Indie Game of the Week 422: The Talos Principle II

Whenever the temperatures rise my IQ seems to drop, so in order to retain my remarkable sapience for a few more weeks at least I find myself once again in Croteam's post-apoc world of lasers 'n' forcefields. The Talos Principle II takes place some considerable amount of time after the first, during which—and pardon the spoilers but you know how it is with sequential games sometimes, they just reveal everything about the last one—a stranger solves a series of environmental puzzles and some tetromino-based spatial reasoning in order to discover that they're just one iteration of countless many AI algorithms that have been put through this puzzle wringer simulation program to confirm a human-level degree of ratiocination. After that game, said AI was able to leave the simulation and was downloaded into a prototype robot body and quickly went to work on creating many more bodies for subsequent iterations—the protagonist of The Talos Principle II wakes up to discover they're the one thousandth such iteration that has been brought into the physical world, completing a quota that the first (referred to now as the Founder) insisted upon in order to keep the population manageable. Yet, with 1,000 reasonably intelligent sapient beings, not everyone in the fledgling city of New Jerusalem is necessarily in concordance with this strict limit. Your much-anticipated arrival has also given you an instant celebrity status and thus can serve as something like a tiebreaker in some of these long-simmering disagreements, though before you start enacting your will on this expectant populace you're effectively dragooned into an expedition to investigate the origin of a mysterious nanocloud-like being calling itself Prometheus who bids this robot society to come find him.

All of this is a prelude to visiting an island that is, mysteriously but also perhaps predictably, filled with the same type of environmental puzzles that the first game's simulation setting had in abundance. Naturally, being a sequel, there's a lot of areas where the game has chosen to expand its purview. You're quickly introduced to several new puzzle factors including color-based lasers (sorry dyschromatopsiacs), machines that can temporarily(?) drill holes in walls, and exact copies of... yourself, that you can telepathically switch between. The game covers its ass with the more outlandish of these additional elements by suggesting these nanocloud entities can create anything on the fly and are made out of a substance completely alien to modern understanding of physics, creating both a compelling mystery and "a wizard did it" contrivance alike, but given this nutty sci-fi angle makes the puzzles more interesting (and the story too) I'm not going to kick up too much of a fuss about it. The game is broken up into twelve of these mini open-world areas, each of which contains eight core puzzles, two "lost" puzzles which are harder but can be completed in lieu of the core types if you're really struggling with them, a few monuments to mythological figures like Pandora and the Sphinx (both of whom regularly talk to you) that give you bonus tasks like chasing a spark around or hunting for a hidden switch based on an image hint, and some secret laboratories and terminals that serve as some "behind the scenes" information and more of the game's trademark musings on the universe and our place in it, the wonders of science, the nature of sapience and consciousness, the follies of the ancient dumb organics that got themselves extinct'd (because of a virus, of course) and what needs to be done to avoid a similar fate, and the restlessness of genius always looking for a new problem to solve. Very heady stuff and while most of it, plus conversations with the rest of the exploration crew, are optional they're still worth investigating for all the lore, backstory, and headscratchers to ponder. This game, like its predecessor, is one very invested in making you think; and not just in the typical "how the hell do I even go about solving this?" preoccupation for the genre.

Other improvements include a significant graphical upgrade. This game is absolutely gorgeous. The first was too, certainly, but the visual splendor of these outdoor areas and how they juxtapose with the sterile fabricated environments creates a striking difference, one the game is frequently exploring with its dialogue between the natural and the manmade. The puzzle chambers perhaps suffer a little bit from this beautification process—what often made the puzzles of the first Portal work was how clean everything was and how that made it much more obvious what was and wasn't part of the puzzle you were trying to solve—but there's a verisimilitude that comes from having these structures be potentially centuries old that would've been spoiled if they weren't at least somewhat dilapidated and covered in encroaching greenery. Even though the puzzles are starting to get a little tough to manage at the approximate halfway point I've reached, I've only rarely spent more than 15 minutes on any given puzzle room. There's an achievement that's rewarded for spending more than 20 minutes in one of these chambers and it's only just pinged for me, and only then because it was a "lost" puzzle with a really interesting twist that took some lateral thinking to decode. That I've spent so much of the game so far reading terminals, talking to NPCs, and just exploring these big regions means that—while the puzzles are still very much front and center—it feels like there's more space for downtime in-between, which has resulted in a less mentally taxing time overall. Granted, most of the non-puzzle stuff is entirely optional but if you're struggling with any one instance you can just walk away and enjoy nature for a little while (or try a different puzzle, since all ten are available the moment you arrive in a new area) and then come back to find everything the way you left it and hopefully something might then click for you. It's evident they put some thought into how players might be able to catch their breath, cognitively speaking, so they don't burn out too quickly on putting laser emitters on pressure plates in ever more increasingly elaborate arrangements.

