The Talos Principle II would have been astounding had it just contained its dense, evolving puzzles scattered across a singular map. But Croteam exploded any expectation of what its sequel would be, providing a heady, philosophical story housed in a masterful game.
Eventually I will return to The Witness.
The 2016 all-encompassing puzzle game consumed me for a couple weeks upon release. I think it was that moment I realized line puzzles existed within the environment. I had climbed a ladder and was overlooking the bay of the introductory area hours after wrapping it up and noticed a near-perfect circle formed by pieces of scenery. “Wait…” I thought. Then shifted my perspective, activated the cursor like I was solving a puzzle, and watched as the line glittered and glowed and the sound effects kicked in.
But there came a time when The Witness began to consistently stump me. For some reason my brain could not figure out a series of cryptic puzzle sets as the game continued to layer on new, fluid rules. I can’t say I blame The Witness for this impasse, rather a kind of mental exhaustion that had likely infected me around that time.
Days, weeks, months, years later I would return to The Witness. A few times to that original save file. More times to start fresh, whether to show the game’s genius to a friend or merely relearn the old rules.
Eventually, I will return to The Witness and solve its elusive mysteries.
And The Witness has maintained its status as one of the greatest puzzle games I’ve ever experienced. Artistic, challenging, and simply brilliant.
Then The Talos Principle II entered my headspace.
In the past I played a significant portion of The Talos Principle but, much like The Witness, hit the brakes for no definitive reason outside of time and mind share. Unlike The Witness, Croteam’s laser puzzles had a more tangible weight to them. I wasn’t staring at a box in the world trying to make lines around objects in a grid. I was moving around fiddling with staffs and splitting colored lasers into walls, putting boxes on pressure plates, and putting together tetrominoes. Yet I imagine I hard quit the game before it became truly complex and especially before its latent narrative continued to evolve.
With The Talos Principle II, the desire to push through was unrelenting. It first started as an infatuation with its narrative, one that took place over a thousand years after the first game. Fascinatingly, the sequel opens up playing almost identical to the first, miming the puzzles and philosophical quandaries players dealt with then. Though not finishing The Talos Principle, I cheated and read the story summary on Wikipedia, unsurprised as my intuition remembered the game taking the ultimate path that it did.
Yet I had no expectations of where the sequel would go, until my player character opened its eyes outside the simulation of what was indeed the first game and the trials that an artificial intelligence had assigned the first game’s android protagonist.
The musings of The Talos Principle II are very layered and delicate. Its journey is a slow burn of philosophy, existentialism, and brute humanity. On the surface, players wake as the thousandth and final android birthed into New Jerusalem. We are 1K, the end result of The Goal–a directive given by Athena, the protagonist of the first who awoke and set out to create more like themselves.
Upon entering the light of day, a large group of androids is holding a celebration for The Goal’s culmination. Flesh and bone human beings as we know them are long gone, a consequence of abusing the Earth and sapping it of resources. Ironically, these androids consider themselves to be human and the logic is sound. The Talos Principle exacted a test for countless androids in the hopes they would become sentient and their intelligence would evolve beyond artificiality. In New Jerusalem, these android humans have names, opinions, hobbies, goals. All those things we as people strive for today.
In the midst of the celebration, a strange anomaly appears above the crowd calling itself Prometheus. Out of curiosity and caution, a group of androids sets off to an island where the Prometheus signal originated from, revealing a colossal megastructure in the distance.
The genuine drive for discovery was curtailed at first in the game. Before setting off on the journey, 1K has the ability to explore New Jerusalem and learn more about the world. 1K and the player can speak with other androids, visit monuments, or explore a museum dedicated to humanity–including miniature versions of the simulation puzzles and a few Easter eggs here and there. In this initial opening area, a general warmth for these metallic characters grew in me. Not only is The Talos Principle II packed with quality writing and voice acting, each of the characters has that spark of personality to explore.
1K is given a wealth of dialog options to shape the player’s idea of what they should be. You can sign a petition, suggest an accent for an android who speaks like a surfer dude, or console a citizen who feels the absence of love. A strength of this section of the game is that it provides the player with a lot of world building and character development. Despite each android being of the same frame, most have different colors, a name, and their number of creation etched into their person. But it also plants early seeds of the larger, headier concepts The Talos Principle II chews on over the course of its playtime.
One of my favorite musings in the game was the emphasis on 1K being the final “human” to be born into the world. Why that number? Are they really humans or just impressions of one? What is really stopping this group from creating more, especially if one of them is destroyed. If they are destroyed is that considered a death?
The writing posits these questions to the player and provides many sound responses that can be chosen from. Subsequently, the writing is mature and complex enough to factor in how not only a logical, thoughtful “human” may respond but raise more questions for the player that do not have simple answers.
Surprisingly, The Talos Principle II is built on a complex pyramid of cliffhangers. These aren’t cliffhangers is the true sense of a fade to black. They are an ellipses that trickles into the subconscious over the course of the game’s numerous additional revelations and pronouncements. A new question only deepens the passion to understand the game on more than a base level. Rather than be solely philosophical, true plot devices are employed that grant the player many opportunities to wonder about the state of the world. Where is Athena? What happened to this mysterious group that chose to leave New Jerusalem? Who is Prometheus and what is the megastructure?
