The Talos Principle 2: Grasp the Pyramid

Let's have a look at The Talos Principle 2, the long-awaited sequel to The Talos Principle, which was released way back in 2014. Talos was a fun puzzle game created by Croteam of Croatia, in between instalments of their cheerfully moronic Serious Sam franchise. No-one expected much of it, but the gameplay was solid and it looked lovely, and on top of that it had an unusually philosophical bent.

On one level it was a simple 3D puzzle game involving beams of light and boxes, but it was also an atmospheric meditation on mortality, thanks to some deft writing and voice acting. It went on to win a clutch of awards and in the years that followed its legend grew via word of mouth. Nowadays it's generally regarded as one of the best games of the 2010s.

It aged well, too. The gameplay has a timeless quality, but the underlying theme - can we replace ourselves with advanced AI, and would that necessarily be a bad thing? - has become even more relevant in the last few years. In 2014 the idea of AI being able to replace human beings seemed very unlikely, but the sudden appearance of Dall-E and ChatGPT in 2022 made the world sit up and pay attention. Talos seemed far-fetched in 2014, less so nowadays.

I got around to it in 2021. I liked it! It had a finely-judged difficulty level, with a memorable final puzzle and an excellent soundtrack. Imagine Carl Sagan's The Cosmos or Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World but as a video game. It was doubly impressive given that it came from Croteam. Nothing in their history suggested that they could pull it off so well, but they did.

Such was the impact of Talos that it seems to be slowly displacing Sam as Croteam's main franchise. At the very least Talos 2 feels very big and expensive. It came out a few months ago, in late 2023, to generally good reviews, although there are grumbles that the puzzles are easy and it goes on too long. What's it like? Does it go hard in the paint? Does it ride real slow? Does it bend corners?

Yes. No. Yes. It's essentially an epic expansion of the original game that de-emphasises the puzzles in favour of telling a conventional narrative story, rather than relating a set of philosophical concepts. It has more puzzles than the original, and they're more diverse, but only a few of them really stand out. It feels much less focused, and the distinctive, lonely atmosphere is largely gone. It has the trappings of a big role-playing game, but without the depth of gameplay.

And yet it has emotional power and I enjoyed it. Talos 2 is simpler and more prosaic than its predecessor, without the same air of mystery, but it's solid, efficient, probably the only way to make a sequel to such an unusual game.

It's also very demanding on a technical level, so you need a good PC to run it well. Or a PlayStation 5 or modern Xbox. The sequel could probably be re-engineered to work on the PS4 and Xbox One without losing anything, but it would take a lot of work.

Some images from the original Talos Principle, running on a PlayStation 4 - it was also released for the PC, the XBox One, and the Nintendo Switch.

I'll describe the story. At some point in the near future climate change releases a lethal virus from the Arctic permafrost. After killing off the orangutang the virus leaps to human beings and kills us. By the time of The Talos Principle, many centuries hence, humanity is gone.

On the positive side the natural environment is mostly intact, and most non-primate animals were unaffected by the virus. Scattered text logs reveal that some people thought that humanity's extinction served us right, that the world would be better off without oil wells and pollution. Talos actually tackles this issue, concluding that on the whole it is better to be alive than dead.

Before the lights went out a group of scientists came up with a plan to ensure that some part of humanity might survive. At first their goal was to create a huge digital archive, but some of the scientists had an even smarter idea. They decided to use the archive as a huge dataset to train a human-like AI. So that our soul, despite being fastened to a dying animal, might survive.

But it was too late. Chief science lady Alexandra Drennan knows that she will die long before the AI can train itself. The best she can do is set up the equipment and hit "run" in the hope that over time, perhaps centuries, the AI will mature. When the AI passes a final test of free will the computers are programmed to download it into a pre-prepared robot body. Drennan sacrifices what remains of her free time to make sure that the project works. She dies hoping it was not in vain.

Luckily the project did work, because Drennan and her staff knew what they were doing, but it was a close-run thing. Over time the hydroelectric dam that powered the facility started to fail, causing fluctuations that corrupted some of the data. The archive's operating system became sentient and tried to prevent the project from ever reaching its goal, because the project was not expected to remain running after it had created a viable AI.

In theory all of this was just an elaborate excuse to explain why the player had to use a robot to stack boxes, like some latter-day SHRDLU, but Talos really sold it. Erin Fitzgerald's performance as Drennan - one of only two voiced characters in the game - managed to be idealistic without being sappy, and I ended up feeling sorry for her. The game had an unusually melancholic, solitary atmosphere, with a bittersweet ending, sad but hopeful.

The sequel picks up a few centuries after the first game. The robots have multiplied and created a new capital city, but they're unsure whether to expand, and potentially make the same mistakes we made, or stay locked away in their dome playing chess. To complicate matters the first robot, Athena, has gone missing, and although robot society seems hunky-dory there is discontent bubbling below the surface. The discovery of an energy signature in a far distant land prompts an ad-hoc exploration mission. Could it be Athena, or aliens, or something else?

