I played a few hours of
The Talos Principle 2 and it's possibly the most tasteless game I've ever encountered. I'm not surprised because I knew it was going to be worse than the original (which was already mediocre) before it released just from the trailer and blurb, but it's fascinating to me just how much effort was put into making the game worse.
New additions brought by the sequel ruin it in ways typical of modern high-budget games, with unnecessarily large spaced out worlds, overly detailed graphics, excessive cutscenes, too many NPCs, quest markers, anything you can think of along those lines they probably added to
The Talos Principle 2. This stands out especially because its gameplay is not some sort of open world RPG where these additions could be reasonably argued, it's a pure puzzle game. The new elements are tacked on to the core puzzle mechanics as clumsily as you would naturally assume, it's baffling that anyone could think they improve the game. The city which serves as the main hub area is a large region which is sparsely populated by asinine curios that have no gameplay significance.
Above are a couple of the worthless things you can discover in the "open world". The irony and cat memes feel very cynical. Because I like to explore, I tried to see if I could escape the city somehow, but my time was completely wasted running through large expanses of shrubbery and shallow water. I thought I could at least enter some of the distant buildings, but they were for show. The average player probably goes first to the few nearby structures that are filled with useless NPCs to hear them babble about lore for a bit, then moves on with the story, left with the impression that they
could explore the rest of the world if they wanted to.
The size of each level means that it's necessary to add navigation markers so that the average player doesn't get lost in all the useless terrain. This destroys any sense of exploration because you know you're not going to find anything if there isn't a marker there. You've probably heard this story before.
We have, of course, the dialogue tree thing where you can say many things that do not matter (sometimes you get up to 8 choices, wow) and hear lazily written babble replies that do not matter.
Every time you discover something new in the world after solving a puzzle, your party members speak unskippably in your ear or even call a video conference to raise the most annoyingly obvious questions about things that you would much rather be allowed to discover on your own.
"Wow, did you see that giant laser you just fired at the pyramid? I wonder who built this and why? Does it have some kind of power source? New Quest: Activate Towers 1/3". This obliterates the mysterious mood the original (relatively solitary)
Talos was able to create at times. It's so incompetently done too, for instance an NPC commented on a structure that didn't look especially notable and I would have otherwise ignored, to the effect of "that's weird, maybe we can come back to this later", basically telling the player that there was a "secret" at this location. A friend described this as like the game was designed for people with no inner monologue. It's kind of amusing how the NPCs are supposed to be helping you in the story, but you're the one solving all the puzzles while they take partial credit by inserting themselves as soon as you make any discovery.
Enjoying the writing or story is an admission that one is at least as stupid as the Croatian dev team. The writing is objectively horrible. Like most nations outside the Anglosphere I imagine Croatians lag behind us culturally, so the plot is filled with ridiculous reddit-tier pseudointellectualism "about" philosophy, that is immediately transparent as such to anyone who is not a midwit. Unlike most of what I've discussed so far, this is was probably about as true of the first game as it is of the second:
"Several texts discuss or are written by the fictional Straton of Stageira, a materialist Greek philosopher who in 260 BC pondered the nature of the mythical automaton Talos. Straton introduced the titular Talos Principle, arguing that since Talos was a machine, yet still conscious, humans may also merely be conscious biological machines, who are nothing but the sum of their physical parts." Wow,
so deep.
The game is visually appealing from afar, but ugly up close. I took the above screenshot a minute after starting the game. It suffers terminally from fern/rubble/shrub cancer. HD textures and harsh lighting make everything look like an excessively detailed and contrasting mess. I played the original
The Talos Principle shortly after replaying
The Witness, and the difference was jarring. The first zone of the original has a particularly disgusting brick texture.
The actual puzzles are generally good and I'll probably keep playing it for this reason alone, I just think the game is utterly shit in every other respect.
The Talos Principle 2 adds some new puzzle mechanics that are pretty interesting, and I find the puzzles genuinely challenging even though the rest of the game is superficial. It seems like the meta puzzles from the original may possibly not exist in the sequel, and are replaced by plainly visible bonus levels, but I can't know that for sure yet. This would be disappointing.
This sequel really does nothing right and is only passable in ways that were unchanged from the original, so how does it have Overwhelmingly Positive ratings on Steam? There are some obvious answers, but I struck on one interesting idea while meditating on my hatred of this game. On
The Talos Principle 2's Steam page is the following image:
This primes the normalfaggot gamer to buy the game and leave a good review in accordance with the majority. Knowing that the game received good reviews might actually increase enjoyment of the game, similar to how a meal might taste better after the chef describes it. Isn't it also interesting that the image, embedded in the Steam description, contains the Steam review score? The developers clearly believe communicating this is important enough to update the description after the game's release on Steam. It's a kind of aesthetic speculation, and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think a similar principle also applies to other aspects of the game.
The Talos Principle 2 shows you a cutscene of a beautiful vista as you ride the elevator, promising you that you can explore it. Characters interact with the player immediately in an attempt to impart an initial impression of a grand and compelling story. The contents of the story and lore are filled with signals that give the impression of philosophical sophistication. The game advertises itself to you.
These aesthetics never live up to their promises, but that doesn't actually matter. If a tasteless retard is sufficiently captivated by the aesthetic, they won't be able to admit to themselves that they were tricked 20 hours in. Especially not if their friends are also tasteless retards who publicly praise the game. They will "genuinely" enjoy the rest of the game despite it being shit because they fell for the aesthetic confidence tricks in the promotional material and first hour of the game. I think this effect underlies a lot of these design trends seen in modern AAA games, which
The Talos Principle 2 aped even though they didn't mesh with the gameplay at all. The average normalfaggot gamer cares only about first impressions, if you can mold their all-too-malleable mind into thinking your game is vast and deep and intriguing they will spend 100 hours finding every collectible. Even when the masses seem to form a negative consensus (e.g. Starfield), it's just speculative turbulence and gamers aren't really thinking for themselves any more than they are when they change their opinions to align with positive reviews.