Answers are not always quick to be given but hypothetical ones continue to linger on the precipice of the player’s mind until the question is solved. That is the true beauty of The Talos Principle II‘s complex tapestry of thought. It isn’t that the game is a piece of college philosophy that thinks its smarter than everyone else. The numerous works and writing of actual minds across our history found in the game can feel daunting and head-scratching but ultimately make sense in the fabric of the narrative and its message.
I do feel that there will be a limit for some players who may view the heady writing as obfuscation bordering on pretension. And that’s fair. Sometimes obtuse does not equal smart or thoughtful. But many clever minds at Croteam went into this script and were able to make a narrative that is appropriately densely thematic. It is a reward to parse through the often cryptic text and apply it to the story’s development.
Similar to The Witness, The Talos Principle II basks in its world. While fundamentally similar in terms of scope and the delivery of challenges, The Talos Principle II is less conservative with space. Numerous open hubs are available for the player to explore and interact with, each accessed through a transit system acting as a loading zone between bespoke locations.
In each of these sections the player can discover a variety of puzzles both main and optional. Sprinkled throughout these environments are also more obscure discoveries that may only be recognized after a type of “aha!” revelation. The visual presentation is clean and sharp, viewable in first- or third-person. I never wanted for higher fidelity because colors were rich when they needed to be and muted at appropriate times. Machines glisten. Lasers glow with deep, pure color. And the draw distance stretches far and wide because it does not have to bear the burden of loading everything on screen at once.
This means that the custom-crafted hubs have a logic to them that makes players question whether it’s done at the hands of Croteam or New Jerusalem’s progenitors. Smartly, The Talos Principle II only allows players to become lost when it’s intended. Obvious guideposts with directional arrows show where puzzles are and which ones have been solved. A compass at the top identifies potential places for investigation. There’s intent behind locked doors and hidden laboratories, providing players with numerous opportunities for engagement that aren’t just producing solutions to problems.
One of the biggest points of praise I can offer is that I only wished to leave a hub area after I had solved everything I thought I could. To progress the story, players need only solve a specific amount of puzzles whether they be numbered challenges or optional, harder tasks. The thirst to feel smart, to complete was unquenchable and I couldn’t proceed until I discovered it all and ensured no stone or story beat was left unturned.
And what are those puzzles you ask?
The Talos Principle II is, more or less, a game about humanity, existence, and lining up the right colored laser with the corresponding receiver.
It feels almost sickening to reduce the game’s core to this but so be it. Portal 2 was about using portals to reach gates. The Witness was about making lines. Candy Crush is about matching three similar items… I think, I’ve never actually played it.
As you may have noticed from the numerous screenshots in this review, the player has access to a number of handheld tools that are capable of manipulating lasers for the purpose of getting that beam of color to its intended destination. The most basic of these tools is a connector that players can assign to a laser and connect to a goal. As the game continue, these elements are layered on top of each other with additional wrinkles folded in.
Pressure plates will need a block on them to deactivate a gate. Drillers leave a hole in the wall that allows an item to be grabbed from. Jammers remove force fields that may block a laser. Tools have the capability of absorbing two colored lasers and turning them into another (i.e. blue and red to make green).
It sounds relatively simple and on the surface it is. Croteam delicately crafts each puzzle to add the slightest uptick in challenge to the player and develop comprehension of mechanics. Players will learn what lasers can and cannot penetrate. They will find uses for fans and ways to manipulate pressure plates. The countless puzzles in the game all ask the player to understand, learn, and then execute.
But that does not mean The Talos Principle II does not present a challenge. Even in the first area I stumbled upon a solution. I did my best to not leave until I solved a puzzle but eventually knew that giving myself enough time from not focusing on a solution would allow me to approach the situation with fresh eyes. There’s also just moments when a solution seems obvious but the method of execution is just out of reach. Frankly, I appreciate either approach to solving a difficult problem as it means you are only getting smarter and improving comprehension.
For players who find themselves overtly stumped, the only tool outside of an internet search are Flames of Prometheus that can be inserted at the entrance of a puzzle to automatically “complete” them and unlock the end gate. However, these are very limited and can only be retrieved if players solve the puzzle as required, meaning that it isn’t an absolute get out of jail free card.
There will be spikes of difficulty as expectations grow. At what point will new devices no longer be introduced? Will there be any puzzles that ask the player to juggle all previous knowledge in one gauntlet? Again, more tantalizing questions that will be answered through progression. But keep in mind that the deeper you fall into the game, not everything is going to increase in difficulty. Often, I found the optional puzzles in The Talos Principle II to be easier than one of the numbered ones. Much like felling a FromSoftware boss on your first try, it simply depends on the player.
What’s most important is that these puzzles, on the whole, stay consistently inventive and a brilliant extension of the evolving mechanics. I never considered a puzzle particularly bad, usually merely frustrating because I was beating my head against a wall. But remember, progression is not as out of reach as it may seem and I would be surprised if anyone found themselves stuck in an area for too long.
As the weight of resolution both narratively and mechanically come to a head, The Talos Principle II remains a satisfying lesson on video games. Regardless of the genre, few games manage to fulfill a singular vision in such a way as Croteam has. The various moving parts constantly shift into harmony, always leaving the taste of satisfaction in the air while enticing with more to come.
The Talos Principle II quickly becomes more than just a deeply involved game about laser puzzles. Its world brims with mystery and surprises that reward players dedicated towards resolution and experimentation. The rich, complex narrative posits vast, difficult questions about humanity in an approachable package delivered through expert writing and inviting characters. This is one of the rare games that breaks open its own genre, morphing into an incredible, indescribable journey.
