And hitting "H" for a third-person perspective reveals a big surprise of who you’re playing as.Īnd that's where the philosophy comes in. The narrating voice overhead here is Elohim (essentially Hebrew for "god"), and he's basically just around to tell you that you'll gain everlasting life if you finish all the puzzles, create a sense of forbidden mystery around a big central tower, and suggest the entire world around you is a sham. It happens often, and Talos Principle maintains that essential "Aha!" factor for hours, partly because there are so many gadgets to toy with and combine in interesting ways, although some repetition slips in by the end. Such moments feel like completing the Triforce in a Zelda game, and this was just one puzzle out of around 120. I then reconfigured my jammers and connectors to work my way back to the cube, dumped it on the trigger panel, and claimed the tetromino that was my goal. I then doubly disabled one of the open force fields with the jammer, and then popped a new cube on a spring before another fan, which sent the cube flying over the wall into the next room with another trigger. I stripped the head off the disabled fan, then used a laser connector to trigger another pair of doorways by shooting out three beams.
![the talos principle a-1 star the talos principle a-1 star](https://images.pushsquare.com/screenshots/73065/large.jpg)
In one puzzle alone, I used to block to disable a force field by setting it on a trigger, after which I took a jammer to disable the fan that was blowing me back down one particular corridor. The Talos Principle's first-person perspective puzzles differ from Portal's with their emphasis on deliberate thinking rather than action and speed. Want a real challenge? Go for the puzzles that reward stars. It eases you into the tough parts (perhaps too gently, as the going is a tad too easy early on), but in time it reaches a pitch of near-orchestral magnitude. It doesn't introduce any nifty, novel gimmicks of its own in the vein of Portal's portal gun, but it positively nails using conventional elements like blocks, signal jammers, laser connections, motion-recording devices, and even turrets to complete each puzzle. While developer Croteam handles both elements well, they don't complement each other as well as they probably should.
![the talos principle a-1 star the talos principle a-1 star](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/55D8SIkgxpo/maxresdefault.jpg)
It's a game I found myself thinking about more often the longer I'm away from it, and I'm surprised that it's the non-puzzle elements that stick with me the most. (No, it doesn't have anything to do with the man-god of Skyrim.) Barely a second goes by when it doesn't encourage you to either stretch the limits of your mind with some brutally tough but rewarding puzzles or to consider the nature of humanity and the conundrums of empiricist philosophy. The Talos Principle, much as its name suggests, is a thinker's game.