I love a good puzzle game. And I love a good mystery game. And I love a good philosophical exploration of consciousness game. So a (admittedly uneven) mix of all three is very hard to resists.

In The Talos Principle you play as a humanoid robot who's waken up by Elohim's voice. You are his child and have to prove yourself worthy of his salvation by collecting his sigils which, in practice, means solving environmental based puzzles and getting small tetris pieces. You face your challenges in self contained rooms placed in beautiful hellenic gardens but your tools are Half-Life-like hammers and crystals. This strange mishmash of styles at first seems like laziness on the part of the design team, but you quickly realise that is a subtle (or not so subtle) clue about the nature of this world and Elohim's intent.

That's the kind of attention to detail, in my opinion, elevates this game far beyond just a very good puzzler and really keeps you going through the latter part of the game when every basic mechanic has been laid out and it enters into the rough more monotone part. Because if there's one critic to make of this game is that is too long. Between repetitive puzzles with few variations and the need to backtrack to previous areas there comes a moment when the feeling of fatigue really kicks in. But by then, you are also invested in the story and the mystery and you get some novel ways of interacting with the plot that moves the action forward.

This is also a game that pulls no punches when it comes to moral philosophy. While the options it presents are limited for obvious reasons, there's quite a large chunk of interesting (even though not really new) ethical dilemas with no real simple resolution. While most games present you with a rather simple good vs. bad system, in The Talos Principle it's made abundantly clear that there's no clear division of the two concepts.

There are also some very dark aspects of the game. I don't want to get into spoilers but by the time you start to get a more precise idea of what happened on the outside world, you are presented with some of the most grim ways of coping with your own mortality. But, again showing that there's no black and white, those are also one of the most hopeful and soulful moments.

Philosophy of mind, religion and moral conundrums seem like a lot of extraneous themes grafted into a puzzler, but they fit. The developers really manged to pull a square peg in the round hole. I say that there's few titles out there with more courage or deeper meaning than this one.

Whew, first started this one up back in 2016. I have memories of enjoying the philosophical angle the game took. The puzzles were never all that exciting, but I kept moving through them because it was enough to entertain me between the small bits of dialogue with both Elohim and the computer. Then in the final main area I stopped. Didn't touch it again for a long time, but always said I'd get back to it.

This past week I finally did. Turns out I had been very very close to finishing the game. I dove in and began attempting to solve the last few puzzles in world C I needed. And man, this game is DRY. Like, it could be because of the long period between now and when I last made major progress in it, but the puzzles themselves are just really boring for me. I don't find any enjoyment in using the jammer, connector, recorder, and other puzzle solving tools. Maybe it's something about the way they work together that just doesn't mesh well. Not sure.

And the fact that there's not much exploring or story to do when you're not solving puzzles kind of makes it feel like a really fancy mobile game. Like a collection of puzzles you need to walk between with a little bit of story on the side or something. It just didn't sit right for me. I went through and got the first ending, which was not very exciting, then the second, which was quite a bit more interesting and spoke to the themes of the experience better. Though still, it wasn't enough to make up for what comes off as a very barebones (though very pretty) puzzle game.

I almost kind of wish they had done away with the puzzles and made arguing with the computer over worldviews the main focus, because that was genuinely fun.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. TURN BACK NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THINGS.

The Talos Principle (and for the moment I'm referring specifically to the main game, not the Road to Gehenna DLC), posits two fundamental qualities necessary for humanity: logic and independence. The former is the purely mechanical aspect of the game: solve the puzzles. Independence is the more interesting one.

If you follow the primary intended path through Talos, the message you will get is pretty obvious: Elohim was telling you not to be curious, not to explore or express yourself, but rather than accept his will on blind face you tested for yourself, and that makes you human. You didn't do what you were told; you were independent. But were you?

It's pretty obvious to anyone playing the game that ascending the tower is the "right" way to play. For those more dedicated players, they might choose the Messenger ending, but that too requires you to do disobey Elohim and ascend up to Level 5 of the Tower. So, though you are "choosing" to be independent, you're basically just doing what the game wants you to do.

The game is about choice, but the very nature of medium is such that choice is limited to whatever the designers allow. This is the fundamental ludonarrative dissonance that is inherent to pretty much any game that involves player choice, but is especially apparent here.

But hey, it's a good story, fun puzzles, you get what they're trying to say, so it doesn't really matter. Anyway, the real highlight of The Talos Principle is The Road to Gehenna, which is one of the few instances where not only did I actually play the DLC (which I rarely do) but I think I liked it better than the main game. I mean, I appreciate all the philosophy and worldbuilding in the main game, and it's an interesting concept, but the DLC is just more fun, narratively. And you actually do get a choice that matters.

Oh, also, an (I assume) unintended side effect of The Talos Principle using a Garden of Eden-style framing device is that it's basically saying that theists aren't human. Which is a bit of a hot take.