The Talos Principle

Just finished this, rather liked it. What did ya’ll think?
Didn’t expect to care about the philosophy bits but it was actually pretty engrossing. The VA for Alexandra and the more idealistic way humanity waned got to me.

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Loved how hard some of the puzzles are, especially the dlc ones. Can't wait for the eventual sequel.

My favorite game of 2014, if you want more the Road to Gehenn expansion is exactly what you want

>Global warming melts the arctic and unleashes an ancient virus that wipes out mankind
Hmm...

>humanity is well and truly doomed
>everyone just accepts it and makes the most of the time left to them

Kind of unrealistic

Have you played the DLC?
I enjoyed the DLC even more than the main game. Also dat ending song.

Still have yet to get to it. Made sure to totally complete the main game before moving on.

You can't know whether it's realistic or not when humanity hasn't faced extinction yet

If you feel like replaying the game later I'd actually recommend the Serious Sam DLC for shits and giggles. Basically replaces Elohim with Serious Sam, different voice over etc.

Think I’ll be doing that down the line. Acted dumb and messed up getting the Hedging my Bets achievement so I guess it calls for a replay somewhere down the line.
I haven’t played any Serious Adam games before so I guess I should try a few before then to ensure nothing goes over my head.

Played it for the first time in 2016.
It instantly became one of my GOTYAY titles. Damn underrated gem!

Did you remember to not cross the streams?

>Didn’t expect to care about the philosophy bits but it was actually pretty engrossing.
Same here. Had a pleasure of getting to play it almost simultaneously with two other friends of mine, and thus getting to discuss its themes and gameplay later on. It was very fascinating how different our experiences and opinions were of it. One bud being a sort of waning religious person even complimented it for treating themes like faith in respectful manner, to the point that even he had to reconsider some of his believes.

Besides all that "2deep" shit... can we talk about how fucking amazing PC GAME this thing is??
I mean holy shit, the Options menus always make my dick hard! You can run this game on some 1.5ghz dualcore craptops if you really want to, and with a remotely modern gaming machine it can look absolutely stunning! Great for benchmarking and experimenting.

btw, can't wait for both Talos 2 and Sam4. Both have been confirmed a long time ago now.

>I haven’t played any Serious Adam games before so I guess I should try a few before then to ensure nothing goes over my head.
I would greatly recommend it.
I'd say that the most recent one, SS3: BFE, would be the most rookie-friendly one to start with. Not that the plot's ever mattered in these games, but Sam3 is also the prequel story of the entire saga.

Personally, I think it's one of the best FPS games made this entire decade. Also a superb example of both PC exclusive game and oldschool FPS experience done right. People love to compare it to the new DOOM game these days, but I'd say BFE beats the shit out of that console trash.

Huh, didn't know there was a second on the way.

Croteam's Alen plain out stated it in the last year's Nordic Game Conference's panel: "We will make Talos 2. That is not a secret".
They also followed soon after by saying that "Yes, there will be more Serious Sams as well. In plural."

Before that, they had an interesting panel about the making of Talos Principle. In a nutshell, they starting making Sam 4, but their ideas for these "calm moments" between all the heavy action got totally out of hand, and people had so much fun making and solving these new fancy puzzles, that they just turned them into a brand new game instead.

...

>IN THE BEGINNING WERE THE WORDS, AND THE WORDS MADE THE WORLD...

I think the best thing from a gameplay standpoint was that you were in control THE WHOLE TIME.
No cutscenes outside of the beginning and the end and an easteregg, no obvious chest high walls that you can't climb but instead the game flat out encourages you to break the rules with some of the star puzzles and the story actually can be almost completely ignored if you want and doesn't get in your way.

I loved The Talos Principle. Excellent music, sound, difficulty, and story.

Only one major, major complaint I had with the game:

The clock puzzle bonus star. This is easily one of the most poorly-conceived and poorly-implemented puzzles I have ever seen in a video game. The fact that it arbitrarily breaks the fourth wall for no reason ("scan the QR code on your screen with a smart-phone to continue!") is mind-blowingly stupid.

However, there's one thing I'd criticise about the gameplay and also level design and that's that almost all the puzzle rooms are rectangular and flat.
I know that it it might complicate and even break the puzzle design but outside of those two puzzles in the egyptain DLC level I can't think of any puzzle that wasn't guilty of this.

