I liked the story of this game a lot, and I felt like it was more solid than the actual gameplay was. The puzzles were solid enough at the beginning and end but were kind of lackluster and repetitive in the middle, and hiding vital puzzle components was deeply aggravating when it happened. Nothing is worse than trying to solve a puzzle only to figure out that the reason it was so hard was because someone hid a vital piece under the couch cushion.
It also lacks the same sort of cohesive feel that Portal 2 had, which I think speaks to the lack of polish issue - though I think that was more of a base design issue, as it didn\'t even try to hide its more gamish aspects. Which makes some sense, given the context of the puzzles, but is still kind of annoying.
Biomedical engineer, game designer, writer.Leave a Comment:
Very good, but with a few problems...
The Talos Principle does really well as a Portal-like puzzle game. The controls are intuitive and getting your way around the puzzles is pretty intuitive as well... for the most part. The puzzles are bound to keep you occupied for long hours, and many of them will provide a sense of accomplishment if you manage to complete them on your own.
However, there are two major problems with the puzzle design...
The first is that on numerous occasions, the game fails to explain certain mechanics to you and inform you that you are capable of doing this or that. This results in you wandering aimlessly around the level until you either stumble upon the solution via sheer dumb luck, or look it up on YouTube in defeat, only to exclaim "HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT?!?" when you see where the problem was.
The second problem is that there is a number of situations where the level layout and/or the placement of vital objects is so unintuitive that you can end up trying to figure out the solution to no avail, and when you inevitably look it up on YouTube, you will realize that the entire problem was that you missed an object hidden behind a wall, the inclusion of which makes the solution instantly clear.
Also, I admire the developers for trying to go with such a serious subject matter for the narrative, but I found that even though all the philosophical babble seemed mildly interesting at first, it slowly started getting on my nerves as the time went on. The fact that you don't get the full picture until the very end only makes matters worse, as I started thinking that the puzzles and the narrative are completely detached from one another, and the game would do perfectly fine without the latter. Turns out that it really IS vital to the experience, but you won't know that before the aforementioned very end. My recommendation is, have faith in the developers, but don't bother yourself with the random texts on the computers or the floating radio recordings, unless you really want to.
In the end, The Talos Principle is a pretty surprising game in various aspects (positively, that is) and definitely worth checking out. I just wish it had more of the Valve polish when it comes to puzzle design. I'd say it's somewhere around 8/10.