El primero me gustó mucho, y este es más grande en todos los sentidos.
Aunque al principio no me gustó el extra de personajes (me encantaba la sensación de "soledad" del primero) y escala, cada vez me está encajando más.
La "filosofía" del juego es un poco de andar por casa, son conversaciones relativamente simples, pero que son agradables, te hacen pensar a la hora de elegir tus respuestas. Me parece una posible puerta de entrada para que la gente se haga preguntas más allá de lo básico..
Visualmente es una maravilla. Los escenarios son amplios, llenos de detalles y especialmente el interior de la pirámide me encantan, aunque esto ya es por gustos. Invitan a la exploración (cosa además necesaria para completar todo) y técnicamente está muy bien.
Los puzzles por ahora bastante sencillos, pero todavía voy por la mitad del juego, por lo que la cosa se puede poner difícil después. Actualizaré mi reseña acorde.

An excellent example of keeping what works in a previous installment and fleshing out the world around it. This follow-up has the familiar puzzle elements of the first game, but adds a much more in-depth story and a cast of interesting characters that ties it all together. It continues to expand upon the philosophical questions of the original while not forcing the player to get too bogged down in it all. I think the puzzles may have been a little easier this time around, which is neither good nor bad, but I do feel like I had to sit with the first game a little longer. My one complaint is the lack of real fast travel options--walking around the different areas does get a little tedious when you're really just moving from puzzle to puzzle. Overall, though, if you like the first game then you'll probably dig this follow up.

Loved the first one and this is the same.
The graphics are like a 1000% upgrade from the first one. The world is bigger, the puzzles more diverging and fun.
The only complain is the lack of a good map.
Some dumb person thought it'd be a good idea to replace map with arrows on map that are wrong 50% of the time to create a feeling of, idk what that mf was thinking.
Anyways the map is ass and you are gonna have to run a lot trying to figure out where to go.

If you can get past that, there's a fun world to explore and solve puzzles.

The first game is one of my favorites of all time, so when this sequel, releasing 9 years later, was announced, I was ecstatic. And after finally finishing the game to 100% completion, I think it's good, but far from great.

Many of the puzzle ideas with the basic elements were exhausted in the first game, meaning new items needed to be added to this sequel to keep things fresh. The puzzles remain solid in quality, with some leaving me scratching my head for half an hour before finally stumbling onto a solution that was right in front of me the entire time. I have to especially give credit to some of the golden puzzles in the end-game stage, which sometimes consist of very few elements but feature extremely clever and unintuitive solutions. But the satisfaction from completing puzzles is different than the first game; the world layout isn't as neat and is instead blown up to a scale that makes it tedious to navigate. It's more of a relief to be done than it is exciting.

There is a fair amount of content here, and I avoided puzzle and monument solutions throughout my playthrough, so I'm proud of myself for that. Sometimes, I was able to bring items outside of their respective puzzles to help make Pandora monument solutions easier, which I'm not sure if I'm happy about or should be criticizing. I guess it was my choice to do so, but it's hard for me not to take the easy way out and not navigate an entire island for a single drill, for example.

The writing in this game is overbearing. If it were great, I would welcome it, but it's instead overly long, consistently drawing away from gameplay (especially in the very beginning of the game) to a frustrating extent. The first game is great in that it solely offered terminals to read, for those interested in digging into the world's story and regurgitations of classic philosophy. But here, we're forced to sit through a plot with a bunch of other characters trying to collectively decide what's best for "New Jerusalem," which culminates in an effectively inconsequential election at the end of the game.

The stars in the first game were more fun, offering bonus easter-egg-type challenges. In this game, they're relatively easy puzzles whose main source of difficulty is trying to locate their elements across huge maps. The puzzles that took me the longest to solve in the entire game were some of the Pandora monuments, where in some cases items are strewn across these massive levels, with obscurely-located connectors hidden in some random crevice that requires an eagle-eye to spot. They feel more tedious and annoying than challenging in the way that the main puzzles are.

