Video Game Reviews #1 - The Talos Principle · 10:03am Jan 6th, 2016
I have written reviews of video games I have played for a long time. I realized that it was kind of silly that I only ever posted them on Steam and Metacritic, and not here. So I thought I'd start out with something of a doozy - The Talos Principle, a game which was widely regarded as the game of the year of 2014 (and not just because the cover art has a robot petting a kitten).
The Talos Principle
by Croteam
First Person Puzzle-Platformer, Sci-Fi, Philosophy, MetaAs if awakening from a deep sleep, you find yourself in a strange, contradictory world of ancient ruins and advanced technology. Tasked by your creator with solving a series of increasingly complex puzzles, you must decide whether to have faith or to ask the difficult questions: Who are you? What is your purpose? And what are you going to do about it?
Features:
Overcome more than 120 immersive puzzles in a stunning world.
Divert drones, manipulate laser beams and even replicate time to prove your worth - or to find a way out.
Explore a story about humanity, technology and civilization. Uncover clues, devise theories, and make up your own mind.
Choose your own path through the game's non-linear world, solving puzzles your way.
But remember: choices have consequences and somebody's always watching you.
Widely praised as the game of the year of 2014, The Talos Principle is a puzzle-platformer which can probably be summarized in the following way:
The Good: It reminded me of Portal 2 in a good way.
The Bad: It was not Portal 2.
The Ugly: It kind of wanted to be Portal 2.
Its similarities to – and differences from – Portal 2 are instructive. Some of these were solid choices which helped to differentiate it, but some of its differences were failures on its part which diminished it as an experience.
However, perhaps the most salient difference is this: Portal 2 is about 8 hours long. The Talos Principle took me 26 hours to complete.
Now, you might think that this means that The Talos Principle had massively more content than Portal 2. In a strict sense, this is true; The Talos Principle has about twice as many levels as Portal 2 did, with Portal 2 clocking in at 64 in the single-player campaign and The Talos Principle clocking in at 138, more counting the Easter eggs – little (and sometimes big) things hidden in the various levels.
However, even with twice the content, that would leave The Talos Principle at only about 18 hours in length. Whence the extra 8 hours?
The answer to that is, sadly, “running around looking at walls”. And it is actually probably more than that, as the first half of the game is primarily spent on that activity, with far more time spent trying to find hidden puzzles than is spent on solving the actual puzzles themselves.
And worse still, despite taking nearly three times as long to beat, The Talos Principle doesn’t feel like it has more content than Portal 2 – indeed, in many ways, it feels like it has less, as you don’t interact with the characters as often, nor do the environments feel as varied as they did in Portal 2.
But perhaps I should back up and explain what the Talos Principle is, and why, despite it not being Portal 2, it is still a good game.
The Talos Principle is a first-person puzzle-platformer game. You control a robotic character – seen in the world’s single greatest piece of gaming cover art petting a kitten which, sadly, appears nowhere in the game – who is navigating through a world at first apparently full of Greek-themed ruins. Flaking frescos can be seen on the walls of the various test chambers, as you try and solve puzzles in a sort of Garden of Eden like environment. Which is appropriate, given that upon awakening at the start of the game, you are immediately greeted by Elohim, a booming, reverberating voice from above who is first introduced when the Sun is shining brightly in your face. He speaks of you as being his child, having great aspirations for you, and that he will watch over you on your journey. All he asks is that you don’t go to the Tower – that place is forbidden. Follow him, and you will have eternal life; climb the Tower, and only death awaits.
It quickly becomes apparent that Elohim is not, in fact, God, and that not everything is as it seems, as the landscape periodically glitches out (intentionally – in the sort of fake-glitchy sort of way that we see as shorthand for a TV or video game glitching out, despite the fact that no video game I have ever played has ever even once glitched out this way), revealing the artificial nature of the world. In the ruinous landscape exist a number of computer consoles which, through a DOS interface, grant limited access to a computer archive which contains a great deal of data – excerpts from the Internet, bits of literature, fragments of books, and even emails between various members of the EL project. The world seen through the consoles is an ominous one, and it is obvious that humanity is in real trouble, though it takes a long time for the game to reveal what, exactly, was killing off humanity.
This console allows you to interact with the second, and most important, character in the game – the Milton Library Assistant, an AI in the computer archive which tries to help you out, but which quickly reveals itself as having an agenda of its own – an agenda that Elohim is less than thrilled with. The metaphorical serpent in the garden of Eden, he questions the player, creating a third character out of the player themselves, as the player is allowed to have reasonably sophisticated multiple-choice conversations with Milton which both can reveal more about the nature of the world, reveal more about the player themselves, and allow you to learn about the world around you.
