The Talos Principle

Pretentiousness and pseudo-intellectualism wrapped around a fun, but monotonous puzzle game. So many logical fallacies and plain old bad takes presented as some deep truth. Not a bad puzzle game, the scenery is nice, but it just seemed to try too hard. If they left out their attempts at philosophy, it would be a solid 6 out of 10, but I would give it about a 4 as it is.

The puzzles in this game are extremely repetitive and tedious. The puzzles in the beginning are very trivial, which is expected, as the game has to teach the gameplay mechanics to the player, but I wouldn't call the later, more complicated puzzles hard, either. Most of the time you can come up with a solution very quickly. What makes the later puzzles longer to solve is the tedium of carrying out the solutions. Every puzzle starts with having to collect the required items. The vast majority of the puzzles then devolve into a long search for the proper angles so that the laser beams will be aligned correctly. (Seriously, if I have to solve another laser beam puzzle ever again, it's going to be too soon.) The puzzles that don't do this make you move three jammers one by one from one end of a big puzzle chamber to the other. These don't require any logic, just patience. Some of the puzzles even like to distract you from your original solution by hinting at solutions that're not going to work. This game really loves wasting your time. Every puzzle is almost the same. You do the same thing over and over and over again with very slight variations. The novelty disappears around the half-way point and the game from then on becomes a chore. There is only so much you can do with jammers, boxes, laser beams and fans. Combining them in every possible permutation won't make them more interesting, nor harder, just boring, tedious and frustrating. I don't know how many times I had to put a connector on a box, then put the connector + box on top of a fan to elevate them so that I could catch a laser beam at the other end of a puzzle chamber and open an energy gate. The game would be so much better with half as many puzzles. With its story, the game takes itself way too seriously and tries way too hard to make itself look more intelligent than it really is. All in all, the game is not bad, just mediocre. It's not on the level of Portal / Portal 2, which the game was clearly inspired by. If you're really starved for a puzzle game, you may very well enjoy this game, it just wasn't for me.