The Talos Principle Was PAX Prime's Most Pleasant Surprise - Hands-On Preview

The Talos Principle Was PAX Prime's Most Pleasant Surprise - Hands-On Preview

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Lee Bradley

The Talos Principle passed me by when it was first announced for PS4 a few months back. It got lost in the noise, filled away at the back of my brain along with the hundreds of other indie titles detailed on the PS Blog. Even people that write about games every day get overwhelmed, you know?

So when I stumbled across The Talos Principle at PAX Prime last week, I didn’t expect much. In fact I didn’t expect anything as I didn’t even know what the game was about. But after spending some time with the demo, I came away pleasantly surprised. The Talos Principle was one of my games of the show. Here’s what it’s all about.

At its heart, the Talos Principle is a handsome first-person puzzle game, with an aesthetic that offers up an anachronistic mix of the ancient and the sci-fi. The demo was set in the grounds of a rural castle (scanned in from a real-world location) dotted with fizzing energy walls and wall mountings.

You play as an advanced form of artificial intelligence and a chunk of the game sees you working out how to progress through increasingly complex mazes by moving and placing blockers to disable energy walls, using a reflector to guide lasers and interacting with different bits of tech in a series of fiendish puzzles.

The Talos Principle offers little or no hand holding. To make it through each section you have to explore and experiment, moving through your options with trial and error before you eventually stumble across the solution. For every puzzle you complete you’re rewarded with a tetronimo piece that you can then move and rotate into place on a board, in order to unlock a further chunk of the adventure.

So that's all familiar stuff, a twist on mechanics we've seen before, combined in ways that makes it feel unique. And honestly, that's enough to pique my interest, as it's done very nicely. But The Talos Principle has a load more going on too, some of which I haven't quite grasped yet.

This includes computer stations that you interact with in interesting ways, a mysterious omniscient voice calling you “my child” and a promise from developer Croteam (Serious Sam) that you’ll be able to "replicate time". If that particular mechanic appeared in the demo, then it slipped me by.

Joining Croteam is writer Tom Jubert, whose previous games include The Swapper, FTL, Penumbra and Driver: San Francisco. Jubert says that The Talos Principle is a “philosophical puzzler” that draws on Philip K Dick, so expect there to be more to the story of the game’s robotic protagonist. It’s an intriguing prospect.

Tough, beautiful and with a few secrets up its sleeve, The Talos Principle is coming to PlayStation 4 at some point this year.

Comments
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  • Looks alright, but lately I haven't been enjoying all those puzzle games as much as I used to. Who know, maybe it's my old age showing LOL Sounds like a cool concept, but I would need to try it out first...
  • I have top say that this game was pretty amazing. I went to PAX and the Talos Prinicple & Bloodborne were the two highlights for me. I wasn't expecting too much from this, but once I played it I was really impressed. The puzzles are decent enough, but the atmosphere that the music and designs portray kept me really interested in the game. Really looking forward to the release.
  • I can't have been the only one to have assumed it was something Elder Scrolls related at first. That being said, it definitely looks like something to try out.
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