The Talos Principle
Since it's the "principle" game, that means it goes first, right? I know my semantics. Talking of Greek schools of learning, though, Croteam's The Talos Principle - named for that giant bronze fellow in Jason in the Argonauts - is a first-person puzzle game that, at least presently, seems to deal with a lot of light refraction and barrier disability puzzles. That's really only scratching the surface though, as it appears to have some pretty heady messages to deliver about the laws of sentience and those of God and man.
Frankly, at times The Talos Principle feels like what happens when you have a Philosophy degree you can't do anything with, and decide to go into video game development instead. That's perhaps a little reductive, but the game is very focused on the classics, in the hoity-toity university academia sense of the word, and a handful of themes keep re-emerging about the nature of the reality the player is in, the robotic form they embody, what may have happened to the rest of humanity, and the mysterious "Elohim" voiceover that is handing down commandments to follow. Much of this is incidentally told through computer logs found on terminals across each of the game's little hub areas. It's a lot to get into, but the fundamental game mechanics are fortunately a little easier to follow than the game's grandiloquent statements about artificial sapience and Judeo-Christian monotheism (it makes for a distinctive narrative framing device for the puzzles though, that's for sure).
Instead, let's look at those puzzles. Early on, you're introduced to a tripod device called a "jammer". These jammers can permanently disable wandering orbs and gun turrets - both of which will kill the player once they step within a certain proximity - as well as energy barriers that prevent access. However, once you pick up a jammer it'll switch whatever it was jamming back on again. Early on, you're juggling these jammers to ensure that you stay one step ahead of the defenses and can nab a tetromino at the end of each of The Talos Principle's puzzle areas. These tetrominos are then used to open doors and facilitate progress through the game. However, there a lot more tetrominos than there are doors to open, so the rest appear to be going towards various bonus unlocks and other mysterious rewards I'll no doubt have to look into later.
And that's really key to The Talos Principle's appeal, at least for me so far. It does what every good puzzle game does and sets up two tiers of puzzle to solve: the instanced ones, where you're given a small arena and forced to use the tools at your disposal to reach the prize in the designer-intended way, and the meta one, which encompasses the entire game. This meta puzzle not only involves the extra tetrominos and their use, but also some special stars which are found by exploring "outside of the box", to use an insufficiently explanatory cliché, and in addition to those all the various mysteries of the story and what the game is trying to teach you about philosophy with all its data files and audio logs, as outlined above. Honestly, a series of the game's puzzles would've been acceptable enough - though these early ones tend to be on the easy side, I can already appreciate just how headscratchy these set-ups might become - but having the framing device be every bit as intriguing definitely doesn't hurt. Could it be I found my The Swapper equivalent already?
My favorite aspect of this game, though, is that it started it up with an ominous error message that my system lacks the visual memory to process the game on its minimal settings (as you can tell from the screenshots, it's perhaps not looking its best) and yet the game still runs fine, at a fairly consistent framerate even. That's a darn sight better than The Witness, which was utterly unplayable on this machine despite sporting a more or less equal level of graphical quality. I don't generally ponder the purely mechanical aspects of gaming in my reviews - framerates, resolutions, v-sync, etc. - because A) performance is often entirely dependent on the player and their particular machine, B) one of those aspects that is difficult to describe but instantly communicable through watching the game in motion on a video, and C) serves as a distraction from what is (subjectively) more important: the game design, and its presentation and narrative when applicable. Yet, even I have to step back and admire whatever wizardry Croteam put into the game to make it work on a system so old I originally stole it from an archaeological dig just outside of where the Mesopotamian city of Uruk once stood.
At any rate, I'll definitely be playing The Talos Principle for one more day at least. One issue is that I won't really be able to talk about where the plot is going without spoilers, nor how any new puzzle elements might function without potentially giving some solutions away, so I've quite the challenge ahead of me for tomorrow's update. Still, could it not be stated that a deeply mysterious game deserves an equally enigmatic assessment? "Only if I was making excuses," you say? Well, all right then. I think we have an accord.
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