It doesn’t so much build a world as vaguely tie together some scraps of ones where the polygon counts are low and the puzzles make no sense. And I suppose I have a certain amount of nostalgia for that particular brand of early-PC-game first-person fudging – click the side of the screen to turn ninety degrees, click the centre to blink ten feet forward – for that unique atmosphere you get from the sense that all the excitement’s either already happened or is going on off-screen and you’re just sweeping up after the fact. It’s like the Silent Hill fog thing – something that wasn’t much more than a way to fudge the parameters that the technology had set for us, but which ended up being such an essential part of the mood it became a signature of the genre. They wanted to show everyone that they were on the cutting edge of pre-rendered PC graphics, and that meant reducing the game to a prolonged sequence of pretty landscapes with no other characters or anything else that might require animation. All of which reminds me of Myst because Myst and games like Myst created a similar atmosphere, albeit largely because of technical limitations. Talos Principle has this nice atmosphere of loneliness created firstly (and most obviously) by our being alone, collecting scraps of knowledge on the backstory and ongoing events from scattered documents, logs and plain text communication, and secondly by being surrounded by huge, gorgeous environments that really emphasize the fact that you’re the only living thing for miles around. Croteam seem like an old-fashioned bunch, and just as their main IP Serious Sam calls back to retro shooters, Talos Principle takes a range of influences that go all the way back to the earliest days of PC gaming, and a little property called Myst. But I do think it’s another symptom of gaming having no long-term memory that Portal seems to be the only point of reference people have for the genre of first-person puzzle games. I’d argue it’s virtually impossible to make a narrative puzzle game in this day and age without being influenced by Portal, consciously or not. Talos Principle also makes full use of the perspective and 3D space when it has you redirect laser beams around the map, requiring you to be able to eyeball the route the laser takes before you place the reflector.īut I’m not arguing that TP takes no influence from Portal at all, it’s only smart to learn from the greats. And while there have certainly been first-person games before Portal that were more about puzzles than action, Portal was one of the first to make full use of the 3D space and line-of-sight in the design of the puzzles, where previously a ‘first person puzzler’ merely meant that you stopped moving around every now and again to solve a sliding tile puzzle that was holding a door closed for some reason. I mean, I can’t deny that Talos Principle is also first person and a puzzler. Portal was very very good and very very successful and inevitably people want to try to make that lightning strike twice, but Talos Principle doesn’t group so easily with the more obvious imitators like Quantum Conundrum and Q.U.B.E. And as I said in the review, I don’t think that’s an entirely fair comparison. A first-person puzzle game, so of course it was going to get compared to Portal. Or The Talos Principle, I’m not sure what it prefers. The extra little (sort-of) hidden puzzles were often more rewarding than the main ones, though some were incredibly obtuse.So, Talos Principle, then. One big benefit of this approach though, as opposed to having completely separate puzzle areas, is that the world itself is often a puzzle. You end up being very glad for the genuinely absurd running speed. The open, connected world is pretty and fun to explore, but contributes to the feeling of things not being as condensed as they should be. Sometimes you figure out the gist of what you're supposed to do as soon as you walk in an area, and after that it's just a matter of trial and error, with timing and exact positioning playing more of a role than logic. Portal) feel like they're introducing a new idea with every puzzle, whereas a lot of puzzles here feel like you're largely just trying combinations of things you already know. I thought it was really quite good, but it does feel a bit padded out. Finished, well apart from the star challenges.
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