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Croatian developer Croteam is mostly known for its
outlandish first-person shooter series Serious Sam, which delivered
great adventures throughout the years, while encompassing the core
mechanics of retro shooters.
However,
the studio is keen on making a name for itself in other ways and has
just launched The Talos Principle, a novel first-person puzzle game
that's written by Tom Jubert and Jonas Kyratzes, and brought to life in a
great series of environments that feel refreshing, to say the least,
and house some devious challenges.Can this new experience delight with its puzzles or should Croteam stick to mindless shooters? Let's find out.
Story
The Talos Principle doesn't hold your hand and spoon feed you the details about its plot, as it relies on the player's innate curiosity to piece things together and check out all of its different elements. You simply awake in a serene environment, noticing first that you're controlling an android, and are greeted by the voice of your maker, a being called Elohim, which is Hebrew for god. If you want to prove yourself worthy of eternal life, you must complete a series of puzzles, and more or less, that's the basic plot right there.However, through recordings and computer files that you find on different terminals scattered across the main environments of the game, you begin to peel back the layers of the story. What's more, you also start tackling, if you want that is, philosophic notions about what it means to be a person and whether or not an android like yourself can even grasp such notions.
Even if you're in this for the puzzles, you might want to pay attention to the story, as it's really impressive while still relying on the player's choice towards the end. There are plenty of parallels drawn to the Adam and Eve story, as well as to many philosophical situations offered by Greeks millennia ago.
There are several endings, but only one truly matters and brings the most solace to players, so please experiment.
Solve puzzles
Gameplay
The Talos Principle is a first-person puzzle game and you can immediately think of it as a sort of Portal clone. However, you'd be wrong more or less, as it doesn't rely on an innovative gadget like the portal gun. Instead, you have access to certain basic tools and objects across the many different puzzle zones in the game. These areas are spread over multiple large hub worlds, as well as smaller zones that actually encompass the areas.Getting around is quite easy and each zone is filled with amazing scenery that makes exploring a joy. The open puzzle areas are also refreshing, as quite a lot of games nowadays see fit to restrict players to small, enclosed areas.
The actual tools at your disposal start with a simple jammer that can stop walking drones from moving, and more importantly, exploding, but also automated turrets from firing. Progression is a bit lengthy, but soon enough you start unlocking and accessing new puzzle rooms with fresh equipment, such as laser beam deflectors, boxes to weigh down on buttons, or even a system that records your movement and then reproduces it with ease.
While at first you may not feel particularly challenged by the difficulty of the puzzles, you'll soon start maneuvering all these different objects while figuring out solutions as you progress through The Talos Principle.
All the puzzle areas have different pieces at the end, which are then used in a small Tetris-like mini-game to unlock new rooms and zones. These challenges also start off rather simple, but once the zone you have to fill up starts expanding, you'll soon spend a lot of time here, not just in the actual puzzle zones.
The Talos Principle is also surprisingly lengthy, with a lot of puzzles to solve scattered across the many zones in the game. Unfortunately, some have similar solutions or rely on similar tricks to solve, so you might feel a bit bored if you strive for maximum completion.
While the game maintains a solid 60+ framerate at most times, there are quite a few moments of freezes or stuttering, but they're not that severe. Also, some puzzles tend to hide their dangers, such as the turrets, a bit too well, and if you're not paying attention to the sound cues, you'll find yourself jumping out of your seat after you get shot down.
Explore new zones
Visuals and Sound
The Talos Principle looks very impressive, offering a rich color palette, imaginative level designs, and pretty good textures all around. Aside from the aforementioned freezes, the game has a solid framerate and you can customize quite a few visual effects from the options menu.The soundtrack is also delightful, complementing the action inside the game, and most of the sound cues are good, although the ones for computer terminals are a bit too loud for their own good. Elohim's voice acting is quite impressive, but you'll also find decent performances when it comes to the audio logs you uncover throughout the game.
The Good
- Imaginative puzzles
- Great story
- Colorful visuals
- Ambitious philosophical aspects
The Bad
- A few freezes
- Some puzzle solutions are a bit too similar
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