The Talos Principle 2

It's a good game but I don't personally feel it quite reaches the greatness of the first game. This first game was a very intimate, tightly woven philosophical narrative with very dense puzzle gameplay. While this second game is also steeped in philosophical discourse and writing, I find the subject matter to be a little less focused in this one. This game is more about exploring the role of humanity as it relates to the world / universe rather than exploring the core of the "talos principle" like the first one did. There's a lot of ideas that contribute to such a vast topic and some are interesting others are not. I do commend the game's writing, like the first one, in that everyone has their own reasoning for what to do and it's all well argued and thought out. The game does not tell you what to think, it presents you with options to think about and you can make up your own mind about it. It's the core work of a philosopher to entertain good faith ideas without necessarily accepting them. Now, the puzzles, I'm a little over halfway done TP2 at this point and I largely find the puzzles a bit on the easy side. There's a few head scratchers which are nice. There was one I was doing correctly but a certain item I was placing wasn't in like the pixel perfect location to work which was frustrating - that's only been a single puzzle out of dozens so it's fine I guess just noting it down. Broadly I found the first game more difficult, but I also wouldn't say this game is a breeze. I don't look at a puzzle and immediately know what to do, i have to play around with it for a minute first in most cases. Another note, some puzzles you'll learn what to do but they are mechanically annoying to perform. Eg imagine there was some convoluted way to swap an item from one side of the area to the other and you had to frequently move items between them in some annoying, slow, 6 step process. A few puzzles like that exist and I find them mechanically tiresome to perform. You realize what you have to do but the act of doing it is not fun. The environments look really good, but this is a typica UE5 optimization nightmare IMO. I know Croteam was having difficulties scaling their in house engine, but it sure ran a lot better than UE5 does. If the industry stops relying on DLSS, Lumen, and Nanite for everything we'd all be in a better place. Finally, I feel the vast landscapes are simply too big. They are nice to look at, but they are by and large extremely empty. Walking between the main puzzles in a zone ususally only takes like 10 - 20 seconds so not too bad. But once you want to start hunting the gold stars (think of them like meta-puzzles that exist outside the designated puzzle areas) you are going to be walking for a long ass time. The stars are also all only 3 types of puzzle (eg, go to one or multiple locations and switch something, find a way to get a laser out of the maps, or find some glowing ball and chase it all over the place for 5 minutes). I would say the stars are a big letdown for me cause they were one of the most clever parts of the first game, and in this one they feel like phoned in padding. Lastly I want to talk about just the general vibe of the game. Since there are many named characters to interact with, and they have voice acting, etc. I just don't get into that that same introspective, deep, meditative state the first game elicited. Also one of the characters sounds way too much like Leonard from the Big Bang Theory and I find it hard to not imagine that lol. In general, it's still a good game. I still think it's a decent sequel (btw, I would absolutely play the first game first. You will be extremely confused) - but in a way it's a letdown as I feel the first game was superior.