The final major character is Alexandra, a scientist who was working on the EL project, who leaves behind voice messages that you find throughout the game, explaining herself, her thoughts on various subjects, why she is doing what she is doing, and what she is hoping for you, the product of her efforts.
Through the course of the game, the player travels through a number of different environments themed around ancient civilizations – Greek ruins, Egyptian ruins, ruins of European churches, and even ruins of castles and forts high in snowy mountains. This contrasts sharply with the obviously technological nature of the player and of the various puzzles in the game, revealing a dichotomy between the pseudo-religious nature of Elohim, and the reality of the technological reality you inhabit. All of this contrasts sharply with the overworld hub – a place full of what look like beautiful ancient places from the inside, but which it quickly becomes clear are naught but replicas built in concrete bunkers in a snowy place from the outside. The tower dominates your view in the overworld hub, an enormously tall spire of concrete and steel that towers over all else, containing an elevator with the higher floors locked out – to begin with. Unlike everything else in the game, there is a sort of grubby reality to the tower, which hints at its true nature and purpose.
The story aspect of the game is quite good, and the whole game does a great job of invoking a feeling of profundity but also underlying desperation. You find messages left behind by various previous people, with version numbers after their names, and, if you pay close attention, you might notice a name or two from your Steam friends list. This is no coincidence – it is possible for you yourself to find paint buckets to leave behind messages to future folks who go through. Interestingly, this also hints at the nature of the world – as well as where you’re going in the end – and as you progress through the game, you unlock more and more messages you can leave behind for your buddies.
The game also has some meta aspects to it. I have seen some reviews which claim that the whole game is meta-commentary about video games, but it really isn’t. That said, it certainly contains meta-commentary about video games, and there are a lot of in-world meta explanations for the nature of the world and even why names from your Steam friends list are appearing in the world – this is not an artificial contrivance, but an actual part of the world you inhabit, and there’s a reason for it. There are also in-game Easter eggs, some of which are quite brilliant, and as you progress through the game the reason that those Easter eggs exist is again explained in-game as being an organic (if silly) part of the world.
What the game is really about is the central question of what it means to be human. The titular Talos Principle is a concept from Greek mythology – Talos being a massive automaton made of bronze, animated by ichor put in his body by Zeus (or Hephestus, depending on the myth) himself to animate him and give him life. In the end, when the ichor is drained from his body, he dies as a human would if they exsanguinated, thus proving him to be “human” in a sense. Much of the game’s philosophical conversations with Milton – and many of the documents in the computer – talk about the question of what it means to be human, and the question of whether or not the AIs they are creating – which you are one of – are “human” in a sense.
As you might guess, this is incredibly pretentious, but on the whole, the game makes it work. Milton is a lot of fun to interact with, and the unfolding of the project – and the hopes and dreams of the human scientists working on it in hopes of creating something to carry on their legacy into the future as a person themselves – is a strong current which carries the game along. The game relies on serious philosophical questions in order to carry it, as opposed to the humor prevalent throughout Portal 2, but it works well enough, and it contains its moments of levity just as Portal 2 contained its moments of seriousness.
That being said, the total amount of chatter with the various characters in the game is much less than it was in Portal 2 – Elohim is simply not as chatty as GLADOS or Wheatly were, and there are long stretches of the game where there is no interaction with any of the characters at all, only the odd console containing a minute or two worth of reading before going on to more puzzles. The most interesting character is Milton, and while he is fun to interact with, the nature of the interaction means that interacting with him is not very spontaneous.
Now, you might wonder: what does the plot of the game have to do with the puzzles in the game, you might ask?
Absolutely nothing.
Okay, that is not strictly true; there is a purpose behind the puzzles, and the purpose is hinted at throughout the game. Still, the puzzles could have been absolutely anything in that sense, and indeed, the puzzles don’t feel particularly humanizing and it is pretty obvious that the actual gameplay mechanics and story are only arbitrarily related. While the game actually calls itself on this fact, it doesn’t really do much with it, and in the end, really, the core of the gameplay – these puzzles – have no real relationship to the story.
A level from above.
The puzzle gameplay itself takes the form of picking up and moving devices around in the world in order to solve problems. There are only six such devices in the game:
• A jammer, which can shut down any other device, as well as the force fields which sometimes block your way.
• A laser director, which can redirect laser beams from emitters, through each other, and finally to recievers which are powered by the lasers, which can themselves shut down force fields or power fans.