Overall, I'm still very happy that this sequel was made, since I was such a sucker for this style of slow-paced first-person puzzling featured in the first game and always had wanted more. But this is leagues behind the greatness of the original, despite being much more ambitious.

Fantastic sequel where you solve puzzles and debate if frogs are human.

At first I really didn't like how story-centric it was (as well as how open the hub worlds are - you wander around a lot before finding the next puzzle). But the story did eventually win me over and I did grow to appreciate the level design and art direction. There's a lot of new puzzle mechanics and a lot of them could have been expanded or explored further.

Overall, I recommend if you enjoy puzzlers or the first one - just be prepared for a more narrative-focused experience.

Goes in a pretty different direction than the first one with an upgrade in scope, story, and graphics.
Recombines elements of the old puzzles with interesting new mechanics naturally and intuitively.

Story:
The story takes a different approach too, where the first game focuses on the nature of humanity and personhood, the second game is interested in the value of humanity and seeks to ask the player if human proliferation is inherently destructive or if we can coexist peacefully with the planet.
Some may dismiss it as a Malthusian and misanthropic, but I feel it's a relevant question to ask. Especially in the game's universe where humanity did almost get wiped out by it's own hand.
It's cool to see how the characters in the game are aware of the dilemma between their creator's desire for humanity to live on and their mere existence setting them up to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors.
The game's characters come to different conclusions shaped by the player's responses and choices throughout the game.
Just like the first game this gave me something to think about even after completing it and I'm still not sure of how much faith to place in humanity. I came away with a tentative feeling that it's possible to wield our power properly to maximise pleasure and beauty in the universe.

Puzzles:
The puzzles scaled in difficulty nicely and introduced new mechanics well. Gold puzzles were fun and difficult and put some good twists on previously mastered mechanics.

A Masterful puzzle game, perfectly satisfying and grants that endorphin hit when you beat a puzzle.

For those who want more, the stars and subsequent puzzle rooms ramp up the difficulty from a 7 to a 10, really requiring some think-outside-the-box solutions.

The story is there for those who want it, with religious overtones. It will make you question morality, humanity, faith, and a multitude of other things, but really it just lost me.

Finished it a couple days ago, but just went back to do all the golden puzzles and whatnot. Basically 100%ed this one! All puzzles and stars!

Talos Principle 2 is an amazing sequel. I sometimes forget how simple the first one was in comparison. You're not alone in a simulation anymore. You're in a massive, technologically advanced city that was built over centuries. There are actually other characters in the game. The locations are incredible and grandiose. The scale of everything is so huge, it takes quite a bit to walk between locations. But sometimes I would walk around these environments and soak in the views.

The story and world were great. I just loved it. New Jerusalem was super cool and I spent ages exploring every detail my first time there. I liked the whole civilization of robot people I thought that was neat. The social media was really fun! Glad to see they took that aspect over from Gehenna. All the talk around The Founder and The Goal and whether to expand or not was interesting to me.

The puzzles are still great. Buttttt after playing the first game, most of the good ideas have already been done. Overall, this game felt easier, which might mainly be because I've already done a lot of the puzzles in the previous game! They're all still fun, but I never got the achievement t for spending 20 minutes in a single puzzle. This sequel was definitely improved by removing some ideas such as the over-precise recording, and those fuck ass exploding robots. But how many light stick puzzles can you do before they get repetitive?

The thing is, Talos Principle 2 does add a lot of new items. Maybe too many. Some of them are pretty interesting. But quite a lot of them are quickly shoved aside and don't reach their full potential. They're prominent in the area they're introduced, but not so much after that. Hopefully there's a Gehenna-sized DLC which uses all of the new items more.

Really stuck between a 4 and a 4.5 for this game. I'm really conflicted because the game does many things so much better than the first. But holistically, it just never quite reaches the highs of TP1 and doesn't feel as impactful. After I digest this game I might lower it half a star.

