YMMV / The Talos Principle 2

• Breather Level: Assuming you complete each area in order, then the High Plain, the final main area in the game, sticks out like a sore thumb for one specific reason: other than a single Swapper in Puzzle 8, it doesn't use any of the new puzzle elements introduced throughout the rest of the game. It's nothing but jammers, connectors, hexahedrons, and fans, i.e. the elements from the game's tutorial stage.
• Fridge Brilliance: One thing that many fans of the first game are willing to point out is the surprising lack of Easter Eggs compared to the first game, but it makes sense for there not to be as many here because this takes place in the physical world, while the first game was a digital one constructed to preserve humanity.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The puzzles for the hidden stars are seen by some as a downgrade from their counterparts in the first game. There, stars were often hidden in strange or seemingly inaccessible locations, making finding out where they even were a challenge in itself; the matter of acquiring them often involved some dedicated lateral thinking, and often required finding creative ways to smuggle puzzle elements out of their respective areas and utilize the entire map. In this game, however, the locations of star puzzles are marked on the map, and the variety has been scaled down to three distinct formats, of which only one, the Pandora boxes, bears a resemblance to the complex and crafty puzzles of old.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic: Remember how the Hint System in the first game literally required you to solve a whole bunch of puzzles and acquire a bunch of stars just to get the messengers, and there were only three of them? Yeah, nobody liked that. The Prometheus Sparks in this game are much easier to find (you just need to do some exploration), there are 24 of them, and you can get used sparks back if you complete the puzzle normally, which makes the system flexible and enables players to go back and try the puzzles again. The only compromise is that the gold door puzzles require 3 sparks to skip, and there's too many to skip all of them even if you have all 24 sparks.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Because each area introduces a new mechanic, of which there are a lot, many levels are practically tutorials, with the other levels reiterating the concepts. Puzzles themselves also don't require a lot of back and forth with high chance of accidentally screwing up, and contain no hazards like the previous game did. The Star puzzles are neither hidden nor require getting puzzle items outside their areas. The Hint System is also available from the start and at a price lets you skip puzzles entirely.
• That One Puzzle:
  • The Pandora's star at Circular Oasis requires the Player to discover that 1. Activating the Progress Wheel (which also means it's impossible to get the Star beforehand) in one of the puzzles also opens a cubbyhole in a corner of the room with the Connector. 2. Activating the Receiver on top of the tower raises a small Connector even higher above that may not be visible on lower setting. If you aren't looking in the right direction in both cases when they happen, you'll likely be checking every grain of sand in the desert. A few players have brought up that this Star can take much longer than the others, and it's the only time the Progress Wheel does something other than moving the plot.
  • The Pandora star in Anthropic Hills is even worse. For starters, just kicking the process off involves using a Connector to shoot a blue beam through a very narrow slat in the wall that more or less requires pixel precise placement of the Connector in order for the beam to make it through. You then have to place an Activator within the same puzzle in such a way that it deactivates a hidden barrier behind the puzzle itself in order to grab a Driller, which you then have to carry all the way to the other side of the map (and this map is quite large, by the way) in order to drill a hole through a specific wall and obtain a hidden Activator, which you then need to transport back across the map to the Pandora monument. Even once you know the solution, executing it is an exercise in pure tedium that will leave you begging for the return of the Fast Forward feature from the first game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In the prologue, a sinister-looking woman named Doge approaches you and makes vague allusions to how not everything is as it seems and how certain "friends" of hers are interested in you and will reach out soon. The setup suggests that Doge and her secret society will be a subversive and possibly antagonistic element in the vein of Milton against Elohim — one with the potential to let the player engage in political intrigue and destabilize New Jerusalem by sharing the island's secrets with them instead. But aside a couple reminders about your promise from the society member of your choice, this doesn't go anywhere. Said society member later even joins the expedition, but they are just another NPC to talk about philosophy and aren't very insistent about you sharing the experience in the Somnodrome.

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