The Talos Principle 2 is the best puzzle game since The Talos Principle, and is likely the second best such game of all time, lagging behind only Portal 2.
A direct sequel to the first game, this game looks at the society that the robots built after waking up at the end of the first Talos Principle. With humanity extinct, robots need to figure out what they want to do as a society – some of them want to limit their growth to only 1000 robots, while others want to expand and explore and make a better society, as the ones who set the process that led to their creation in motion wanted. After “Prometheus” shows up in town shortly after the creation of the 1,000th robot, you, number 1000, are sent on a mission along with several other robots to find the source of the “entity”. In the process, you discover a giant megastructure surrounded by a bunch of puzzles reminiscent of the first game, and are left to try and determine what exactly is going on – and this time, you interact with other robotic people and engage in roleplaying dialogue choices that end up determining how people perceive you and what the robots want to make their future into.
Overall, the game is pretty great. The core of the game is puzzles – each world contains 13 puzzles, in the form of 10 standard stages, two “statues” that give you “sparks” if you solve their puzzles, and one “golden door” puzzle that is only unlocked when you complete every normal puzzle in the game.
While the Talos Principle 1 felt like it ran out of ideas in the middle, and resorted to making really big/long puzzles, The Talos Principle 2’s central conceit is that each of the 12 major areas of the game (and eventually, a thirteenth “area” of sorts) contains a new gimmick. The game starts out with a tutorial area as well, meaning there are, in effect, about 14ish areas in the game, with well over 100 puzzles in total.
The gimmicks in each area end up working pretty well – some of them are pretty basic, like having a drill that can put a hole through a certain kind of wall, while some of them are more wild, like being able to transfer into multiple robotic bodies or teleport around the map. Some of these puzzle elements show up again in later areas, allowing you to mix them together, while others are mostly confined to one area.
The end result of all this is a game that is constantly feeling fresh; every area feels like it has enough puzzles to explore the idea without belaboring the point, and when you run into some of these features again in later levels, they are combined with fresh twists to keep things interesting and novel.
The puzzles are also mostly quite short and snappy – generally speaking, there’s only 1-2 “core insights” you need to complete each puzzle, but the puzzles, despite their apparent simplicity, make you feel quite clever for solving them. The game does a good job of teaching you the game mechanics, and there’s only a couple puzzles in the game (mostly the “statue puzzles”) which felt like “they hid the piece in the couch cushion” rather than that you were missing a key insight. The puzzles are fun, interesting, short enough that you don’t forget what you’re doing, but hard enough to feel satisfying to solve. Moreover, because you don’t have to solve EVERY puzzle in every area, players who aren’t quite as good at it still have some outs – and there are also a (very limited) number of puzzle bypass items, that allow you to bypass puzzles – but you don’t get “full credit” for solving them, and you can retrieve these solution tokens by solving the puzzles properly. I didn’t end up using them at all in my playthrough, but it was a nice way to keep players from getting stuck if they were having problems.
The game also keeps things interesting with its philosophy as well. Not only is the philosophy highly topical, but it is very interesting and humanistic – ironic, considering that everyone in the game is a robot. But the game’s philosophy is very cerebral, and the game works really well at encouraging the player to embrace hope over despair and cynicism. The message came through very strongly, and while you do have the choice to make the wrong choice, the game’s stance on what you should be doing is quite clear – you should be embracing the future and trying to build a better tomorrow, and take responsibility for the world and its environment. Given how many writers embrace techno pessimism, it was nice to see a work of art that pointed out how shallow and sophomoric such takes are.
If the game had a flaw, however, it’d be in the core plot. While I loved the characters and philosophy, the game sort of embraced a sort of magic-as,technology thing that felt a bit out of place given its theming. While I get why they did it, and I did appreciate the moral choice it presented as well as the argument it presented for metaphorically accepting fire from Prometheus, I felt like it was a bit weirdly fantastic given how grounded the game is otherwise.
There is also something of an issue with the areas being quite large, which means that if you search around for the collectibles, it can get a little tedious exploring some of the areas. That being said, it did not take so long as to be problematic.
Overall, the Talos Principle 2 is a great game, and if you like puzzle games, you should absolutely play it; while it isn’t as snappily paced as Portal 2, in terms of sheer quality, both in terms of puzzles and philosophy, this is one of the greats.
4.5