The Talos Principle II (2023)

I play a lot of puzzle games, and often find myself describing them in my reviews as a "cute little puzzle game," a "sweet little puzzle game," a "fun little puzzle game" - you get the idea. But there's nothing little about this puzzle game.

It's everything from the original Talos Principle, and so much more. Puzzle rooms, stars, and optional bonus rooms. Connectors and disruptors are joined by a range of interesting new laser-and-energy-field-manipulating tools like inverters, accumulators, combiners, and energizers and a "driller" tool that can bore holes in copper walls. Wild, fun new mechanics like body-swapping, teleportation, and gravity manipulation are now part of the toolset, too.

But it's not just the puzzles that have been enhanced this way. In stark contrast to the lonely solitude of the first game, in the sequel you step into the role of the newest member of a robot civilization. You can fully explore the robot city both before the main mission begins, and during an intermission sequence in the middle, and have rich interactions with dozens of your fellow robots - all of which are fully voice-acted. A core team of three other robots is always near you, occasionally radioing over the shared comms to compliment your puzzle-solving abilities or share updates on things they've discovered, and often having new dialogue options available every time you bump into them out in the world (based on progress you've made since the last time you run into them). You can check a social network feed within your own operating system from time to time, to read about how other residents of New Jerusalem are reacting to the discoveries your team makes, and you can choose to post your own responses, which influences the positions some of them will adopt.

I once again loved the philosophical questions it asked. If the first game asked, "What does it mean to be human?" and its DLC asked, "What does it mean to be part of a community?" then this game asks, "As humans, what do we owe each other, our cities, our world, and our universe?" The game very unabashedly presents a pro-technological-progress view, but does allow the player character to persistently disagree with that take if they so choose.

There appear to be three main endings, and the one you get is entirely determined by your answer to one big, very clearly-indicated question at the very end of the game, but there are many small variations in the details of how each ending is presented, and these are determined by many of the smaller choices you made throughout the game up to that point.

I really wanted to get robot-married to Yaqut, but this sadly wasn't possible. Oh well.

After the first game, my expectation were quite high and they still managed to surpass them!

The new puzzle elements are cool, the story and its intertwined philosophy are stellar. I can't wait to see what the final game in the trilogy will, hopefully, be!

I managed to do all of the puzzles on my own, except the last two golden gate ones, as I was impatient to see the ending. But what did help in most puzzles where I was stuck was to question my assumptions about what the solution should look like. I also didn't collect all the stars because I didn't feel like doing it, but I can't wait to see what's behind that gate in a youtube video.

Play this if you liked the first one, if you like puzzle games or if you don't mind puzzles and like a good story :)

I'm very confused. I don't know what I expected from a sequel, but probably not this.

The demo starts with a condense puzzle-solving session very reminiscent of the first game. Same mechanics, same solutions. Not the same Elohim, though. He is strangely direct about this being a simulation that is preparing you for the real world. I was expecting some sort of twist, but no... you actually wake up in the real world and start talking with a robot Bethesda-style. And then you go to the city founded by the androids, and meet a bunch of them, and they give you a mission? it's such a weird tone.

I guess they were going for contrast. Change the overly dramatic god voice for these pedestrian-sounding humanoids (I kind of like that they consider themselves humans), but it's strange.

Then you're back to solving puzzles. Now with new mechanics. The demo introduces a laser routing pylon that takes two lasers of different colours and outputs a third colour, a teleportation pad, and a stationary gun that creates wholes in walls. Not being a simulation, I guess a hefty suspension of disbelief is required to not question how all these physics-defying elements work.

The game seems to offer more of the type of spatial puzzle that I liked from the first one, but the tone is all weird.