====== The Talos Principle ======

Recommended by [[:people:Jeff Hinschberger]]. Owned on Humble Bundle / Steam.

I got about seven hours in (maybe halfway?), the last few while I had Covid in early 2024, decided I "got it," and looked up the endings. This one is interesting because it's clearly got the ingredients of something I like: Clever puzzles that reuse a small set of core concepts, teaching through design, a weird philosophical sci-fi story slowly revealed through epistolary text. But it got to feeling like a grind, and I didn't want to keep going.

I agree with [[https://blog.zarfhome.com/2014/12/the-talos-principle-design-ruminations.html|Zarf's take]] that there are some serious design footguns mixed in with all the good stuff. For me the first thing was the amount of "manual" labor involved in solves - like, a lot of running to no purpose. Besides complaints about the scale of the overworld(s) I was quickly hitting a point where getting oriented in a new maze would take a while, and then I'd know the solution to a puzzle, but executing it would be another five minutes of running back and forth through the maze juggling tools. It made me wish for a bird's-eye view mode that let me implement my solution more like a chessboard.  And... scanning negative reviews, it sounds like I quit just in time, and the last third of the game is actually much //worse// in this respect.

My other complaint is that rewards are too sparse. The UI that directly tells you it will be another 5-7 puzzles before the next meaningful unlock was actually kind of frustrating - if you did the same thing on a Mario World-style map, at least every level would unlock the next level. I didn't mind the tetronimo tangrams so much but they do feel like filler. And I felt like I'd hit the critical plot points, so having a gauntlet of fifteen red (difficult) puzzles ahead of me without much of a carrot besides maybe //another// gauntlet of puzzles before an ending left me fed up.

{{tag>videogame owned played "played in 2024" "played on PC"}}