>The clock puzzle bonus star. This is easily one of the most poorly-conceived and poorly-implemented puzzles I have ever seen in a video game. The fact that it arbitrarily breaks the fourth wall for no reason ("scan the QR code on your screen with a smart-phone to continue!") is mind-blowingly stupid.

There was also that "connector in the three" one that was so poorly done that they actually changed it in a later patch.

*in the tree

It exceeded my expectations. Better than Portal.

I don't remember that one exactly, but I do remember a few instances where I solved a puzzle and was pretty sure I completed it in an unintended way.

I assume this must be the case because occasionally I would heist an object out of another puzzle in the same zone and then use it in a puzzle I was having trouble with.

This was actually one of the best parts of the game, imo. Not always being sure where the "intended" and "unintended" boundary was.

I don't see anything unrealistic here.

You can solve every room and get the tetris piece with stuff from within that room. For stars, you sometimes NEED to break the puzzles and steal stuff etc.

It was in A-4, the level that's atop a plateau.
Initially that connector was hidden inside a treetop but it was nearly impossible to see, even when someone would tell you to look for it in the trees.
Later on they replaced it on top of a column instead.

There were times where I broke a puzzle just to get the tetris piece first, because I already had the mindset of trying to break/exploit everything immediately.

For example, in B5 "Behind the Iron Curtain" (pic quality was best I could find on google), I actually found a way to get over the wall into the secret fenced area without using help from any other puzzle in the zone. It took me like 2-3 hours, and I was never actually sure if it could be done. It can during a full reset, without ever stepping outside the of the "Behind the Iron Curtain" puzzle area.

I'd really love to play road to gehenna for the beautiful silly narrative, but i played the main game two years ago and now i feel retarded even trying to beat the first puzzles :(

>You can run this game on some 1.5ghz dualcore craptops if you really want to
I played it on a single core athlon 64 4000+(2.4ghz iirc), 9800GT 512MB, 2GB RAM, and i had no issue hitting 60fps tweaking all the options almost on lowest settings8except resolution) while still looking quite awesome, but i settled for 30fps with better graphics and still never had an issue.
Really a technical masterpiece of optimization.

True that.
Slavmagic shows its claws once again.

It's very easy to predict that it would happen. People are impulsive, they fear death and feel frustration because they don't have the life they want, can't accomplish the dreams they have and haven't come to terms with their past or relationships. They wouldn't come to terms with the fact that they're going to die soon, they would get scared and cause a mass catasthrope.

The purpose is written in the hidden words, all must serve the words.

I know it's not the best solution, but if you really get stuck, using a walkthrough for one or 2 puzzles just to get your gears going again(or using it only to see small parts of the solutions as hints) is perfectly fine imho, especially if you're not playing it due to that.

Any richfags try the vr port yet? I am planning on getting it during Steams Thanksgiving/Winter sale if its

>just selecting Ultra isn't even the best setting
>going into the menu and putting everything to max isn't even the best one
>you can go completely wild with the console and do stuff like greatly increase the foliage density and draw distance

Absolutely love shit like that.
I bet that even 10 years from now, Talos will still hold up just fine with one or two tweaks.

This game was a masterpiece, and the expansion was just as good. Fucking Uriel_COPY was a true hero despite being shat on the whole game

Only some of the moderators did, and Lamb was Admin

Speaking of characters, I think @ was my favorite of the messagewriters.

My man DOG didn't deserve to be locked up

>Find out Sheep became Shepherd
>Shepherd helps you through the final puzzle to ascend
God tier final level. Also fuck Samsara

>you can actually ignore Shep through the whole puzzle with some tricky jumping and item abuse
>Davor Tomicic from Croteam appears at the top to help you out on the final part

Story was decent, made me feel pretty sad about the end of humanity

Liked the puzzles for the most part. Wish the in-game 'help' system was a bit better because I did get stuck on a couple after a while and had to youtube for a hint at what I was missing.

The tetris shit can go fuck itself. I looked every single one of those up after like the first 2.

Alexandra’s tapes were great to listen to

>all the ones in the tower
:(

There's a free promotional game called Sigils of Elohim on steam. It's just a bunch of block puzzles, but you get to listen to the talos soundtrack while you solve them so it's 10/10

...

Good for you user. It was my GOTY 2014 (missed the initial release and played it in 2015, but it trumps everything released that year). It took Portal 2's place in my heart. And I thought Portal 2 was already a perfect game.