Once you have the most basic understanding of any philosophy that came after Marx, the philosophical pondering in this game feels like your pothead roommate, completely wasted, barely stringing together sentences like "what if like, nature is not our victim, but also like, a bad guy too?"

the puzzles are fine, a bit too content to be inside their little boxes but then what's a better metaphor for liberals

developers are Croatian

So I enjoyed the first Talos Principle. The puzzles were fun headscratchers, not easy but also not too hard. But that's really all I can tell you about it, except for the musings on humanity and impending apocalypse. And you know what? The second one hits the same notes, for better and for worse.

Talos 2 can't be described without first talking about the puzzles. These are the kinds of puzzles that I really excel at: 3D-space-based, heavy on positioning and really make you use the tools at your disposal. For completion, you have to complete 4 zones of three smaller sections of 10 total puzzles per section. And for the most part, the puzzles are very clever and the difficulty has a great curve. Slowing down and spending the time to really concentrate on what your goal is, what tools you have right now, and sometimes working backwards, you can get the answers within a few minutes.

That said, after about 10 of the 12 areas, I think I was about done. Some of the puzzles became a bit convoluted, like I would place a button, but didn't get the feedback of what that button did, or extremely tight positioning of a laser made progress more of a headscratcher of "Wait, but why?" (that puzzle was "Jailbreak", where I finally lost a bit of interest). Again, great puzzles, and there are definitely people out there that will find each a treat, but I personally thought it a bit too many and the game could have benefitted from cutting a few.

The second thing you have talk about with Talos 2 is the graphics. Much improved, with full DLSS and RT on PC. But you know, the first game did just fine without the extra graphical fidelity, and I don't think it added much here, overall. I'm usually a graphic snob, but it wouldn't have bugged me if they hadn't used the extra enhancements.

The sound and music ARE much the same as the previous game though, to the point where the puzzles SFX I think are literally used over again. The music is just not good, at all. For a puzzle game where you're going to sit in thought for long periods of time, I found the music kind of grating after a while, and there just wasn't a ton of variety. I was hearing the same song over and over again, so I ended up turning it off and just became a podcast/Youtube game.

Philosophy is another massive part of the Talos series, and if you hated it in 1, you'll hate it in 2. I didn't really mind it, though it seemed like the writing staff spent more of their time talking about if robots can be considered human than spending time on the plot and dialogue. There are also the requisite audio and text logs for extra flavor, but honestly this is where the game got a little to "up their own ass". A fun extra, but I ended up just skipping them after collecting them.

So, is Talos 2 a good puzzle game? Yes! I would consider it top tier for 3D puzzle games and would love to meet the psychos who come up with these things. Just be warned that there are some annoyances that may or may not be your cup of tea, but if you're willing to sit and give the game the time it needs/deserves, there's a lot of good content here

The most damning thing I can say about The Talos Principle II is that it bored me.

The open-world design led to a lot of running back and forth, with large parts of the game spent in dialogues with characters, as well as reading text from terminals. While the writing can be great, I found a lot of the dialogues to be tiresome and not very interesting, like these characters -- many of whom being hundreds of years old -- could hardly break away from retreading the same ground in meandering dialogues. Thus, the story was less consistently engaging than the succinct narrative in the first game.

The puzzles prove to be the true catalysts of the downfall of The Talos Principle II in my mind, however. Out of the 132 main puzzles, there was precisely one which genuinely had me stumped for a while (Thrust Vector, in case you are curious), and probably around two dozen which I felt were true 'puzzles' and not simple busywork. The lack of difficulty in the puzzles meant that on top of spending lots of time running around between puzzles, solving the puzzles themselves often felt like a waste of time, where nothing was learned and nothing much was gained.

Of note is my mention of 'main puzzles'. You see, outside of the usual puzzles, there are also story setpiece sections which feature the player manipulating puzzle elements, and there are monuments. The setpiece sections are generally of an even lower standard of difficulty than the main puzzles, and are busywork to the point of not actually having any numbers or names to identify them with. The monuments exist in three forms: pulling a lever in a location based on an image, map, or other similar clue; shooting a laser into a receptacle; and finding and chasing a 'sprite' around the map. The first of these hardly requires thinking most of the time, the second is a matter of shooting lasers across the map, requiring some tedious laser connector positioning across long distances, and the third can hardly be called a puzzle by any stretch of the imagination. These stars were so tedious and pointless that I did not bother getting them.

