The Talos Principle: Reawakened

I wish I could recommend this game. I adore The Talos Principle and while the gameplay updates are great, the performance is horrendous to such a degree I don't think it's justifiable. I'm playing on an RTX 3080, not the newest GPU but definitely not a weak one. I've had to turn most settings to the lowest to be able to achieve a half stable 60 fps, and that's **with** DLSS turned on. This game pretty much requires you to have upscaling and/or frame generation to reach at least a decent framerate. But at least this game looks good then, right? Even with higher settings though you will still notice some objects pop in and out depending on distance, something that never happened in the original. Particle effects like water splashes look very pixelated even in high settings. Due to some strange thing I guess is related to nanite's tesselation (another stupidly performance heavy UE5 tech) shaded objects usually get DARKER the closer you get to them. Another really strange thing is how reflections are just totally messed up. Foliage and anything near water will get reflected in the water that's BEHIND the objects. Objects obstructing the background view will also obstruct the reflection in the water even if the water itself is still visible. All of these things just make the game seem so rushed and unpolished, despite it being quite obvious that a lot of time was spent making sure the gameplay was great. Unreal Engine 5 is quite the mess but it's still not impossible making good looking games that performs alright using it. Lies of P for example is a great looking game that didn't make both my PC and my eyes hurt while playing it. The same thing can't be said about The Talos Principle: Reawakened unfortunately.

Back in late 2014 Croteam surprised the world by releasing a new game that wasn’t Serious Sam, but a thoughtful puzzle game with great story called The Talos Principle. My experience with that game happened almost a year later, and while I really liked the game, I was so exhausted by the end of it, that I didn’t finish the Road to Gehenna DLC. In another shocking twist, in 2023 The Talos Principle 2 was released and did everything a great sequel should do. It was and still is one of the best puzzle games I have ever played and it has improved upon its predecessor in almost every conceivable way. Given that The Talos Principle: Reawakened is the remake of the original game that sticks very close to how that title felt and played, it feels a bit weird to reassess it. On one hand, it’s still a fantastic puzzle game. On another – it pales in comparison with the sequel. So yeah, this is a remake of the original The Talos Principle and not a simple remake at that. It is among the very small list of game remakes, where despite the clearly impressing underlying technical changes, the game plays almost identically to the original. I can assume that the reasoning behind this remake was with the team wanting to improve their mastery of Unreal Engine 5 that they have used really well in The Talos Principle 2 and will be using the already announced third game in the series. And the results are fantastic – the game looks amazing, while also running a great (and noticeably better than TTP2). The original game, that used their proprietary Serious Engine, still looks very good and for players with older hardware that version of the game can remain as a solid choice. But in almost every way the remake works as a superior substitute. Only a couple of things have changed in The Talos Principle and Road to Gehenna in comparison to the original game. The biggest change, I feel, is that the often criticized by many (myself included) Recording mechanic, where you record the state of tools and yourself and then solve the puzzle using the recording and your current self, has been made a lot more convenient. You can now create pauses in the recording, instead of standing and doing nothing for several seconds at a time, which removes a lot of the guesswork and time pressure from the puzzles using this mechanic. The second biggest change is that now apart from only resetting the state of the world you can rewind the game in small chunks. So you no longer need to redo the whole puzzle if you’ve made a mistake, instead you can just rewind a bit and avoid the mistake. And finally, in the main game the concept of “Messengers” was updated, so now they are available from the start, but you need to find new types of sigils to unlock them. And once unlocked, instead of giving you hints, they allow you to skip the puzzle, similarly to how it works in the sequel. Now, despite that final change, I still feel that the idea of Messengers is somewhat pointless and unhelpful. Because the overall structure of the game, the puzzles, the progression and everything remain unchanged. As such, by the time you will unlock these folks, you probably don’t really need them. And this mechanic is also entirely absent in both Road to Gehenna and the completely new story campaign In the Beginning. My memory of the game, with it becoming rather tiresome by the end, turned out to be true. Once again, I’ve felt that as soon as you get to the third section of the game, things become a lot more frustrating and not as polished. Which continues into Road to Gehenna, where some of the puzzles are very poorly communicated, though some are extremely good. And then things get completely dire with In the Beginning, where puzzles tend to turn into complete nonsense. I know there are fans of extremely convoluted puzzles with niche usage of mechanics and the need to plan 10 steps ahead, but I’m not that audience. So where some of the harder sections in Road to Elysium DLC for the second game were frustrating, but mostly manageable for me, majority of In the Beginning was just purely unfun. The story, however, is still very good. Different, too stuffy for my tastes, too bible, too up its own butt (by design, that’s what the characters are). And accompanied by solid music, that nonetheless makes me want to sleep. But once again – I’m just comparing things with how extremely fun, exciting and well paced the second game is. On its own, the original and the additional campaigns tell the story well and for it alone The Talos Principle: Reawakened is worth it. Yes, I like the sequel a lot more. But the original game still holds up. And The Talos Principle: Reawakened is just a better version of it. The only things missing from this version are a couple optional DLCs the original got, like prototype levels and Serious Sam voice instead of one of the characters. Personally, I didn’t like those DLCs at all, so their lack is a gain, not a loss. If you have played the original game before and really liked it, then I recommend planning the revisit with the Reawakened version. And if you have not played the original game, then just grab this new version instead. It’s a better version of a great game.