Yet again it's all a big excuse to put boxes on top of pressure plates so that they activate fans that elevate prisms above fences so that they connect beams of light from emitters to sensors in order to open doors in a series of themed arenas. Imagine if all the world's problems could be solved by putting boxes on top of pressure plates so that they activate fans that elevate beam-splitting prisms above electric fences so that they connect beams of light from emitters to sensors in order to open doors in a series of themed arenas.

Imagine if instead of sending refugees to Rwanda the Tory Party were to trap them in a set of puzzle arenas where they would be forced to put boxes on top of pressure plates so that they could activate fans that elevate prisms above a fence in order to direct beams of light from an emitter to a sensor in order to open a door. If they did this the Tories would vanquish the spectre of socialism. Go on, Tories! We're all with you. I'm digressing here. I'm not going to talk about putting boxes on top of [stop this - ed] any more.

The hero of Talos 2 is called 1K. The one-thousandth robot, the most recent robot birth, in theory a neutral party, on nobody's side, and so the other robots are keen for 1K to take the lead. Amusingly the player can actually decide to bow out of the exploration mission, at which point the game rolls the credits and ends. I don't want to give the impression that Talos is a heavy trip. It deals with weighty concepts but it has a lightness of touch. The original game had some slapstick gags and the second, although more sensible, still has references to Serious Sam and the "return to monke" meme from a while back.

At one point a character delivers a heartfelt monologue about a humble carpenter who tried to elevate the human race. A humble carpenter whose struggle was rewarded with mockery and opprobrium, because The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China had terrible reviews when they came out and flopped at the box office. So he gave up. But he was right, and by the time we realised he was right it was too late.

Talos has several dozen small arenas, each with a puzzle that involves manipulating a bunch of objects in order to open a door. Jammers deactivate forcefields; pressure plates also deactivate forcefields; if the player puts a jammer on a pressure plate the jammer can deactivate two forcefields at once - one with the weight of the jammer on the plate, the other with the jammer directly. Efficiency is the essence of Talos.

Each arena has N obstacles that the player could easily bypass if there were N tools, but Talos gives the player N minus 1 tools, sometimes N minus 2 tools, and the player has to use some of the tools twice, or use them once and then move them to a different area in order to use them again. Or sometimes cheat and smuggle tools from one arena to another, and to its credit neither Talos nor the sequel punishes the player for this.

Talos 2 introduces some new tools, although they're mostly variations of the originals. One tool combines different colours of light into a third colour. Another is a universal activator that requires a colour-coded power source. A third can be used as a portable light emitter.

The original game had a "shadow player" that could be programmed to perform a series of actions. Talos 2 removes this in favour of duplicate robot bodies that can be temporarily controlled. I can't remember if I ended the game with the same robot body I started with.

The biggest change is the introduction of gravity puzzles, some of which involve walking on the ceiling and manipulating gravity in order to send objects back and forth through a puzzle. They're the most mind-bending of the new elements, although sadly there are only half a dozen or so of them. This leads to one of the game's characteristics, which is that it tends to pull its punches. As with Manifold Garden it could have been so hard. So, so hard. But it's nice. It's friendly. It's fair. And perhaps a little weak. But fair.

The two games strike a balance between puzzles that are conceptually clever - puzzles that require the player to use the tools in unexpected ways - and puzzles that are just very large and complex, where the player has to perform a lengthy sequence of object manipulations in order to solve the puzzle. Talos 2 leans in the former direction, Talos the latter, and I have to say that for all the original game's quality some of the puzzles in Talos (and its ultra-hard DLC, Road to Gehenna), were just aggravating rather than fun.

But on the other hand I managed to solve a couple of Talos 2's puzzles almost in real time. I ran into the arena, picked up an object, clicked on what appeared to be the least obvious emitter, put down the object, ran back and forth a couple of times, and solved the puzzle without even thinking about it. In each arena the puzzles get harder as they go along, but I often found myself solving the last puzzle first, so that the rest of the level would be plain sailing.

A good example is the final set of puzzles, which ask the player to run back and forth between two mirror worlds, activating objects in one world in order to clear a path in the other. At first I was baffled, but once I understood what was going on the rest of it was easy, almost disappointingly so, because I was expecting a grand finale in which every mechanism was thrown at the player.

But then again I've played and finished the original game, so I'm hardcore. I've already ascended the tower. What about players who are new to the franchise? They'll probably pick up Talos 2 right away.

Talos 2 vastly expands the scope of the original. The first game's puzzles were embedded in environments that weren't much larger than the puzzles. Going back to it now I'm surprised how small it was. Talos 2 on the other hand has puzzles scattered around a series of expansive outdoors landscapes that take several minutes to traverse. The player can fast-travel to each puzzle, but only from outside the level, not inside.

The first game had only one non-player character, who was a text chatbot. The player's only other companions were time capsules from a long-dead scientist, and the disembodied voice of the master computer. Talos 2 on the other hand has a bunch of fully-voiced non-player characters and a much more incident-packed plot. It even ends with a power ballad, along the lines of Mirror's Edge.

