[url=store.steampowered.com/app/257510/The_Talos_Principle/]The Talos Principle[/url] is one of my favourite games of all time, and I'm also a big fan of VR games, so I was excited to see what my experience would be when these two worlds collided. Fortunately, I had a good experience with this game, but it wasn't without flaws, and I probably wouldn't recommend this game unless you've already played the original game and you're a big VR fan.
In most ways, this game is very similar to the original version. The story is still phenomenal and the puzzles are still very creative and interesting. However, you're now experiencing the world through the lens of VR, and there's just something about walking through the world and feeling like you're physically picking up the jammers and connectors that just makes everything feel more alive. The feeling of actually picking up the tetris pieces to solve those puzzles in VR was probably my favourite part (although it did come with one major downside, which I'll mention shortly).
Unfortunately, playing the game in VR came with some fairly major caveats as well. First of all, I sometimes found the controls for the Valve Index difficult to use, which often left me frustrated:
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[*] Picking up objects is done by squeezing the controller while your hand is over an object, but squeezing harder makes the character jump, which is bizarre and a bit disorienting.
[*] The game doesn't consider whether you're hand is already closed or not when it interacts with an object, so it's easy to just be holding your controller and then accidentally pick up objects that are behind you, which irritated me more than a few times.
[*] The touchpad on the Valve Index controllers is used to pick up pieces in the tetris puzzles (along with the trigger), which was very cool and made it feel like I was actually holding the pieces, but for some reason the touchpad is also mapped to character movement, which meant every time I picked up a piece, my camera would move slightly. This made these tetris puzzles feel very nauseating at times.
[*] Pressing buttons on a terminal is pretty imprecise as well, and I was often worried about pressing the wrong ones.
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There's also some really nice features from the base game that seem to be missing from the VR version. There doesn't seem to be any sprint button, so you're forced to move through the entire game at the same speed, there is no journal for terminal entries or time capsules, so you can't read or listen to them again later, and worst of all, there doesn't seem to be any way to pick up jammers or lasers without resetting their assignments like you can in the original game, requiring you to reassign them every time, making some puzzles take a lot longer. It's too bad that all of these are missing, as I really felt their absence while playing through the game.
The game still looks alright, although the graphics did feel a lot more dated in the VR version. The performance was also alright, but I did get some stuttering once in a while. I also encountered a few bugs I never encountered in the base game, such as the UI being rendered outside of my field of view, occasionally being unable to grab objects when I was too close to them, or certain events not triggering properly when certain puzzles were completed.
I should also mention that there's a process to transfer save files between the base and VR versions of this game, but this can only be done from the base version to the VR version, [i][b]not the other way around[/b][/i]. This is really unfortunate, as you can't continue your game if VR ends up being too much for you, or you decide you'd rather finish it in the original version.
[b]TL;DR[/b] This VR version of one of my favourite puzzle games of all time still has a fantastic story and interesting puzzles, but the controls are sometimes frustrating or unintuitive, some quality-of-life features from the base game are noticeably absent, the game doesn't run quite as well and has a number of bugs that don't seem to be in the base game, and there's no way to transfer your save from the VR version to the base game. I still love this game, so I still recommend it, but only if you've already played the base version (as it's definitely better) and you're a VR fan that's willing to put up with an imperfect VR port.
