This video will start with no spoilers, then I’ll warn you when it’s about to get more
spoiler-y, and whether you should continue watching. I don’t want to spoil this game
for you as it’s been among my favourite experiences I’ve ever had with a game and
it would be a horrible shame for yours to be ruined by a youtube video such as this
one. But if you’ve completed the game already, then at the end of this video I’ll link
to another, unlisted one filled with spoilers. But for the rest of you who haven’t played
and who DON’T want it spoiled, stick with this video for now.
The Talos Principle is one of those games I knew about, and knew at some point that
I’d get around to playing and would probably enjoy. What put me off was that I thought
the makers of Serious Sam had created this just to make a quick buck from a low-effort
puzzle game to cash in on a pretty game engine that they had built.
How wrong I was! I quickly got hooked to the game, and now I’ve finished it, I feel that
it’s one of the best games I’ll ever play. I suggest you check it out, and don’t look
up anything else about it. I’ve deliberately saved this video ‘till Christmas, because
it would be awesome to associate this game with such a nice time of year. And you can
even play this game in VR! And it’s on a huge Christmas discount on Steam right now.
What more could you want. I, however, didn’t have these things. I
played it on a normal monitor, on a random day during the year. And I think I paid more
for it. But it was still one of the best gaming experiences I can remember having. I think
it’s a recent trend to make games so long that you have no choice but to pace yourself
and to chip away at them, session after session, week after week until you finally grow tired
of it and move on. And while I’m growing to appreciate these, I also LOVE shorter,
more intense games. The sort that can be finished in a day or so, but that you’ll be hooked
to from start to finish- think Portal 2, or Max Payne. They may be short, but they stick
with you and deliver more thrills per minute than sandbox games can hope to provide. The
Talos Principle is one of these as well. This game made me put everything else in my life
on hold, only switching it off when it reached the early hours and I needed to sleep! It’s
been years since a game has done that to me. I felt like a child again.
This game’s developer, Croteam, is also known for Serious Sam, which is a game where
you go from arena to arena, shooting thousands of monsters in each. At first glance, these
two titles can’t be more different from one another… and yet I can tell they’re
made by the same people, and the strengths of one translate surprisingly well into the
strengths of the other! Serious Sam always had fiendishly sneaky secrets to discover-
so it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re also capable of a clever puzzle game! The
essential, unskippable puzzles get hard, but never HORRENDOUSLY so. You may occasionally
need a little nudge from a guide of some sort just to be like ‘aha!’ and then you’ll
be on your way again for a few puzzles, problem-free. Just don’t expect to 100% complete all the
bonus ‘objectives’- some are so fiendish or ridiculous that I don’t think anyone
could possibly do it other than the devs themselves. I’m pleased to report that Croteam’s humour
is alive and well, if used more sparingly here than in Serious Sam. But it’s a shame
their talents were limited to slapstick humour for so long, as the Talos Principle has shown
the team is capable of so much more. During my playthrough this game evoked other, far
more profound emotions as well which have remained fresh in my mind ever since. Croteam
are a smart studio, hidden behind a comedy veneer.
The next bit of this video will describe what this game is, while not spoiling anything
more than you’ll discover within the first 5 minutes of gameplay.
It’s a puzzle game, set in pretty looking environments. The game is now 5 years old,
but it looks great! And it seems like they’re still updating it regularly. The visuals and
sounds do a good job of making you feel like you’re in a place that you’d want to explore.
Which is good! Cos you’ll be doing a lot of that. And although the environments, at
first glance, are convincing and detailed, they’re also slightly abstract, and wonderfully
dreamy… in a good way. Again, kind of reminds me of the imagination Croteam showed in the
earlier Serious Sam games. And I can imagine it would work wonderfully with VR.
And while it’s a puzzle game set in pretty environments, all this was actually secondary
to what made the experience so special to me. How can I put it- the puzzles were almost
there to give me time to think about the other aspects of the game.
The gameplay is pretty much Portal. You must complete puzzles to collect tetris blocks,
which can then be used to unlock later areas. In fact, I was reminded of Portal for a whole
number of reasons. There’s also the narration from a mysterious
power, and the cryptic scribbles on the walls. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you any more
than that without spoiling it for you, but I will say it’s the story element that made
me enjoy this game as much as I did, and the constant dwelling on what had been revealed
and where I thought it was leading to. It’s here that I have the same problem with the
Talos Principle that I had with the Truman show a few years ago. I wanted to get friends
and family to watch it, but couldn’t find a way of convincing them to give it a chance
without having to spoilt it a bit. Come to think of it, I’ll also recommend that movie
to you if you haven’t already watched it. So I guess at this point, I hope you’ll
click off this video and will play the Talos Principle for yourself. But I understand that
may require a bit of… faith.
Which is why this last bit of the video exists. Don’t worry: I won’t ruin the important,
later bits of the game, but I will discuss my experiences with the first ‘segment’,
pretty much up to the point where I had become so engrossed that I knew that I HAD to finish
it. And discovering that is part of the fun so you might as well just buy it and give
it a go if you think this could appeal to you- come back to this video in a couple of
hours if you’re still not convinced.
