From the Archives: The Talos Principle 2
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Notice
I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those, like this one, that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.
The Talos Principle 2 is a game about autistic robots overcoming existential ennui.
The first Talos Principle is a well-regarded first person puzzle game, much in the vein of Portal, and made by Croatian Serious Sam developers Croteam. It’s a game about putting cubes on pressure plates and guiding lasers into receivers, with a heavy dose of thematic styling and the conceit that all the puzzles are designed to expand the mind of an awakening AI. It’s one of my favorite of the crop, Portal included, and in my opinion still holds up today if you just like physically manipulating puzzle bits around in first person. The story bits, mostly conveyed through audiologs and chats with ‘the Devil’ in chirping computer terminals never really clicked much with me, and I mostly skipped all of that in any replay. So when I played the demo of TP2 and saw how story-focused it was, I was a little leery.
TP2 starts out with a very condensed and simplified re-visit of the first game’s puzzles, showing you the basics of some of the old puzzle elements in the same setting, but once you complete it, it’s revealed to be the initial bootup sequence of a robot, and you wake up in New Jerusalem, a city created by robots, created by other robots, created by the first robot to finish the first game and get downloaded into a body. You also happen to be the thousandth robot ‘born,’ an important distinction since the city’s government is apparently dead set on sticking to 1000 as the maximum population of the entire planet. There’s a little celebration for you as you step out, which is interrupted by a [somewhat suspect] giant apparition who invites everyone to a mysterious island. You get asked to come along on an investigation by some of the big power players in the city, and if you avoid the temptation to refuse the offer [earning a non-standard game over] you hop on a transport and wake up on an island teeming with puzzles and logs!
The general structure of TP2 is fairly similar to the first game, with each area being a large open level with cordoned off ‘puzzles’ isolated within it. Unlike TP1, though, every puzzle is technically interchangeable as far as progress goes, and you just have to clear 8 per level to move on. The levels are also generally bigger, more interesting visually, and have more to do than the ones in the first game. There are always exactly 10 normal puzzles [8 numbered in order of intended progress, 2 ‘bonus’ ones you can use to skip a numbered puzzle or just to solve for your own gratification], one ‘lab’ which usually needs to be visited and contains bits of the main story, two ‘stars’ which, like the first game, involve tasks tangential to the regular confined puzzles, and a bunch of text and audio logs to find. You can also find sparks, which can be used in a puzzle to skip it and have the game consider it ‘cleared,’ letting you move on if you can’t even solve 8 puzzles on your own, and you can even return later and solve the puzzle properly to reclaim that spark and use it elsewhere.
The biggest change in the sequel is the amount of dialogue and story. Your expedition is not a solo venture, so although you’ll be doing every single puzzle without help or even input, several other robots are milling around the levels between puzzles, chiming in on things you find, flagging you down to discuss philosophy, politics, and personal interests. You’re all also streaming your experiences back home to New Jerusalem, and the robots there are making threads about your discoveries on the robot forums, which you can also post in.
That was one of the things that I found odd about the demo, but I have to say it ended up really surprising me how much I enjoyed it. The main characters tagging along, as well as the central figures of the overarching story, are all solidly voice acted, fun to talk to, and frequently pretty funny. The main cast are genuinely memorable and engaging - Byron, one of the first ‘humans’ made, is the primary motivator, driven by his optimism for change, and held back by his cynicism towards stable society. His counterpoint and best friend Alcatraz tends to be more level-headed and cautious, but mostly out of his concern for others. Yaqut is the explorer, perpetually in awe, but also personally insecure, and self-admittedly terrible at puzzles. Finally, Melville is the crusty engineer, gruff and bristling with irritation to hide her dread for the inevitability of entropy that she has resigned herself to battling almost single-handedly. Along with their interpersonal banter, you frequently engage with them individually, and you usually have a decent amount of options, agreeing with their concerns or priorities, disagreeing, compromising, or deflecting entirely. These interactions don’t really become a real ‘gameplay’ element, but the responses I saw felt refreshingly measured and responsive.
It’s a shocking amount of depth to a bunch of robots who can only be visually distinguished by their choice of color palette, and even many of the minor characters come across well too. There are two points where you are allowed to wander around the central plaza of New Jerusalem itself, meeting a couple robots who aren’t necessarily crucial to the plot, and they still have distinct personalities and even some side stories you can get entangled in.
The city even has a few spots to explore, like a museum dedicated to the puzzles and gimmicks of the first game, complete with semi-functional replicas of TP1 puzzles with painted cardboard decorations and a tinny speaker playing out the completion jingle, or a collection of robot-submitted text adventures in honor of the inhabitants of Gehenna [the first game’s expansion area]. You can weigh in on a labor strike over ecological power restrictions, join a secret society, and even meet fanatics who want to find the secrets of organic immortality [so they never have to lose a pet cat again]. You don’t really have to do any of this, and there’s not actually a huge amount of content in the city, but it’s still neat that they made it a place you can go and interact with a little at your leisure.