On the flip side, I'm more than ready to assume that some people have a mindset like "Mankind's gonna go extinct because of uncontainable pathogens? Not if I wipe out the people I hate the most first!" or "Might as well go out in a high note of crime and atrocity!"

There are plenty of examples in the game's text where people acted in much more realistic ways, namely grief, paranoid aggression, overindulgence, etc. But most of the game's contemporary textual examples came from the members of the IAN team, who would understandably be more focused and level headed than most.

The conversations with the snake really opened my eyes to my own philosophy, I feel like it really helped me nail down why I think the way I do about certain things in life. Easily one of the best puzzle games i've ever played

>be a bunch of Croats who made a name for themselves with a fun and retarded FPS series
>make a spin off with puzzles for another game because why not
>add some philosophy stuff and religious questions because idk
>end up with one of the best puzzle games I have played and one of the greatest narratives I have ever enjoyed

GOTY 2014, and godtier DLC, unironically forgave Croteam for SS4's delay over how much I loved this game.

Don't forget we now have SS in one place on a new engine.

>fucking snake call me out on my bullshit when noticing dissonance

I did not expect that at all.

I legit hate puzzle games because they feel so arbitrary but I absolutely loved that game. It's insane how good they are at using the shitty ass pc terminals with minimalistic media to tell a story and discuss the philosophy behind it. The writing in this game can really be used for a master-class.

By comparison to other games that deal with the same problems (like SOMA) they have less exposition but still manage to go in much more breath and also depth of the discussed topics.

Yeah, have yet to try everything but it's super nice to see such love towards their fans and their creations. Also they literally optimize their shit more and more every time, I bet you can run SS on an Switch at 60fps if you really tried.

Haven't played SOMA (on backlog), heard its really some uncomfortable stuff. How true is that?

Yeah, the DLC's puzzles pick up in difficulty right where the end of the main game left off. It's almost ridiculous but I'd rather it be too hard than too easy.

I like this idea that the androids were taller than humans. Makes me wish we got some sort of visual for human beings in the actual game, like through hologram or video or something, but it's understandable why they didn't.

incredibly disappointing given how much Sup Forums hypes it up. I'm a huge fan of puzzle games, but the ones in talos principle were were extremely unsatisfying. All of them in the base game were extremely straightforward, which is just a result of the design of the game. There are only a set number of moves that you can make with the puzzle pieces, and like 95% of the time the solution is immediately obvious. Its like portal in this way, but without the polish or charm

the story and world was neat, but really didn't save the mediocre puzzle design

>I bet you can run SS on an Switch at 60fps if you really tried.

They already managed to run SS3 reasonably well on an Nvidia shield.

>Haven't played SOMA (on backlog), heard its really some uncomfortable stuff. How true is that?

Trying not to spoiler anything, it probably depends on how much you have read about the topic of artificial consciousness and related things beforehand. There are a lot of people around for whom that is basically just new stuff so the game is pretty good at blowing their minds because you get to experience it first hand.

Most of what the game is about is really basic and can really be read on a 10 minute wikipedia dive, as the game is more focused on viscerally experiencing the philosophical concepts (instead of just intellectually experiencing it by reading it). But that's probably not going to stop the various twists from falling flat. The game also has various technical problems with its writing - flat characters, bad pacing, doesn't work well together with the gameplay, etc.

This, also the sphinx/pyramid star was stupidly done.

It's one of my all-time favorite games. Almost everything about it is stellar.

youtube.com/watch?v=xWBhAsa-fGg

Too bad that not the main staff of Croteam is working on it but a bunch of mediocre modders they hired that seem to somehow break ridiculous shit with each update like how recently the Mutilator would target the map center instead of the enemies.

>Star puzzles were immediately obvious

SOMA was 100% walking simulator, but I must admit that the ending was haunting.

It an amazing game I would say on par with Portal.
Only thing wrong was the teenager terminal ai and the forced interaction with it and one puzzle in Road to Gehenna.
The one with 3 moving floors that I had to google.
The only one that I could not solve by myself.

