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PlayStation 4 and Android versions will launch early next year. The Talos Principle releases for $40 from developer Croteam and publisher Devolver Digital on Dec. Each collection of pieces, when assembled properly, moves you along closer to your goal of self-discovery. If you arrange and use them correctly, you’ll unlock gates, avoid roving mines, refract lasers, read and listen to snippets of information, and get sigils (which look suspiciously like giant Tetris pieces). You move and stack and manipulate objects - electromagnetic jammers, crystalline refractors, fans, computer terminals - in an open world of beautiful, deserted settings. The game takes easily north of 20 hours, with completists clocking in around 30. The voice of a self-proclaimed deity guides you, though his motivations are suspect. As you solve the puzzles, you’ll collect information to figure out your current role and what happened to the human race. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind.Bot had a lot to test. Regardless of what you choose, I consider it one of the best games of the year. If debating what it means to be human sounds like a great Saturday night, then The Talos Principle is for you. If you liked (or didn’t like) Portal, it’s that type of game, and a very good one.īut what makes The Talos Principle special is its story, and I just won’t talk about that more than to say a passing interest in philosophy is recommended.
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This review is vague to the point where it hurts me, but I’ve given you as much knowledge as I can about the mechanics of the game without ruining any puzzles-you play in first-person, and you manipulate objects (lasers, boxes, fans, et cetera) to progress through a series of test chambers. Suddenly you’re eight hours in and gasping because you just found a crucial text and unraveled a key part of the larger whole and it’s hit you so hard you half-stand up out of your chair. Each individual fragment of story is so small, but it’s like mosaic tiles. There are also going to be people, like me, who think it’s one of the best stories this year. There are people who read that last paragraph and already rolled their eyes and decided not to play this game, I’m sure.

There are people that are going to play this game and think it’s pseudo-philosophical pretention masquerading as something more. The Talos Principle walks a very fine line. Each terminal has two or three texts which deal with everything from the works of Immanuel Kant to chatroom logs to personal emails to a translated story of Anubis. And then there are the computer terminals, which house the Archive-a vast databank of texts, mostly corrupted. There are QR Codes imprinted on the walls, left by other people who came through the Garden. There’s Elohim himself, who warns you away from temptation. The story plays out in a number of threads. Why? What is your purpose? Is your purpose just to solve puzzles? You awake in a Garden, brought to life by a being named Elohim (Hebrew for “god” and/or “God”). It’s heady stuff, especially for a video game to tackle. (Click to expand and read for a taste of what The Talos Principle is like.)
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Where Portal is full of dry humor and spawned a thousand memes, The Talos Principle is a morose reflection on mortality, on what happens after we die, on the pursuit of truth and what it means to be human. I want to disabuse you of that right from the start. A bit here, a bit there, put it together, try to make sense of it.” The text makes sense in its story context too, but I have no doubt it was an important philosophy in developing The Talos Principle also. There’s a text you’ll discover early in the game that says, “The way I see it, the world doesn’t come with a manual. The Talos Principle ‘s tangled network of laser beams and boxes and fans and signal jammers is packed with revelatory moments. Almost too excellent, in fact-since the game was only twenty levels long, it felt like you were still unraveling the full potential of portals when you finished the last bit. Portal was excellent at the “A-Ha!” moment. That’s really not why The Talos Principle is so great though. There’s nothing as iconic in the puzzle mechanics as the Portal Gun, but redirecting lasers certainly feels familiar (to say nothing of the ubiquitous cubes and red switches on the floor). Each finished puzzle unlocks a Sigil, and collecting enough Sigils unlocks new puzzle mechanics and doors to even more puzzles. The Talos Principle‘s puzzles are arranged in discrete rooms, similar to Portal‘s test chambers. It’s not because of the surface similarities, though those certainly abound.