The game looks good and runs fairly well, but I did have a few problems with it on a visual level. First, and this is going to be vague and likely subjective, but there was just something up with the framerate or camera movement that made me feel very slightly unwell for the first few hours. I mostly mention this because I remember the first game giving a lot of people real motion sickness problems, which I didn’t experience, but they were bad enough to turn some people off of it outright despite the devs attempting to add in nearly every motion sickness mitigation thing they could think of as an option. I always figured it was mostly a case of puzzle gamers being unfamiliar with a modern, fast rendering first person perspective, but now I’m wondering if there really was something up with the engine or camera. For what it’s worth, whatever it was, I got used to it and the last two thirds or so I felt fine, and it may have just been something else going on, but I feel like I should mention it in case you were one of the people who really got fucked up by the first Talos Principle. The other graphical thing I want to mention is the lasers - they’re bright as shit, which is good since most of the game is about you figuring out how to direct and orient them, but they BLAST your fucking retinas from certain angles, in a way even I as a long-time gamer was occasionally shaken by. I feel like they could’ve been toned down a TINY bit by default.
The puzzles have solid variety, and in a nice changeup from the first game, a well-considered gradual ratcheting up of complexity, in the order in which they’re numbered, with the unnumbered puzzles generally being a tiny bit tougher than the rest, meaning it’s a lot more clear which things to go to for your introduction to an element, versus ones that are expecting you to know all the possibilities for something stuck on the other side of a wall, or guiding you into a tertiary or lateral use for a new tool. The difficulty overall seemed a bit lower, but part of that may be because there are more tools with fewer puzzles utilizing each as a lynchpin, and a lot fewer of them therefore have to rely on really specific angles and positions that you have to feel out by shuffling laser reflectors around.
But the generally easier puzzles do mean there’s quite a bit less challenge, and therefore less satisfaction in finally grasping your goal. A good dozen or so of the puzzles I pretty much ran in, looked around, immediately said ‘got it’ and plunked shit down in the exact place and order I needed to, palm slammed the victory button, and sprinted out feeling no smarter or more accomplished than I went in. The tetromino puzzles have also been changed - instead of filling a space, you now put them end to end in a weird sort of bridge building minigame, which is equal parts trivial and fiddly. Some of them you can just walk through mashing the button and it’ll mostly work out, and others just devolve into you flipping pieces around at random and inching your way to the goal.
The optional or rather ‘meta’ puzzles you need to solve for the two stars in each level are also a mixed bag. A handful of them feel like the most engaging stars in TP1, where you notice an element in the overworld between puzzles, and then have to riddle out which puzzles nearby will sneakily allow you to interact with it, firing beams or jammers outside of the normal confines of the ‘puzzle’ to solve something else. Most, however, are basically busywork - some make you find a wisp out in an arbitrary spot, then chase it back to the statue that pointed you in its original location, some give you a code to punch into a hidden device somewhere in the level, another couple provide a map with Xs for you to go on a scavenger hunt for secret levers. None of these are particularly compelling, and running around trying to find all the crap for them just makes the otherwise gorgeous and well-paced maps feel empty and tedious, especially as some of the later ones are fucking enormous.
This is made worse by the fast travel system - you can go directly to any puzzle you’ve completed, but only if you first physically walk all the way to the train station, which might be further away than the individual puzzle you’re heading for anyway. At the very least, the fact that so many of the stars feel like filler is better than stars that require like, looking up guides or using your phone to scan a goddamn QR code, when every other fucking QR code in the game gets translated for you automatically! Sorry, I’m still pissed about that star in the first game.
There are a few endings, and changes to endings, depending on your completion percentage and choices. I was extremely thorough, refusing to leave a level before I had completed everything possible on the first pass, so at the end I only had a fairly painless trip through the levels for the final Golden puzzle in each, which become available in the endgame. I really liked the payoff, and am interested if Croteam are actually going to do anything with the several sequel hooks they deployed.
The Talos Principle 2 is a slight change of course from its predecessor - subjectively speaking, it was significantly more satisfying from a story and setting angle, but a bit less so from a puzzle solving angle. Depending on your tolerance for slightly corny undergrad philosophy conversations or your capacity for laser bouncing puzzles, you might feel more strongly positive or negative about it, but I do think it’s worth checking out next time there’s a discount.
Afterward
As with the first game, The Talos Principle 2 has gotten a pretty significant expansion, titled Road to Elysium, which is split into three parts, each expanding some part of the story while also aiming for a different theme in the puzzling - one is supposedly more relaxing, one is of ‘nightmarish’ difficulty, and one is nothing but laser puzzles. Sighs~ I haven’t played any of them yet, but I probably will this year.
The Talos Principle 2 was my eighth favorite game of 2024.
The Talos Principle 2 can be purchased on Steam, GOG, Playstation 5, and Xbox.