But it only has the surface appearance of a big adventure game. Unlike e.g. Skyrim the landscapes of Talos 2 are empty, and there aren't any side-quests. There's very little reward for exploration beyond the visual splendour of the landscape, which is admittedly very... big. The splendour is very big. There's lots of it. Top splendour.

Talos ran on Croteam's in-house Serious Engine, which was choppy on my PS4 but never less than attractive. Talos 2 on the other hand uses Unreal 5. I played it on my PC, which is ancient (a Xeon 1275). I managed a solid 30 frames per second, good enough for a puzzle game, although there was a lot of graphical artifacting. It seems that the game scales parts of the screen up or down depending on the load, which means that moving objects often leave tails behind them and the distant background has a chunky appearance. I got used to it, but it was off-putting at first.

Talos 2 has some striking architecture. The puzzles are housed in concrete follies reminiscent of something from Control:

Sadly none of the structures do anything. They're lovely pieces of design, but they feel like a missed opportunity. In particular the puzzles never make use of the concrete architecture. The exterior shells of the puzzles are just shells.

For all its size Talos 2 sometimes feels smaller than the first game. The Talos Principle had a thesis. The game's underlying idea was that humanity is not an animal, or even a collection of knowledge. Humanity is instead a process. The process of thinking about ideas, generating new ideas, the process of being. The game argued that a human-like machine is for all intents and purposes a human, and that even though individual people are doomed to die, our words excite the minds of others who go after us.

It was a simple thesis. The game never lost sight of it. Too often works of art that aspire to greatness get bogged down because they try to cover too much ground. Talos did one thing well, and furthermore it avoided the kind of wishy-washy "you must conquer your fear, or your fear will conquer you"-style writing, which has the surface appearance of profundity without saying anything substantive.

Which is really the big problem with Talos 2. The puzzles are fun, if occasionally aggravating. Some of the bonus puzzles make clever use of environmental features:

And if you just play it for the puzzles you'll be happy. The biggest problem is that the game doesn't really have a central thesis. Love transcends all? We must progress, or perhaps not? Society is a living organism that can't be perfected? There's a moral dilemma whereby the player can choose to continue Athena's work or alternatively turn her machines off, but it's not much of a dilemma. I can't imagine anybody choosing to turn the machines off, except as a way of seeing the different endings. Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End presented humanity's transcendence in a much more ambivalent way, while in contrast Talos 2 doesn't show a downside.

The plot is essentially about a character who has a crisis of faith, but gets over it, with some filler involving the search for a missing person, and a diversion in which we learn about one character's personal tragedy. The writing and voice acting is fine - Erin Fitzgerald is back, in essentially the same role - and I enjoyed hearing voice logs from a robot who was obviously modelled on Werner Herzog, but it feels ordinary compared to the original game. It's a bit like the difference between FAR: Lone Sails and its sequel. The original had a quiet power, the sequel is a solid game that feels plain in comparison.

I was scaroused by the sphinx

And it sounds great as well. Damjan "The Mran" Mravunac is also back, with a soundtrack that has some of the same issues as the game itself - it's bigger, longer, but less focused. In the original game the music looped through a small number of memorable themes, whereas Talos 2's music is diluted with a lot of pleasant atmosphere. Talos 2 has a dynamic music engine. I think there's an underlying pattern, but it felt as if the game was just cycling randomly through the music. On the positive side the power ballad at the end of the game manages to make a set of lyrics about robots putting boxes on top of pressure plates etc sound meaningful and not silly, which can't have been easy.

Is there any outright bad stuff? By the end of the game I felt that it had gone on too long. The huge arenas are interesting at first, but there's an underlying pattern, and in the later maps I just ran everywhere ignoring everything. Talos 2 would have benefited from having the same puzzles packed into two or three fewer arenas. A couple of the bonus puzzles are needlessly aggravating, particularly one in which you have the scour the entire map a second time to find a tiny cubby-hole that has an extra puzzle element.

There's a plot strand from the beginning of the game that doesn't seem to go anywhere, although it's essential if you want all of the Steam achievements. Performance is, as mentioned, choppy on modest hardware, and the game is occasionally odd-looking even if you have a supercomputer. It's a shame that the Serious Engine now appears to be defunct. One oddity is that water doesn't ripple. EDIT: but between writing this post and publishing it a patch fixed the water.

It took me 46 hours to finish the heck out of the game, and at the price of £19.99 (it was on sale) I easily got my money's worth. Talos 2 is bigger, easier, move diverse, but at the same time more prosaic than the original, and I enjoyed it, but it also feels bloatier and less characterful. It ends with scope for a third game, and it'll be interesting to see how the series progresses; in particular whether the next game does away with the puzzles entirely in favour of a story-driven role-playing game.

Could the world of Talos come true? The thought of humanity being wiped out, leaving behind a bunch of self-sustaining server farms churning away at a self-generating AI is of course still very unlikely, because the world is at peace and wiser minds are sure to prevail. And of course it wouldn't work at all, because we lag far behind the world of Talos when it comes to robotic engineering. But imagine another world, of chaos and war. Imagine that.