With all of that out of the way, my experience was far from negative on the whole. There are definitely many points where the familiar brilliance of the writing shines through -- I was particularly fond of the interactive text adventures in the game. There are some stand-out music tracks I quite liked. The elephant in the room is, however, the graphical presentation. The level of detail is simply absurd, the performance is great (other than the random crashes, of which I experienced 17 in 25 hours), and many of the visual designs of the elements of the environments are simply stunning; I was frequently reminded of the likes of BLAME! and NaissanceE, brought to life in real-time 3D at an unprecedented level of fidelity.

Overall, I found The Talos Principle II to be severely lacking as a puzzle game, and not as compelling on the merits of its narrative as the first game, but still good and definitely worth its low asking price.

That said, shout out to Croteam for putting multiple direct parallels between Shakespeare's The Tempest and the story and setting of this game into the text, in a way which could go over the average player's head and still make for a full experience. I would recommend reading/watching The Tempest on its own merit, but I have been mulling the parallels over in my head for the past day and it's been good fun.

This is superb, quietly the best puzzle game of 2023, beating both the already excellent Cocoon and Humanity, and the best game of its type that I've played since The Witness, to which it owes a huge debt. The puzzles - almost all of which involve reflecting and refracting light in every conceivable fashion - are ingenious without being overwhelming, and the satisfaction I derived from solving them frequently and involuntarily had me guffawing like a dastardly Bond villain - MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! The entire game is wrapped up in some stunning, megalophobia-inducing scenery that triggered many a Neo.jpg 'Whoa' moment. There's a fantastic ambient soundtrack that has immediately entered my gaming playlist rotation, and the whole thing is topped off with a surprisingly moving, poignant story about life, the universe and (quite literally) everything.

I started playing it on Saturday morning and have ploughed 36 hours into it since then, completely transfixed, which I haven't done with a game for ages. If you like puzzle games, games that make you think, or games with huge and imposing monolithic structures popping up all over the place, making you feel exceedingly tiny and vulnerable, then you must play The Talos Principle II. It's truly awesome (in the original sense of the word).

I wish I was more ashamed to admit that I have finally become the thing I hated. I normally think video games have incredibly shallow takes on philosophy and moral decisions (often boiling down to "must shoot but make sad"), but the Talos Principle games probe and poke at your ideologies in such interesting ways, to the point of making me think "Woah that's kinda deep" on a few occasions. I had to stop and think about how I was going to respond to questions, only to be made to feel like an idiot when the cloud of dust wafts away my arguments like they were silly.

But The Talos Principle games are much more than an interesting philosophical exercise, and it's because of this I believe that it aids the execution of the former. I think TP2 is a perfect sequel. It takes nearly everything about the first game and expands on it.

The choice to add companions beyond a text-adventure friend and Elohim from the sky was genius, and everyone is so well-written and voice-acted that it lets them take you along on their journey and character arc. You really want to consider their own philosophies and points-of-view, and there is not a single character to felt unmotivated in their actions.

The puzzles, while I wish they were more difficult, had mechanics that were distinct from the original. Thematically however, they felt like a perfect evolution, and no puzzle from this game would have felt out-of-place in the first.


Yeah sure the game isn't without its issues. As mentioned I think the puzzles were a little too easy, and the hub worlds, while beautiful, were a little too big/aimless sometimes. I wanted to feel like I'm exploring but trying to find all the collectibles in an area sometimes felt like a chore because of the size. This game has a lot of walking around.

I think the biggest step-down from the first is the removal of the star puzzles and replacing them with the shrines. There were really only 3 or 4 different puzzles duplicated through 24 shrine puzzles, and I would say only half a dozen were genuinely satisfying to solve. The star puzzles were the strongest part of the first game, making you re-evaluate the geometry of the level or solve a puzzle in a new and interesting way. This time it was more brute force the solution by chasing a cloud of dust, or find a part of the level by accident.