Which you might end up doing, because this game does start a bit slow, and the puzzles
definitely get better as the game progresses. They start with the things that can kill you,
which with hindsight is weird. Most of this game isn’t about escaping death- the bits
that are were definitely my least favourite. Also, there are a few puzzles that require
a surprising degree of ‘botching’. You might think there’s a smart solution to
it, but then you realise it’s just about making a jump that you didn’t think was
possible, or just about getting lucky with the timing in some way. In a way it reminds
me of earlier generations of games, before the modern level of polish we expect from
the puzzle genre. So in that sense, it’s nothing like Portal, which is about as refined
as you can get! But aside from the first bits, and a few patches later on, the vast majority
of the game is well thought out and very rewarding, and it never gets difficult enough to be infuriating…
at least, not for long. Most of the puzzles can be done in a minute or so, you can reset
them if you need to, and there are only ever a handful of elements that you have to think
about at once. If you’re just here for the puzzles, you’ll get your moneys worth out
of the game. But there’s more to it than that. You have
a God-like being guiding you, being all loving and fatherly and stuff. And you have scribbles
around the levels, all weirdly signed off by names you might recognise.
And then you notice the computers. I am not a fan of reading stuff in games. If I’m
playing a puzzle game, I’m there to beat the puzzles. So I didn’t really treat these
computers seriously at first. I completed what they asked, answered their questions…
but at some point, I realised I had made a mistake. And that these computers would hold
it against me for the rest of the game. If you’ve played Assassins Creed Odyssey you’ll
probably remember speaking with Socrates, who was definitely one of the most interesting
NPCs in the game. Talos Principle is kind of like him, but there’s more of it, and
it goes a lot deeper. I didn’t think I’d end up enjoying discussing philosophical questions
with a computer terminal… but I did. What you need to know is that I went from
ignoring these terminals to actively seeking them out. I craved the next chapter of the
story I felt they were taking me on. I even started reading the texts- more so than I
did in Skyrim. Even more than I did in Deus Ex! These computer terminals became a source
of joy for me. But there was also something… sad about them. It was perhaps their sorry-sounding
beeps, in conjunction with the game’s powerful ambient tracks, that ultimately made me feel
kind of sorry for them, just sat there, waiting for me to come along. Loneliness is a key
theme in this game, something Croteam uses to manipulate you as you play… and it worked
on me. It’s not giving too much away to say that
this is not a densely populated game. There aren’t NPCs running up to you and asking
you to do things for them. While I typically despise AI trying to befriend me, this game
taught me that, when they’re not there, it makes me miss them! If you must know I
played this game when working on the Odgrub video and I think it might have inspired the
Lydia storyline a bit. There are even pre-recorded audio logs dotted
about where you get to hear a human voice! As lonely as you are in this game, it’s
nice to hear, even if you’re unable to interact with them any further. These snippets of audio
contain yet more philosophical questions and profound observations about the world. Some
of the stuff this game throws at you gets dangerously close to sounding pretentious-
these audio logs in particular- but even these never quite overstepped the mark, for they
were spread few and far between, diluted by many puzzles that needed to be beaten.
You’d imagine that, between God telling you the way, the audio logs, and the computer
terminals to talk to, that the story wouldn’t need anything else. And yet, from the very
beginning, I felt that something was missing and that it was up to me to figure out the
answer. Or at least, an answer. Problem was, I didn’t even know the question.
It’s one thing to be told information. It’s another to be left with it. You know when
you go to the cinema with a friend, the movie ends with lots of questions unanswered, and
you endlessly discuss it with your friend all the way home? Like, you HAVE to reach
conclusions about the movie before you can be happy. It doesn’t matter if the answers
are wrong. You and your friend just have to agree on an interpretation so that you can
both find your peace with the movie before moving onto other things? Yeah, that’s the
Talos Principle right there. Only, you don’t have a friend to discuss it with. You’re
left alone, mulling over what you’ve been told while solving whatever puzzle you find
yourself in. And without anybody else to bounce your theories off, you run the risk of coming
to some ridiculous conclusions, and have nobody to tell you how silly you sound. Again, it
plays into the game’s sense of loneliness. It’s because of this that the puzzles and
story-telling, although seemingly unrelated halves of the same game, complement each other
so brilliantly. Yes, I was given a lot of stuff to think about. But also, I had a lot
of time to dwell on it, while still feeling like I was making progress with the game by
beating the puzzle I currently found myself in. But slowly the puzzles lost their importance
as it became increasingly about the story. I pushed on in the hope of discovering whether
my ridiculous theories were correct! It was like a TV show I couldn’t stop watching!
Ultimately, this mix of story-telling and puzzles got me to treat the game with a respect
that I haven’t done in a long time. There’s nothing else quite like it.
I can’t say any more without ruining the game for you. I know I’ve been cryptic about
it. About as cryptic as the game will be with you, actually. I want so badly to be able
to share what made this game so special with you. I’ve only had myself to talk to about
it and it’ll be so nice to know that I’m not the only person who was left profoundly
moved by it. So in a few days, I’ll upload a video full of spoilers which I’ll leave
unlisted, and linked to right here at the end of this video. Watching this video before
you’ve completed this game WILL ruin one of the best games you might ever play, so
please, once it’s up, only click on it if you’ve beaten it already, or have absolutely
no intention of playing it, ever. Really.