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Section added for Orpheus Ascending August 29, 2024.
100% completion time: 26 hours 54 minutes
Just finished The Talos Principle 2! Overall I liked it but there was a lot more I didn't like than in the first game. I'd still highly recommend it though, at the very least because there's always a major dearth in nice Portal like 3D puzzle games.
Overall, at the very least they went for something different and unique rather than âthe same thing, but againâ which is what I was really really worried about. They definitely went for a very different story, looked at very different themes, and the puzzle design (particularly the bonus/hidden puzzles) felt subtly different (although the latter point is not necessarily a positive).
The puzzles felt too easy. All but a handful of the main puzzles, lost puzzles, and monuments felt easier than most of the first game. Even the golden gate levels were pretty straightforward, I think only three out of the twelve were ones where I actually felt puzzled by (although there was one that absolutely enraged me, because the solution was straightforward but it was really fiddly to actually execute and required fully resetting the level if you messed it up). I was mostly disappointed that they introduced a lot of new mechanics but then it feels like no one of them was explored in as much depth as it could've been.
Maybe the DLC will have harder puzzles, like how the Road to Gehenna DLC for the first game had masterwork puzzlesâas in, the best puzzles I've ever solved, where every single one had just the right difficulty; and when you solved them it felt like an accomplishment over a very well-designed puzzle rather than feeling like you were just missing something obvious. I will be getting the DLC anyways just because I always really desperately want fresh 3D puzzles sometimes so I can't just skip whole sets of them even if I'm not expecting the best lol.
The general story is fine, suitable for the game. As with the past game, the philosophical discussions and themes are more important than the story. I liked a lot of the stuff discussed in this, although the actual decisions and non-reading discussions felt a little too black and white for me; your conversation options are very stark with no real middle ground, at least until the last sections of the game where you have the option for some more of a gray area. I don't know if I liked the philosophical discussion in this as much or not, what they're analyzing was very different, and it felt a lot more conversational rather than merely reading articles and having a singular character to talk to. It was still good by any measure though, and actually having other robuts around and talking with them around made the game feel a lot less isolated and lonely which was nice. Although of course physical isolation is sorta the entire point of the first game and especially Road to Gehenna, while in this game collaboration and society is really the entire point.
I liked the settings in it a lot, I really really liked the environment of the 12 regions in it, very nice-looking. Absolutely beautiful natural environments (in particular I loved the North areas and West 1), and the âmegastructuresâ were interesting in design.
Although I kept losing immersion in the game because it's Gaming 5.0 upscaling nonsense that runs worse and looks at best the same as a game from 2018. Are reflections and light scattering in everything really worth it? It's also 78 fucking gigabytes[1] which constitutes nearly a â of all the data I have on my main computer right now (77.9/432.3 GiB).
100% completion time: 2 hours 49 minutes (~1 hour of that spent in golden gate puzzles lol)
Finished the first third of The Talos Principle 2 DLC, âOrpheus Ascendingâ. Overall, don't have *substantially* different thoughts.
The very first puzzle was difficult, mostly because it introduces a completely new concept that's never been required for a solution before. Otherwise, each of the four sections of main puzzles were not very difficult. It was interesting to see them teach all the subtle laser mechanics you don't notice in any of the main game's puzzles, but none of them were particularly difficult but the very first one and puzzle 16.
Puzzle 16 was also rather difficult, but mostly because it required working out in your head and didn't respond well to trial-and-error for various reasons. A satisfyingly difficult puzzle though, I liked it.
The final puzzle of the main section was a thinker but didn't feel like the culmination of all the mechanics taught in the DLC like I was hoping it was. It mostly was a matter of making observations about what you're capable of doing, and correlating some âsymmetriesâ in your available actions to figure out what to do.
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In contrast, the first two golden gate puzzles were extraordinarily difficult, I think more difficult than any puzzle in any of âThe Talos Principleâ 1 or 2 or any of the DLCs. They rely on things you've previously only ever seen when your idea for a solution was completely incorrect, and they required arcane setups. I got the achievement for taking over twenty minutes to complete a puzzle in the first one, and would've gotten it in the second one too if you could get achievements twice. However, while they were slightly frustratingly difficult, they were very fun puzzles and felt satisfying when completed rather than feeling like you were just missing an obvious mechanic.
The third golden gate puzzle wasn't nearly as hard, it felt more like an extension of the mechanics introduced in the main DLC puzzles rather than an extension of the mechanics in the other two golden gate puzzles (luckily, otherwise I probably wouldn't have solved it lol).
I liked the story and philosophical elements such as they were, similarly to the first game. I liked them sorta bringing back elements and environments of the first game, which both felt nice to revisit and fitted thematically with the setting of the DLC.
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