Adventure Gamers - Forums

Midweek Puzzle

I have literally just finished The Talos Principle (well last night), and I can tell you that it is both a highly entertaining and very addictive game (didn’t get much sleep last night), so don’t start playing it unless you are also prepared to spend a lot of time on it

The game consists of different courses that you have to get through, mainly by disabling force fields by either jamming them, redirecting a laser beam or use pressure plates. But you will also have to run gauntlet between patrolling guard drones and automated machine guns (my least favourite course type ), or simply scale high walls - and the reward at the end of the rainbow? A so called Sigil which, when you have collected enough, can be used to unlock more courses and different puzzle types

Now I know this probably sounds very tedious, but trust me it isn’t!

You start out with a simple jammer, which you can use to jam things with, including those pesky guard droids . But soon you also get a laser conductor, which you can use to redirect and split laser beams, boxes, which are surprisingly versatile, fans that blow, and .. my absolute favourite .. a time recording device that allows you to cooperate with your past self!
And lets not forget the tray, yes a tray! (I won’t reveal what that is used for)

Especially the time recording device is really an ingenious contraption (read: diabolical difficult), as unlike with the other devices, you can’t just run around experimenting until you stumble upon the solution, instead you have to work it all out in your head first, plan and execute every single move in minute details, until finally .. you realise your plan doesn’t work and you have to rethink the whole thing.

What however impressed me the most, is that even though it is very repetitive then it never really gets old (okay, perhaps a little bit here and there). Even when you have completing more that a hundred of these courses and you think you know every possible use of a box, then it still manages to throw a new twist at you, that will leave you scratching your head until the proverbial light bulb lights up.

And if these normal Sigil puzzles aren’t challenging enough for you, then there are the Star puzzles that requires a lot out of the box thinking - literal out of the box, or perhaps more accurately, out of the course thinking, like in the screenshot above. The star puzzles don’t have their own courses, but instead they are incorporated into the other courses and the open hub areas, and they will often require that you set up the solution across several different courses.

The screenshot is however not from one of the star puzzles, but instead from a course named “Shoot the Moon” (for obvious reasons), though shooting the moon is actually an easter egg and has a perhaps not so surprising effect.

Another interesting idea is that it also have three different endings. There is in itself nothing new about that, but instead of depending (solely) on decisions you make in the game, it really depends more on how much of a completionist you are. There is an easy ending that will allow you to skip a large (difficult) section, a normal ending that require you complete all areas, and finally a hard ending that also requires that you find all the stars, which I might add, is almost impossible.

Sefir - 25 June 2015 06:37 AM

You did shoot the moon….But did you find the telescope

Erh .. no - but now that you have mentioned it, I simply have to

Sefir - 25 June 2015 06:37 AM

Found all stars (though I needed help in the A-3 stage with one that required a specific date-code, God bless these forums…).

That one was outright unfair imo I also did find all the stars, and played all three endings, though I had to use a walkthrough for about a third of them. I also just read that it is actually possible to complete the normal ending without Sheppard’s help, though it should be extremely convoluted.