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"Thanks, I hate it."

I have set this review to be "positive" because despite all of its flaws and despite Talos Principle 1 being the much better game, I think Talos Princinple 2 is still a really good game - even more so being priced at less than €30 in my country (I preordered a month ago and paid the discounted price of, I think, less than €25).
If you've never played Talos Principle 1 this review won't really be useful to you since I'm going to compare both games a lot.

The Talos Principle (and its expansion, Road to Gehenna) was a hidden champion when it was released - a calm, thoughtful puzzle game that challenged you a lot of times to think about what a human being really is. You wandered around in three medium sized puzzle hub worlds unlocked one by one with each of them having a theme and a selection of puzzles, and most of the time you were left alone. If you wanted interaction, all of the levels had a beeping computer somewhere where you could talk to a sentient "Library Assistant", or read up on the thoughts of ancient philosophers and more modern texts, and you'd slowly come to realize what exactly was happening.

I loved it. The calm solitude, the thought-provoking nature of all the tiny specs of text, the story, the feeling when finally, finally solving "that" one puzzle I came back to a million times, all of it intertwined with the puzzles, never overshadowing them, never taking away from gameplay, but somehow enriching it.


Talos Principle 2 is a step back in every way from that - except for graphics.
The game looks fantastic. My favourite by far are the southern worlds, Croteam has done a marvelous job at building the south. East and North are almost equally as pretty, the West is not - all of the West levels feel like they'd been abandoned in the middle of polishing.

The story is decent, but more bland than in the original - the writers set out to explore the nature and purpose of society and then do nothing with it, it forever stays a simple argument between expansion and stagnation. At no point I felt like pausing for a bit and thinking about what was presented to me, thoughts are spoonfed almost all the way through.
The dialogue is MUCH worse - you are in a society with 999 other beings, all of them talk a lot and say very little - in fact the only good argument to be made in favour of stagnation: If society expanded, soon you'd be surrounded by not 999 but 9999 people who just can't ever shut the ♥♥♥♥ up - at one point one of them mentions that the difference between 1K and the protagonist of TP1 is that 1K isn't alone, and you'll think "I WISH I WAS". Expect meme references and a lot of tone deaf writing.
Gameplay is interrupted by zoom calls, NPCs prevent you from discovering places by pointing them out, and instead of having library computers or a forum like Gehenna had, you now have robot twitter that constantly takes up HUD space by displaying the number of oh-so-important missed tweets in a corner. Infuriating.

Puzzle difficulty is all over the place - of course this is a personal opinion and experience, but I've had worlds where the first few puzzles were medium hard, and then the later puzzles - which were supposed to be the "real" challenge after solving the tutorials in every world - could be rushed through in 2-3 minutes each.
The Gold puzzles I liked, and to be honest, the Gold Puzzle difficulty should be the standard for every non-tutorial level.
Star puzzles are absurdly easy and should have been left out entirely in this form.

I liked the new puzzle mechanics - each world introduces a new one, and all of them are a great addition and present unique challenges.

All in all, I recommend buying Talos Principle 2, it really is a good game - but now you know about the shortcomings.

I've been working with Godot since 2 days after 4.0 came out and spent 11 minutes idling in the Steam version project browser so I could write this review.
I've worked on games and non-game projects in Unreal and Unity, both on the programming and on the art side. For personal projects, Godot won me over because of its major advantage:

NO BLOAT.

There is no bloat in Godot, no ass-backwards solutions to circumvent issues that stem from 20 years of not cleaning up your engine code, no gazillion different methods that ultimately do the same thing, nothing like that. There's generic base classes with a lot of usability, and there's you who's meant to write your own code like any game dev should. Your blank project IS a blank project with only the Godot icon in it, not some "blank" project where you have to remove 10 layers of trash you didn't ask for. Godot's JSON class isn't a thinly veiled, half-finished object serialization class (looking at you, Unity) that's no good for anything else, it's a JSON class that translates a JSON string to a regular Dictionary that you can then use to your liking.

The downsides:

- The physics backend currently is missing functionality. If you e.g. plan to use hinges and joints, be prepared to override the integrate_forces() method and write that code yourself.
- The file browser currently hides files where Godot thinks it can't handle them. If you rename your stuff.txt to a stuff.txx you can still use it in code without issue, but it won't show up in the file browser which makes working with those files tedious.
//EDIT: As I found out, you can add any text file extension to Editor Settings -> Docks ->
FileSystem -> TextFile Extensions and not only will it display those, it'll add your custom
file endings to the dropdown list of available formats when creating a new text file.
Fantastic.


Things you want to learn quickly when starting with Godot:
- SIGNALS. God, I love signals. Decoupling code has never been easier.
- Scenes are Resources and not just levels/maps. They can and should be used like prefabs too. Your weapon? A scene. Your character? A scene. That box over there? A scene. Drag&drop all of that into your main scene and save it as - a scene.
- You can animate a lot more than just parameters, skeletons and transforms. Call a method mid-animation. Emit a signal at a specific point in time, from within your animation.
- GDScript is so similar to Python you'll pick up the syntax within one or two days if you know Python.

This game has a small mirror with perfect comedic timing.

It's been 20 minutes and I'm already tired of the cliché-laden writing. It's not a good thing when a character's lines read like someone replaced the original with whatever their Thesaurus gave them.

Bought this for 2 bucks on sale. If you're starved for more content similar to DXHR (albeit way less polished and way more buggy) this will scratch that itch, and for $2 it's not a bad deal at all. Not sure if it's worth the full price.

This is the game you wanted Deathloop to be.

Would recommend if it wasn't tied to an Epic Games account. Do not buy.

Not recommended. Keeps your GPU loaded 100%, all the time, even in the main menu.

Short but excellent puzzle game, with very clever use of space and directions. Both DLCs are worthy additions with no drop in puzzle quality.
It's also the only time I have ever seen a developer comment on a review fixing a bug the reviewer mentioned.

MAXIMUM comfy.