The Talos Principle 2
What is society? Is it a form of stewardship, to protect ourselves and the planet on which we were born? Is it a vehicle for us to expand our consciousness as far as possible? Or is human progress inherently doomed? Such questions are part and parcel of playing The Talos Principle 2. Its philosophical conundrums tug constantly between realism and optimism, myth and history, curiosity and punishment, as an android society grapples with the legacy of its self-destructive human past – all while trying to determine its post-human future.
In the 2014 original you were placed within a simulated garden of Eden, tasked simultaneously with completing puzzles and grappling with the concept of free will – eventually defying the garden’s overseer, Elohim, to prove your readiness to enter the real world. The Talos Principle 2 builds on that philosophical foundation, seeing you ‘born’ into the 1,000th android body of New Jerusalem, a city founded by the entity that completed the trials of the first game many centuries ago. Now that you androids are out of the simulation, and have proved your autonomy, you have the significantly more challenging job of figuring out what comes next – a hard limit on your society’s growth, continued expansion, or something in between. The seemingly serene city is full of disagreement under the surface, which is intensifying as the population grows.
To complicate matters further, an illusory Prometheus is promising secret knowledge – we’ve heard that old chestnut before – should you venture outside the city to free him. Soon enough, you’re back solving puzzles in an attempt to explore this newly found island and reveal its many secrets, unlocking successive regions and delving into mysterious structures. All the while, you hash out Socratic dialogue with your band of fellow androids, helping you determine your own position on the direction of this new, post-human civilisation. Do you grasp for the secrets of the universe, or decide some things are best left out of human – or, rather, android – hands?
It’s an intriguing premise, and mythology buffs will enjoy piecing together the viewpoints of Sphinxes and Titans, alongside the literary naming conventions for your colour-coded android friends (Melville, Byron, and so on). While the story lags at times, it does a fine job of comparing and contrasting distinct perspectives as you go on, making the entire game a marketplace of ideas in which you act as a resolute window shopper.
Like the original game, it makes for a distinctive blend of logic puzzles and philosophical critique. Musings on the nature of reality and consciousness are interspersed with spatial challenges in which you must use teleportation devices and multicoloured lasers to reach your goal – like a galaxy-brain rat freeing itself from a series of mazes. But now the stakes are higher, the world is busier, the visuals sharper. Everything benefits from the grander scale, whether you’re puzzling your way across frozen landscapes, exploring a damaged laboratory or rearranging blocks inside a pyramid.
These challenges are consistently strong, with a new suite of devices that mesh together in devilish ways – continually pushing you to think smarter as the difficulty escalates. And many of the first game’s kinks have been ironed out on this second run. A fiddly video feature, which previously allowed you to co-complete puzzles with a recording of yourself, has been replaced with a second android body you can swap between for certain puzzles. Meanwhile, the first game’s flat, Tetrislike puzzles have evolved into three-dimensional bridges that need to be constructed between sections of the map – a tangible improvement, even if they still feel a little disconnected from the puzzle logic elsewhere.
Croteam expertly mixes its combination of lasers, force fields and handheld gadgets for its puzzle-box dioramas, the solutions often seeming opaque until they slowly come into view. With optional puzzles to help meet your quota, freedom as to the order in which you tackle them, and (albeit scarce) collectible tokens that let you sidestep puzzles entirely, The Talos Principle 2 helps nudge you forward on the occasions you get stumped on a brainteaser. The lack of timing-based puzzles affords you the room to mull over these conundrums without pressure. The developer trades the linearity of Cocoon and the momentum of Portal for a more contemplative stop-start pace, which ensures space is made for the ontological conversations happening around you. (“Existence? It’s totally gnarly.” Well, quite.)
Crucially, the game’s larger scale extends to its intellectual scope. It juggles a lot more ideas, and the game benefits from the liveliness and humanity of its central cast, whether that be the droll asides of a robot engineer or musings on the comparatively short lives of domestic cats – all of which helps to make the puzzlesolving process a little less lonely. And Croteam draws on a host of sources from across history and fiction, mixing classical philosophy and 19th-century authors with visions of a futuristic utopia. It’s a fascinating mix, and one that this sequel carries confidently, allowing it to take bigger swings, the majority of which connect.
That central combination of philosophical debate and logical reasoning remains as robust as it did nine years ago, asking you not only whether your mind is up to the task of completing puzzles with a single correct answer, but also whether you’re able to move beyond that rigid thinking and choose a path for yourself – whatever the consequences. In the words of the android Byron, “There’s a price for pursuing progress. But there’s also a price for not pursuing it.” Playing this, it’s clear Croteam was wise to choose option A.
Now the stakes are higher, the world is busier, the visuals sharper. Everything benefits from the grander scale