Still, if I was to spend time contemplating those conundrums – and other, more earthly questions, like “why is there a fire axe in this temple?” – there are few locales I'd rather gaze upon than those provided by The Talos Principle. Maybe I'm just bitter that I can't make that nihilist computer love me. Maybe it's a big statement on determinism. Then again, the broad range of responses to a big question like “How do you gauge the value of a human being?” probably makes simulating reasonable conversations more or less impossible. It's not the mere existence of a loaded question that bothers me so much as the fact that it gets presented as a meaningful debate, putting you up on stage just so the game can invite everybody to point and laugh at your pathetic response. Remember G-Man's little speech at the end of Half-Life 2? “Rather than offer you the illusion of free choice, I will take the liberty of choo-sing for you.” If only The Talos Principle could be so above board about its intentions to funnel you where it pleases. Every time Milton asked a question and the options unfolded, I started to silently beg for a button that simply said “I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?” Failing that, I wished the game would start providing answers that didn't obviously force me towards a predetermined conclusion. There's an in-game journal that aggregates all the terminal documents you read, but what it doesn't keep track of are all the conversations you hold with Milton via the terminals themselves, or all the booming declarations made by Elohim, both of which pretty much comprise the entirety of the plot development. Actually, that's sort of a problem in itself: The Talos Principle's shotgun approach to philosophical discourse, though exciting at first, quickly becomes really difficult to keep track of. Let's return to the story, since there's certainly no shortage of discussion points there. It's like the video game block-sliding puzzle has a long-lost cousin that's only marginally less annoying. There's no moment of epiphany when you unravel the solution like the regular puzzles, nor any sense that you're ever building a strategy you just keep aimlessly rearranging pieces until they finally fit together. I'm not going to get too narky about these puzzles, mostly because they turn up about as often as a dental appointment and don't take half as long, but there's no real satisfaction in solving them either they're just a thing that gets in your way until you've thoughtlessly fiddled around enough to find the right combination. Now imagine those stars were Tetris pieces that needed to be arranged in a grid before you could proceed, and you more or less have The Talos Principle's approach to gating progress. It was a dubious method of home security, but it worked. You know how doors in Super Mario 64 would only open after you'd amassed a certain number of stars? Sure. Then you have the sigil locks, which seem to only have been included because somebody decided that the connection between completing puzzles and unlocking progress wasn't quite tangible enough. It's nice that you aren't just beaten over the head with an obnoxiously descriptive dialogue box – frankly, I can think of nothing that would ruin the atmosphere quite so effectively – but floundering around hopelessly because the game is asking you to solve the fox-chicken-grain puzzle when you've only just been introduced to the concept of boats isn't fun either. Even if you play through everything as close to sequentially as possible, the game is somewhat poor at introducing new mechanics and elements, often throwing you straight into the deep end with only the most cursory hints as to what the strange new item before you is actually capable of. On one hand, the inability to skip especially devious puzzles and come back to them later would make progress agonisingly slow, but on the other hand, the lack of a distinct order means that the difficulty curve looks like a sheet of paper that my printer just decided wasn't properly inserted. The Talos Principle's non-linearity – wherein you can visit puzzles in more or less any order, barring those currently locked because you don't have enough sigils – is something that's kept me up for several nights, staring in despair at the ceiling as I wonder what to make of it. Certainly not when there are perfectly legitimate things to gripe about, that is.
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