit your abilities and the environment to do so, reflecting lasers, activating or deactivating fans, moving or stacking blocks. The goal of each area is reaching where a Tetris-like piece lies and collect it, being allowed to advance. You yourself might be a human, or a robot, or half of both. The place is a mixture of past and future. The ruins resemble a Greek mythology setting, but are crowded of lasers, turrets, robotic devices and technological items such as fans. You can not recognize the place, nor, in truth, who or what you are. In The Talos Principle you awake finding yourself in ruins.
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