• Fans, which blow things around. These must be fitted to specific things in the landscape, and in many cases, must be powered by some external force. However, at times these instead serve as force fields of sorts themselves, keeping the player out. But they can also serve as elevators of sorts, both for the player as well as for the laser directors, which can set on top of them, then floated upwards in order to give a better line of sight for their laser beams.
• Cubes, which can be climbed on top of, or used to set up laser emitters on top of them to grant extra elevation and clearer line of sight.
• A machine which allows you to record the world, then play it back, creating holographic doubles of yourself and all the portable items in the level, temporarily doubling them in number.
• A carryable platform whose sole purpose is to be combined with the recorder, allowing you to jump on top of yourself, or load items on top of yourself, in order to reach higher places.
Pictured - most of the gameplay mechanics clustered in a narrow hallway in a secret puzzle. This was the only actual "normal" gameplay screenshot I got.
On top of that, there are buttons which can be stood on to activate or deactivate things, an invincible enemy which serves the sole purpose of messing up your laser beams, a mobile bomb which seeks you out and blows you up if you stand too close, gatling gun turrets which fire on the player if you stand in their field of view and which must be disabled by the jammer or by guiding one of the mobile bomb enemies to them, and of course force fields, which serve the purpose of blocking your path. There are also a few switches on the walls here and there in the game which simply turn on or off other things.
Your goal in navigating through these puzzles is to gather “sigils”, colored tetramino pieces which are used to solve specific puzzles to grant you access to new items and locations. There are additionally 30 stars hidden throughout the game, which serve to unlock special, secret areas which contain grey tetraminos whose purpose is to unlock one of the endings of the game.
There are three real problems with the puzzles in the game:
• The game runs out of interesting ways to recombine the pieces about halfway through the game. You might think that this means that it stops introducing new ideas at that point, but instead, the middle part of the game is the part where new ideas for combining the pieces ends – the final few sets of puzzles in the third area of the game, as well as in the tower, proves that they knew of other ways to combine many of the pieces, but rather than run out midway through, they threw in a lot of boring, repetitive puzzles into the middle and then made the end better. This makes the mid part of the game a drag.
• Some of the harder puzzles in the game are harder not because they require you to think, but because they’re long, and thus feel like a repetitive grind as you repeatedly backtrack to adjust your pieces.
• Some of the star puzzles are puzzles of the “we hid the puzzle piece under the couch cushion” variety rather than the “you have all the pieces and need to figure out how to use them” variety.
The last point bears elucidation.
Throughout the game, the stars are hidden throughout the levels. Some of these are hidden in fairly obvious places – a star sitting atop a monolith, or behind an iron gate. Here, the puzzle is not “Where is the star?” but “How do I reach the star?” These tends to be fairly decent puzzles – you know what you’re trying to solve, you need to figure out how to solve it.
On the other hand, there are other star puzzles which are, more or less, “Where is the star?” Some of these stars are hinted at by messages written on the walls, or simply obviously out of place things that indicate that something isn’t quite right and you should investigate further.
But there are other star puzzles which are entirely obscure, where there is no indication at all that a star is nearby, and you can only find them by running through all the corners of the level in search of the narrow, secret passageway that leads to the star area, or you have to look for the specific spot to target to unlock a section of wall to reveal the star.
This is frustrating, and combined with combing the levels for more hints as to what is going on, a great deal of the game – probably a third of its length, maybe more – is spent running around looking for stuff rather than doing interesting stuff. There is a fair bit of backtracking in a number of the puzzles as well, and many of the world puzzles – which often involve trickily pulling stuff out of the puzzle areas by circumventing their entrances, which prevent you from removing items from them – also involve quite a bit of backtracking as you have to figure out which puzzle exactly can be cheated in such a way that you can get out some of the items from it to solve the greater puzzle.
The very final puzzle in the game is also somewhat unusual in that it is actually a series of four puzzles and is timed – and if you fail the puzzle, either by running out of time (though you generally have plenty of it) or, alternatively, do something to get yourself stuck (likely by falling off, backtracking at the wrong time, or accidentally dropping some vital piece of equipment), you have to start the whole thing over again, which is a bit frustrating, even if it does add a bit of excitement to the game, as well as adding one final new mechanic to make things interesting.
That being said, a lot of the puzzles are in fact reasonably clever, even if they are never as engrossing or as exciting as Portal’s puzzles – carrying around items and setting them up simply does not carry the same sort of weight that hurling yourself through portals at high speeds does, and it shows, with the game feeling much slower paced as a result. And unlike Portal 2, the game is non-linear, with the ability to skip puzzles and come back to them as needed, and the various hub and sub-hub areas leading to the puzzles allowing you to attack them in a variety of orders, as well as explore the (mostly) empty world in search of the bits of content.