What has scrambled my brain the most while playing this, however, is some unfortunate achievement work. I'm struggling to understand why the developers of such a cerebral game that is capable of challenging my meager intellect on both a mechanical and philosophical level simultaneously thought it was a good idea to include three mutually exclusive achievements regarding a relatively immaterial story-based choice that only unlocks towards the end of a thirty-hour long campaign in a puzzle game, which typically have next to no replay value, with no manual saving. Granted, shoddy achievement design shouldn't necessarily bring down what is a stunning and deeply introspective game that respects your intelligence as much as it punishes your synapses but I'm a big believer in good achievements and rating games holistically alike, so for me this was a major downside. If, hypothetically, a game had terrible music but great everything else you could probably just shrug and turn it off in the menus and not let it become a detrimental aspect of your playthrough, but you'd still factor that in when it came to reviewing the game as a whole.

Otherwise, I'm enjoying my time with The Talos Principle II and I imagine I'll be hacking away at it for a long while yet. As each region introduces new mechanics, it continues to play around with those it's previously announced, creating an increasingly complex set of tools to build their puzzles around. I can't say the more open areas particularly help given how much longer it takes to move between puzzles but I do appreciate the stunning natural beauty, secrets to find, and little monument-based puzzles to break up the more traditional fare found in the various puzzle chambers. Granting the game a stronger narrative and a larger cast of characters, even if they all look identical owing to their production process, allows the game to expand on its scholastic aspirations and give you more perspectives to bounce off rather than the first game's single chatroom buddy (who was quick to call out any perceived contradictions in your ongoing correspondence, to such a pedantic degree it usually felt forced) and the one-way communication with the haughty false deity Elohim. There are, after all, 999 more of these cat-loving robots milling around New Jerusalem and posting in this world's version of online social media—an invention they were maybe a little too quick to bring back, if we're talking about a community walking on eggshells to avoid repeating what caused humanity's downfall.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Well, the game sort of wore me out the longer it went on, and not just by the expected mental fatigue that came from having my melon scrambled by ever more challenging puzzles. The puzzle design quality started dipping quite a bit, to the extent I was regularly getting trapped and forced to start over from checkpoints which didn't happen at all with the earlier instances. If that's going to be a potential issue, there probably needs to be some kind of "undo last action" button—though, per contra, no puzzle takes that long to recreate if you know the steps. The Pandora towers as well—which required you connect several nodes outside of the puzzle areas to activate them—just got more and more hopelessly obtuse. Like "find this one connector behind this secret panel and then use it to find another halfway across this gigantic overworld map and then take that to a third location" type of obtuse. I understand in games of this type that the puzzles need to keep escalating in difficulty, but it occasionally felt like it was sacrificing its own rules and logic and playability to get there.

Overall, though, some excellent work right up until the end. As a (frequently lapsed, depending on how many atrocities are happening that week) secular humanist I've always appreciated the way the Talos Principle games match my philosofreak and so I was happy to consume its substantial amount of navel-gazing and pretentious Shakespeare references. Going bigger and innovating doesn't always work out for some genres, especially puzzle games (see also: Tetris 2), but I'd say the Talos Principle 2 makes a strong enough case for its own existence all the while endeavoring to make a case for humanity's as a whole.