Life finds a way
The Talos Principle is much like other puzzle games such as Portal or last year's Antichamber, and while its puzzles may not be as clever, the story rewards the contemplative. Asking deep philosophical questions about life, death, what it means to be human and the meaning of it all can be intimidating or outright infuriating, but because answers aren't forced upon you, these questions are more provocative and something to think about while you puzzle solve.
There is a great mystery as to what exactly is going on at the beginning of The Talos Principle. The gist is that you're a robot in some weird Adam and Eve sort of scenario. A voice speaks to you as your maker calling himself ELOHIM. He forbids you from ascending a tower and tasks you with gathering sigils so that you may find a place beside him in eternity. These sigils are hidden behind the puzzle aspect of the game.
And it's the puzzle part of this puzzle game might be the weakest part of it, but the puzzles do require a bit of thought and planning nonetheless. You start off with jammers that can disable traps and open doors. Gradually other mechanics are introduced. You'll probably be spending a fair bit of time positioning laser beams just so, which can be one of the more frustrating parts of the puzzle solving. You'll lug around hexahedrons, (the game's fancy way of saying, "cube") placing them on switches or jumping on them to reach higher places. Fans will also come into play as a sort of transportation device or roadblock. The most interesting mechanics are the recorder and the platform which is exclusively used in conjunction with the recorder.
It's difficult to wrap your head around getting two yous moving in perfect harmony to reach an ultimate goal. Basically you'll record a version of yourself that will exist when you stop the recording and then you will continue the puzzle with this recording's actions affecting the puzzle state for that recording's duration. On top of that you're trying to get lasers to line up, blocks in the right places, jammers jamming the right things, the right fans blowing, so you can jump to the right place and it's a lot to keep track of. None of the solutions are particularly hard to come by, but when you're solving them in such quick succession you might run into a wall from time to time. So it goes in a lot of games like this, when you come back from a break, the answer just hits you.
A lot of the puzzle solving is just moving parts back and forth and back and forth. The novelty of its puzzles wears off a lot sooner as there isn't anything super crazy like portals in Portal nor does it mess with traditional conventions like Antichamber. The puzzles are a lot more standard and straight forward, and a lot of the time you'll feel clever for figuring them out, but its the ponderous nature of the story that really propels The Talos Principle.
There are three key locations inspired by Greek, Egyptian and Medieval history. The game begins in an ancient Greece like setting, and in Greek myth Talos (who inspires the game's name) is more or less a bronze guardian with but one vein running from his neck to his ankles sewn shut by one nail. When that nail was removed at the promise of immortality, he died. A lot of these tidbits and other stories are portrayed as files on computer terminals and as audio logs. As you come across more computer terminals you will eventually find more than just stories, but a personality on the other end. QR codes are also painted onto walls with messages of previous travelers trying to help each other and make sense of it all.
The rewarding part of solving all of those puzzles is the story's development. It asks more and more questions and reflecting the ponderous nature of those questions it begins providing fewer and fewer answers. Those questions are the true puzzle, but they're not a puzzle you're expected to solve. The compelling tale becomes outright powerful in the closing sequence, but even when those credits roll you'll still have a lot of questions to mull over. That is the nature of the story, not because it is incomplete.
The Talos Principle is one of the more thought provoking games of recent memory. Putting forward a mess of philosophical questions without shoving answers down your throat is no easy task. It's rare for a game providing such food for thought to give you time chew on it. What I've spit up is... Life finds a way.