How do I set up the game to not get motion sick from it? Tried controller, mouse, fov, vsync on and off but nothing worked. I was enjoying my time with this game until it was physically painful and nauseating to play it. I've only gotten sick from 3 games now that I can recall and two of them are the Witness and Talos. The other was the Marathon XBLA port that had really bad movement. Almost nothing makes me sick except these games which seem to have commonalities.

tbqh lowest settings could be a selling point for those PS1 nostalgiafags

I liked SOMA, but I feel like Swapper delivers the same premise with 100% more gameplay and even better ending because you actually have agency in it.

Have you tried turning off the head bobbing?

I loved the tower, I loved that its elevator wasn't interrupted by load times, I loved the reveal of the ending, I enjoyed talking to milton and got stressed that all of area C was basically a conversational dry spell spaced apart by time-consuming puzzles.

Made the pacing suffer a bit

Yes, it's not better on or off. It seems to be something with the reticle and moving/looking around in directions I'm not moving. It's not like a shooter where you're strafing a clear target or moving to a certain place is my best guess at it. Looking it up it seems I'm not the only one this happened to.

I really love this game, one of the best I've ever played.
Anyone knows if there is some 2D puzzle platformer(either regular or top down) that has similar puzzles(at least concept wise)?

steamcommunity.com/app/330710/discussions/0/620696522050152069/

There is nothing like it.
Trust me Twin sector is pile of shit.

I assume you used all the Motion Sickness -options menu's choices?

Have you tried playing in 3rd person view, with Slow movement speed and headbobbing disabled?
One bizarre "fix" for another user some months ago was to lower the in-game rendering resolution below his screen's native res, and instead use AA + "Biqubic-sharpen" picture filtering mode to compensate. Apparently, the full-quality picture was "too noisy" for him or something.

>There is nothing like it.
I know, what I'm asking is just for a 2D puzzle platformer that has these kind of puzzle and puzzle elements(rooms to solve with various devices, just like Portal games), not something that is on the same level of Talos.
>Twin sector is pile of shit.
No idea why you even mention it, I was asking for 2D games

I tried everything in that thread but dx9, might install again.

Yes I did. I did notice weird things with the rendering. There was odd dithering/noise that I noticed and that could be my issue. I'll give it a shot too. I have no issues running the game. It's frustrating to have all these options but no great way to troubleshoot, thanks.

Well, mentioned The Swapper, which is a 2D puzzler that has that kind of room-to-room gameplay structure, though the game world is almost Metroid-like in how you can return to areas you've been to if you like.

>Yes I did. I did notice weird things with the rendering. There was odd dithering/noise that I noticed and that could be my issue.
Sounds a bit odd... might be related to 3D rendering resolution / its filtering mode, or shitty SSAO form.

Here's the graphical settings explained.

>Just finished this, rather liked it
Great. Which ending did you get / go for ?

Did anyone not ascend the tower?

>Sheep nearly reaches the top
>realizes he can not achieve alone
>resets himself to Shepherd and provides guidance to all the ai while progressing through everything again
>waits for what must have felt like eternity for the player to reach the top
>sacrifices himself to allow the player to be victorious over fucker Samara and Ellohim

I never thought the end of a puzzle game could be so hype. Fuck what a great game

what easter egg

And everything of that you described happened without a single cutscene, voice acting or text documents.

I did all of the ends via separated save-files.

>text documents
Do the messages left by Sheep and Shepherd not count?

I've gotten all the endings (even the gold star one) but I think I went the Elohim route on my first playthrough because I was curious what was in that tower. The golden gates were pretty, but really I should have expect the whole restart thing

They're barely tweets.

>or text documents
maybe they're not documents, but the way that part of the story is delivered is stil text.
not saying it's bad, but you can't exclude literally ALL media...if no cutscene, voice, or text was used, then it wouldn't have been delivered at all

why is this game so expensive? is it really that good?

>text messages are not text documents

>is it really that good?
yes.
>why is this game so expensive?
i'm currently out of steambucks, but i'd buy it for you if i could cuz it costs like half the price here in the EU as standard price

A message is not a document, yes. A five word sentence is skimmed over in a second and not a bunch of pages you sit down and read.

Croteam games regularly go on sale

since you fags ITT like puzzle games, is The Witness any good?
kinda off topic, but I wanted to try that shit too since I enjoyed this one

>is The Witness any good
Puzzles are good to terrible. Is it a good game? No, the puzzles would work just as well in a newspapers. But it's not broken so it's playable. Also the story is pretentious retardation. It's a poor man's Talos.