Ontology, Geometry, Exemplary
Talos Principle is a game well beyond what you may think it is. I went in thinking it was Portal, with robots and slight call backs to Serious Sam. It is all this, but also a lot more. There are meanderings of existentialism, ontology, served and servant, contradiction, and lastly devious puzzles that rely on strict rule sets. And then puzzles where you have to further break these rule sets.
This is THE puzzle game of 2014, and I'm sad I only sat down with it late in 2015.
It gets what its puzzles are amazingly well. In virtually all cases you can see the end goal (a sigil or star or other) up front, and it displays the tools to solve it clearly as well. This cleverly aids puzzle comprehension and makes you master the thought process of solving puzzles yourself, rather than the dealing with the mechanics arbitrarily and coming up against progress blocks through lack of understanding. Nothing is cheating in this game, and thus you feel even more empowered and clever when things click into place as all the pieces are there for your to figure out right at the start. Puzzles are hub based, and being stuck in one will not hinder your progress elsewhere, so you can come back later to that devious puzzle with fresh eyes.
Easter eggs are also abound, and small touches like FOV adjustment, movement speed adjust, time skipping (fast-forwarding) are all in the options and add fantastically to make this game very difficult to criticise. It is purely your brain against the game, with nothing to hinder you otherwise. Lastly, this game smartly works with your Logitech keyboard screen to display statistics and other relevant information while you are playing, which is a neat little touch.
Lastly the world building although simple, is staggeringly complete and believable. A lot is made with such little to draw upon. The MLA (an AI (?) entity that converses with you via terminals about the land) and Elohim (an omnipresent, god-like voice), and even notes scrawled by other 'avatars' really ground you in whatever is going on in this game. Are you a mouse in a maze? Or something more?
This is a phenomenal game. If only nearly this much thought and deft handling was put into more puzzle games (or games in general)!
