Even in opening new zones and items, The Talos Principle maintains this devotion to brain teasers. (We should be able to leave some of our own messages for others to read this way - somewhat Dark Souls style - after launch.) But the puzzling stands just fine on its own, although the lore enriches it and delivers different endings depending on your choices and actions. But The Talos Principle brings its own appeal, chiefly in the form of (easily readable) QR codes with messages from robots, yammering about the glory of Elohim, or how hard this or that puzzle is. Here, we almost never have a chance to laugh.

We've seen stuff like this in The Stanley Parable as well, although with more humor and sometimes to better effect. created for the story itself.) If there's one thing I don't like about it, it's that the terminal forced me to choose from preset responses most of the time, instead of typing in my own. The Talos Principle asks us to ask ourselves old philosophical questions dating back to Socrates, but by the same token, they're not that hard to grasp. At times, it even adds to the mystery by letting you partake in surveys testing your humanity, but which seem to be administered by a real person. It explores concepts of humanity and being through quotes by writers like John Milton, William Blake, and others.

I gained insight from listening to audio logs and reading e-mails from the designers of your world contain everything from inane song lyrics to reflections on an important garbage dump/archaeological site.

Running parallel to the puzzle focus is my personal quest to discover who and what I really am and whether I'm actually a 'person,' explored through little terminals dot each subzone that beep and boop, begging for interaction. And that's where the philosophy comes in. And hitting 'H' for a third-person perspective reveals a big surprise of who you’re playing as. The narrating voice overhead here is Elohim (essentially Hebrew for 'god'), and he's basically just around to tell you that you'll gain everlasting life if you finish all the puzzles, create a sense of forbidden mystery around a big central tower, and suggest the entire world around you is a sham. It happens often, and Talos Principle maintains that essential 'Aha!' factor for hours, partly because there are so many gadgets to toy with and combine in interesting ways, although some repetition slips in by the end. Such moments feel like completing the Triforce in a Zelda game, and this was just one puzzle out of around 120. I then reconfigured my jammers and connectors to work my way back to the cube, dumped it on the trigger panel, and claimed the tetromino that was my goal. I then doubly disabled one of the open force fields with the jammer, and then popped a new cube on a spring before another fan, which sent the cube flying over the wall into the next room with another trigger. I stripped the head off the disabled fan, then used a laser connector to trigger another pair of doorways by shooting out three beams. In one puzzle alone, I used to block to disable a force field by setting it on a trigger, after which I took a jammer to disable the fan that was blowing me back down one particular corridor. The Talos Principle's first-person perspective puzzles differ from Portal's with their emphasis on deliberate thinking rather than action and speed. Want a real challenge? Go for the puzzles that reward stars. It eases you into the tough parts (perhaps too gently, as the going is a tad too easy early on), but in time it reaches a pitch of near-orchestral magnitude. It doesn't introduce any nifty, novel gimmicks of its own in the vein of Portal's portal gun, but it positively nails using conventional elements like blocks, signal jammers, laser connections, motion-recording devices, and even turrets to complete each puzzle.

The talos principle level 2 star