All of this sounds fairly negative, but the truth is that I did enjoy the game. There were lots of bright spots, the overall ideas that the game explored were fairly decent, it did a good job of setting the mood and creating a good ambiance, and as the game approached its conclusion, it tightened up and got stronger rather than weaker. Alas, the game forces the player to spend a fair amount of time “searching for the fun”, which dilutes the gameplay experience and doesn’t really properly respect the player’s time. While it is not so bad as to make the game bad on the whole, it leads to the game dragging in places, with only the moments of cleverness serving to buoy you onwards until you reach the conclusion.
Really, the game’s greatest flaw is that, with Portal 2 serving as a template for it, it is not Portal 2, and it fails at being Portal 2 in fairly obvious ways. It is a thoughtful game, but it is similar enough to Portal and Portal 2 to make the comparison inescapable, and in the comparison, it suffers for it. Not being as good as arguably the greatest game of all time is, perhaps, praising with faint damns, but it is hard to escape the comparison.
Despite all my griping, there's a good chance you'll like this game if you like puzzles and games that at least try to be profound, so long as you don't mind a little bit of tedium along the way.
Recommendation: Recommended.
3667717
I would imagine that Talos 4 is probably named after the same Talos from Greek Mythology.
3667721 Hmm. And here I thought it was a corruption of telos, given the philosophical bent it's supposed to have.
TD, I sort of want to read this review since I just bought the game on sale, but I'm wary of spoilers. Can you give some indication of how much interesting content you're revealing here?
3667738
Nothing in here is anything you wouldn't know within an hour or so of playing the game, save possibly what movable items you unlock for some of the later puzzles in the game.
That said, if you already own it, you might as well just play it; it is pretty good and I don't regret the time I spent on it. I did just beat all 26 hours of it in three days.
I would argue the opposite: it's silly to post video game reviews on a fanfiction website.
Obviously one of the great things about the internet is the ability to build communities that spread beyond their initial functions; a fanfiction website need not only be about fanfiction. There is also obviously a lot of overlap between FIMfic's userbase and Steam's userbase (as the ass-load of crossovers show).
I think that cross-posting content isn't really very helpful, though. The amount of new viewers it attracts doesn't seem worth the awkwardness and mismatch it creates. A better idea would probably be to post a review or two as exemplars, and then direct people to your Steam account (where the reviews make more sense) or tumblr/wordpress/etc blog (where posting a wide variety of content is more likely to attract viewers).
I actually read your Star Wars VII review because I thought the "bad fanfiction" comparison was an apt reason for inclusion. This review seems to clash with the rest of the content on your FIMfic account, though. Things which relate to ponies or fanfiction is already a broad spectrum of content, adding video games seems to stretch it too much.
Of course, the obvious solution would be to review pony video games
The core "test chamber" concept can't help but draw comparisons to Portal, and they share a few mechanics, but I found Talos to be the better game. Portal 2's puzzle design in particular is not particularly sophisticated and resorts to frequently introducing new mechanics to keep things fresh at the cost of complexity, which drains it of the "aha!" moments that are key to the genre. I'm much more inclined to forgive Talos's occasional missteps in light of the constant demand it placed on my creativity. It is free from the fear of being difficult in a way that Portal 2's narrative driven campaign is not. P2's co-op campaign had no such restrictions and was much better for it.
If you haven't played the expansion, I highly recommend it.
Incorrect.
For good reason. Every single time developers put realistic fake glitching in their games, usually as a consequence of an antipiracy measure, it always gets misreported as the game actually being buggy.
3667758
I saw one of those on Steam the other day.
It had a lot of reviews.
3668235 I don't really count "has ponies 10/10" or ascii art as a "review"
Excellent review, which pretty much covers my experience with this.
A few things:
- Because you the human are playing the game, it's not just asking what it means to be human, but what it is to be truly sapient / self-aware. You're given limited choices, but "I'm human because I'm self-aware" and vice versa is never a good enough answer. I like how this game forces you to at least to contemplate the reality of your existence.
- The kitty does appear under a very specific, non-intuitive and seemingly unrelated circumstance. If you see the cat at any other time in the game, it will appear at the end.
- The DLC is also well done and IMO worth the time and sale cost.
- My first play through was with the Sam DLC, for which Elohim is acted by the original voice actor of Serious Sam. The dialogue runs the same course, but is much more fun.