Not needed if you own the original game, but the developer commentary is excellent. Recommend just for that, plus an opportunity to throw more money at my favorite puzzle game franchise.

リメイク前をDLCのゲヘナ含めてクリア済みで、Reawakenedはセールで購入。 初プレイとなるビギニングは地獄みたいな難易度だった。 既存のギミックだけで新しい解法を用意してくる開発者の発想力には脱帽する。 ただしごく一部に（シビアと言うほどではないが）素早く正確な操作が要求されるパズルがあり、そこだけはTalosに求めるものではないと感じた。

Can't really recommend this remaster. Yet another game fallen victim to UE5 craze. The original game was fine as-is, and I'm not sure why it even needed updating. Also it was one of my favorite games that worked natively both on Linux and Windows with excellent performance. This thing also works on windows and linux, but sucks balls in terms of perfomance on either platform. It does not look much better(subjectively, it's kinda worse) than the original, but completely tanks performance to the point where even with DLSS I can barely get 60FPS on a 2K Ultrawide (no RT, no framegen). Shader compilation and load stutters are also there (expect sub-20 FPS after location change for a few minutes), and object/texture pop while running (and it's wa-a-a-a-ay worse than Talos 2). Reflections and shader bugs are everywhere. And of course - game crashes every once in awhille. which was less so in the original. Basically it's a remaster for the sake of remastering.

I'm nearing the finish line of this remake, and as much as I'd love to give this a recommendation with caveats, I can't do that with how many horrible graphical issues are present due to the engine being used. Half of everything on screen is flickering all the time, and the real puzzle becomes what combo of .ini adjustments and settings in-game need to be altered to make things look even remotely okay. Why do you not have a screen-space reflection toggle? Why do you instead tie screen-space reflections to the global illumination setting, which needs to be set to ultra? What are we doing here? I love The Talos Principle. I'm still powering through all this nonsense, but certain areas are being transformed from absolutely beautiful, to horrendous and hard to look at, and I feel like I've spent hours just in the menus hoping I'll find some perfect solution that will make things stop giving me a headache.

This is basically an Unreal Engine 5 remastering of the original Talos Principle and the Road to Gehenna DLC. Both are a joy to experience again. UE5 does make this a demanding game to run at high settings due to the usual poor optimization of UE5. However, I did find that this game ran much better than Talos Principle 2 with few stutters. On my high end 9700 XT system the game could run at the highest settings and full ray tracing with FSR3 and stay above 60FPS. However, the game also scaled well to my Z1 Extreme Lenovo Go S and I was able to lock it to 40FPS on the 120FPS screen at low settings for a very smooth and playable experience. If you can push the visuals, they are fantastic looking with full ray tracing. It was very nice to wander through these familiar landscapes with the higher fidelity. For the Reawakening Croteam has sprinkled developer commentaries in the main game and Gehenna DLC. These are very informative and I learned a lot about how the game was created. I never knew the creator of the Swapper was involved with the story in Talos Principle. It makes so much sense though. In addition to the remastering, Croteam has also added a prequel of hard puzzles called In the Beginning that gives more background on the humans that created the simulation in the game's story. After the super hard puzzles in the TP2 DLC I was not too excited about this addition. However, I can say these are much better than the awful laser only puzzles in TP2's DLC. They use all the tools from the original game in new ways, but they do suffer from what the super hard puzzles always suffer from. There is no teaching of new mechanics. You have to use the tools in brand new ways with no direct knowledge how. You have to bang your head against it until you solve it. The puzzles range from the head scratching, but logical to the completely unfair puzzles like Daydream. Some people will love the challenge, but I think the majority will probably skip them. Daydream deserves to be ignored. There is also a nice community feature with over 500 puzzles at all types of difficulties. This can be fun to explore after finishing the main game content. All and all this is an impressive package of content and in my opinion worth the full price for someone new to Talos Principle. For veterans like myself that had already played through the original versions multiple times it is probably best to wait for a sale.

It's crazy how poorly optimized this game is. The puzzles in the first few worlds are also very repetitive.