The Talos Principle: Reawakened Review: Puzzling Perfected!?

As someone whose literal job it is to pick apart the pieces of a video game into easily digestible critique, it’s always a joy to come across a game so brilliant in its construction that I wonder while playing – how on earth did somebody design this? For me, The Talos Principle, originally released in 2014, was one of those games.

When The Talos Principle originally released, it would’ve been easy to dismiss it as yet another Portal imitator. While the indie scene is where most of the gaming industry’s creativity is (a notion I don’t have to defend to this audience), it’s also where you frequently see developers seek inspiration from other titles and often, accidentally or not, land on something more like imitation. This is evidenced by the fact that if I had a nickel for every Vampire Survivors clone on Steam at this point, I’d probably be able to buy my entire wishlist outright.

But dismissing The Talos Principle as a Portal clone just because it’s also a first-person puzzle game would be an unenviable mistake.  You could make an argument that any one of its puzzle mechanics isn’t doing anything nearly as mind-blowing as Portal’s… umm… portals, but not only does its focus on a philosophically rich narrative strike a completely different tone, but the often-ingenious design of its various enigmas makes it far more than the sum of its discrete parts.

That might not matter to you, though!  Because 10 years later, it’s easy to argue that as brilliant as The Talos Principle is, it doesn’t really need a remaster.  Well, as with anything, that value proposition is going to be in the eye of the beholder.  But whether you’re completely new to The Talos Principle or a returning fan wondering if this is a worthwhile package, I’ve got you covered.

Alright, let’s start with what The Talos Principle is – and if you’re a returning fan looking for what’s new in this remaster, eh, feel free to skip ahead a minute or two while I cover the basics.

You awaken as a robot in the garden of Elohim – a godlike figure who, not content to have you merely believe in his existence like all those other pesky gods, speaks directly to you, informing you that he is your creator and demanding you seek him in his temple if you are indeed worthy.  And while I don’t want to spoil much more than that about the overarching story since it’s unquestionably worth experiencing on your own, know that its religious overtones feed into a much grander purpose that has little to nothing to do with religion itself.  The story that gets filled in throughout the puzzles you’ll solve in The Talos Principle’s base campaign is consistently great and bolstered substantially by computer terminals you’ll find throughout the game. 

These terminals will allow you to read notes and emails that fill in bits and bobs of the game’s lore, but also give you access to the Milton Library Assistant, a program of sorts that will start asking you some deep and probing philosophical questions and not be shy about confronting you with your own contradictions upon answering them.  The discussions with the Milton Library Assistant explore your moral views and perception of the world around you and feel bizarrely like talking to a real person who’s not afraid to call you on your crap.  I would love to get a look at the sort of decision trees and branching pathways that make up Milton’s wide variety of responses, because the way its inclusion manages to kick immersion up so many notches merely through text is a testament to the power of exemplary writing.  These were always some of my favorite parts of the original game and are a joy to return to here, especially with knowledge of the broader context through which they feed into the rest of the narrative.

The puzzles themselves are excellent too, though don’t stick to any particular gimmick in the way that games like Portal, Superliminal, or Manifold Garden do.  In The Talos Principle, you’ll place boxes on buttons, you’ll use jammers to disrupt machines or disable force fields, you’ll use connectors to reflect beams of aggressively bright light around each level until it looks like the world’s most dangerous rave, and you’ll even make copies of yourself to record your actions and play a little single-player co-op, so to speak.  There are plenty of other mechanics too, of course, but you’re not here for me to rattle off a list, are you?

Puzzles and the bonus secrets surrounding them can escalate to some serious levels of complexity, but thankfully the difficulty curve here is quite smooth, at least in the base game, and a reworked hint system for the remaster can give you some help when you really need it.  

Speaking in terms of what’s new here since the original game, let’s start with some of the smaller stuff.  In addition to the reworked hint system and some added developer commentary, there are some accessibility settings and quality-of-life options like the ability to switch between first and third-person view with the press of a button, a new rewind mechanic that allows you to fix any mistakes up to 10 seconds back, and tweaks to specific gameplay mechanics to make for a smoother overall experience – for example, making the aforementioned recording mechanic a lot less frustrating, which will make a number of folks breathe a sigh of relief.