There were a few puzzles where I soft-locked myself, and needed to hit the reset button. I always feel like this is a weakness in puzzle design, but I can mostly forgive it here due to the complexity of certain mechanics making it almost impossible for it not to happen sometimes. There were some mechanics I wasn't too keen on (mostly fiddly ones that you needed to wait for or be in a specific position), but these came around infrequently enough to not be a major bother.

The game does run like ass too.


These two games have been incredibly formative for me, shaping my views on video game design, but also broader societal ideas, and honestly I cannot think of any praise higher than that. A must play.

I really LOVE Talos Principle 2, but it was one of the most tiring games I have ever played. 9/10 is good for this game, aside from the absurd playtime and a few weirdly specific puzzles, it is literally flawless and one of the best that this genre has to offer. Yes, I added the finishing sentence of a review to the beginning because the rest of the review isn’t specifically a review. I will ramble about a problem I actually had control over and talk about a valuable lesson I learned as a game designer. It will probably sound extremely stupid to you, so get ready.

I actually have lots to talk about this game, but 24 hours of puzzles completely destroyed my mind to a degree that even thinking about puzzles as a concept seems like an exhausting task. I wanted to talk about how I liked the narrative threads, how beautiful the game looks, how beautiful the soundtrack is and how well the puzzles are made, but sadly whenever I think about this game playtime is one of the main things that comes to my mind.

I adore this game, but 24 hours was WAY too much. It’s not that the game ever bores you, it’s the exact opposite actually. The game never runs out of new mechanics to give you, puzzles never get boring, and story threads and dialogues always keep you fresh. But man, if you want to see every bit of the story, you have to devote your life to this game and solve every puzzle this game has to offer. The main problem with this is that the maximum time I can play this game in a day is two hours because after that I completely run out of steam and even get to a degree where I start to have headaches. I wanted to see the ending of the game, also I wanted to move on to another game, so I played this game in really long sessions and in the end, I was extremely tired. Maybe a good solution would be to play another game with this one that is the opposite in nature, but I feared that I would have abandoned this game after a while. There might have been even more solutions that don’t come to my mind (thank you Talos Principle 2) but pushing through this game was probably the easiest one to do, so I did that. It was a mistake, but I did it anyway and I have no regrets as it taught me a valuable lesson.

This series is weird man. Not in terms of its story, or gameplay, but in terms of playtime. As a game designer, it gave me a valuable lesson in terms of playtime. The first game was also really good, but the puzzles got really, really hard and combined with the long playtime (15 hours) that game was also really tiring, even more than the second game. This game seemingly solved that problem, puzzles weren’t gradually getting harder, there were easier puzzles between harder ones and there were always new mechanics to keep the gameplay fresh (unlike the first game). When I was at the 12-hour mark, I thought to myself that this game solved the main problem of the first one and I probably won’t get tired at the end of this game like I did in the first one. As I progressed through the game, I gradually started to get tired again sadly. The reason is simple; Even if your game is endlessly fun, even if you have the content to support a long playtime, there is always a degree where your game can be too long.

Even though this series tired me, I’m really glad that I played it. I learned a really valuable lesson about playtime that I don’t think I could have had without experiencing and analyzing it by myself. If you are a game designer, definitely play this game. Even if you don’t learn the same lesson as me, I’m pretty sure you will learn about something equally significant.

Talos II offers a lot more story than I anticipated. It's well thought out and offers plenty of moral and philosophical questions. Considering the subject matter I was impressed with how they handled it.

I found the first game tells a better story overall, but this one has a lot more of it and is a lot more ambitious. There is even a robot city of all things.

I find the puzzles in the Talos Principle games to be deeply satisfying. I don't know exactly what it is. I suspect it's something to do with the 3D nature of it, as most puzzle games are 2D, or it may have something to do with the laser beams being put in order that scratches an itch, a feeling that you are constructing the answer. I can't tell.

The game has a lot to say, and I found some issues with the combination of the constant articles and the large spaces. A lot of the story is optional, but I wanted to get into all of it. If you play like that, be prepared for a lot of time away from the puzzling.