Obviously, there’s also been a massive visual overhaul, and even if it’s not expressly necessary since The Talos Principle still looks pretty decent, the game looks fantastic in Unreal Engine 5.  There’s so much added detail everywhere from more natural-looking foliage and texture work to the ability to turn on ray-traced lighting effects for those whose rigs can handle it, that there’s no doubt in my mind that the visual difference is pretty much night and day, easily bridging if not overstepping the gap between the original Talos Principle and The Talos Principle II.  I do feel that the scenery lacks a bit of variety, and the levels can tend to be too large and empty, but that’s an issue I had in the original game and is at least mitigated slightly here by the comprehensive glow-up.  And while I could have used some music that didn’t repeat quite as much, the soundtrack still adds a peaceful and slightly somber vibe to the enigma-cracking proceedings.  There is some voice acting both in the form of Elohim’s various ramblings and some audio logs you pick up, and I would say the results are a bit on the mixed side.  Totally passable but occasionally voiced with an overenthusiasm that pulled me out of the experience a bit.

Technical performance here is decent given that this is an Unreal Engine 5 game, and scales reasonably well with lower-end hardware if you’re willing to put the fancy ray-tracing effects aside.  Frame generation might be a needed boost for certain rigs to experience all that this remaster’s visual splendor has to offer, but at least as of the time I tried it, enabling the option made my game immediately crash over and over and over… and over.  I can’t comment on whether this will be fixed for launch, so if the ability to get the highest-end visuals at high frame rates is important to you, it may be worth keeping this in mind until you can confirm it’s been fixed.  I tried The Talos Principle: Reawakened on the Steam Deck too and was pleasantly surprised that on the default settings, it can easily keep a locked 30 fps and even hold a relatively steady 40 fps with some drops here and there.

But hey, if you’ve played the original game to death already, you might be wondering if there’s anything new here actually worth caring about beyond the little stuff I’ve mentioned already.  And my answer to that is definitely yes, kind of, maybe, depending on who you are.  I swear I’ll explain that in a less obnoxious way.

The Talos Principle: Reawakened is broken into 4 main pieces of content that will easily take a minimum of 25-30 hours to get through, even for a relatively focused playthrough without care for side content or completionism. The main campaign and its expansion, Road to Gehenna, are the largest parts of the package and easily the biggest appeal for anybody new to The Talos Principle.

Let me emphasize this: if you’re new to this series, you’ll want to complete both of these pieces of content first, not only because they’re great but also to avoid the spoilers that the brand-new prequel expansion, dubbed In the Beginning, will inevitably throw your way. In the Beginning is a several-hour-long prequel story that is… well, certainly very pretty and certainly well-designed, but harder than a frat boy on a European nude beach. Listen, I’m all for a challenge, especially when it comes to puzzle games, and will freely admit that maybe my husband is right and I’m just kind of stupid (okay, I’m kidding, he’s very good to me, I promise), but In the Beginning’s puzzles are borderline excruciatingly hard. It was not uncommon for me to spend an entire hour with a single puzzle and still be scratching my head, so heed my warning when I say that if you’re returning to The Talos Principle with the expectation of solely focusing on the new content, please make sure you’re ready for your grey matter to take a deep, kinky pounding. Maybe you’re into that though, who am I to judge?

The last piece of content that’s very much worth talking about is The Talos Principle’s brand-new puzzle creation toolkit, which allows you not only to build puzzles of your own using a wide variety of in-depth and easy-to-use tools, but also to play other people’s puzzles from the Steam Workshop, taking an already robust suite of content and expanding it to hypothetically indefinite ends. I’m not much of a puzzle maker myself, but it’s incredible to see the number of puzzles already available on the Steam Workshop, with that number sure to grow very rapidly upon the game’s full release.

If you’ve already played The Talos Principle in its original form, you no doubt are aware that it’s a fantastic package that has a ton to offer. Anybody new to this game has an incredible journey ahead of them, and this edition holds a ton of value. If you’re a returning fan, it might be a bit more of a mixed bag, depending on what you’re looking for. The new content is extremely challenging and borderline sadistic at times, making a purchase for that alone inadvisable unless you’re really thirsting for some new challenges. But the level-building tools and Steam Workshop support are sure to add much life to an already robust package, and if you’re eager to replay the campaigns as they are, the experience is going to be a noticeably gorgeous upgrade to The Talos Principle you know and love.

GREAT