The Talos Principle (2014)

January 21, 2024 / stephensopinions / Leave a comment

Many games try and fail to meaningfully incorporate philosophical concepts. The Talos Principle is a puzzle game that is genuinely impressive in how it asks classical philosophy questions in a context in which they make sense. Philosophy always runs the risk of sounding pretentious, but The Talos Principle balances it masterfully. Puzzle games in general rarely have a story worth talking about, so I was pleasantly surprised with the unique approach that The Talos Principle took. It’s not the hardest puzzle game around, but I enjoyed how puzzles slowly ramped up in complexity while remaining approachable.

The Talos Principle begins when you come to life in what seems like Greek ruins. An omnipresent voice warmly regards you as his child, as he is Elohim. He is God. You have to solve his puzzles and stay on the path to achieve eternal life. But he warns you against ascending the tower that looms over the temples of this land. Aside from the occasional praises from Elohim, the only other signs of life are in the computer terminals as well as messages scrawled on the wall from those who came before you.

The computer terminals have a variety of texts. Some are excerpts from classic philosophy documents, some are random blog posts, and some are emails sent to and from a scientific institute. It quickly becomes clear that something catastrophic has happened to humanity, and you are in some sort of simulation that had been created by the aforementioned science team. An AI converses with you from the terminal, asking you questions about sentience, consciousness, humanity, free will, and other introspective musings.

I don’t think The Talos Principle tackles any new philosophical concepts, but it’s how the game presents these ideas which makes it intriguing. When you are confronted with the implication that you are a program in a simulation, it makes you think hard about what constitutes a human. You argue with the AI assistant at the computer terminals, debating the purpose of all of this and if you are truly human or not. Can a program ever achieve free will, or does it merely do as it’s told? Philosophy often borders on being pretentious, but The Talos Principle never felt like it was trying to show off how smart it was. It merely places you in the appropriate context to be confronted with these classic questions.

Aside from its philosophical elements, The Talos Principle is first and foremost a puzzle game. Each puzzle is almost like a maze filled with tools and obstacles. There are force fields, turrets, and moving minefields that prevent you from reaching your goal. You are given an arsenal of tools such as jammers, cubes, and laser reflectors to assist you open up pathways. The puzzle design frequently relies heavily on spatial reasoning and order of operations. As you get further and further into the game, the number of tools and obstacles grows such that you have to perform dozens of steps to complete a single puzzle.

A technique that I noticed while playing was that no matter how elaborate a puzzle got, the first step was always obvious. The game rarely gives you more than one object to interact with right away, so you know what to do first. This is clever because it makes the puzzles far less intimidating when you are making progress. Even if all you did was connect two dots, that’s still a step towards the solution. I never truly felt like I was stuck and I never got frustrated because The Talos Principle makes sure its puzzles are segmented into smaller, easier puzzles. And putting the pieces all together at the end is immensely satisfying.

Another interesting aspect of the game’s puzzle design is how deceptive it often is. You learn tricks and gain habits as you play, only for the game to turn those against you. You may see a force field that seems like you need to use a laser to open it, but there’s no feasible way to get a laser in that spot. Or you may think that you need two laser reflectors to get around a couple corners, but really there’s a specific angle that you need to place the reflector at. As I previously mentioned, none of the puzzles felt overwhelmingly difficult, but they do make you feel smart when you catch on to their tricks.

While I did enjoy the standard puzzles in The Talos Principle, there were two other types of puzzles that I loathed. The first type being sigil puzzles. As you solve a regular puzzle, you are rewarded with a sigil, which is a block shaped sort of like a Tetris piece. When you collect enough sigils, you can use them to open doors. You have to fit the pieces together into a perfect rectangle. It’s simple enough, and most of the time isn’t too difficult. But towards the end of the game there are some sigil puzzles leading to secret areas that require you to fit a dozen or so pieces together. I never found a reliable way to solve these puzzles, and mostly relied on just guessing or using intuition. Sure, you learn which pieces fit nicely together as you play, but it’s annoyingly time consuming to just slap pieces together and pray that it works out.

The second variety of groan-inducing puzzles are the secret stars. There are 30 secret stars hidden throughout the game, and collecting enough of them grants you access to bonus areas. Truthfully, I quite enjoy the puzzle portion of collecting most of these. They usually require some outside-the-box thinking, like stacking boxes to go outside the boundaries of a puzzle or using a laser from one puzzle to open a gate in another one. The issue with the secret stars is finding them. They are often hidden in completely obscure locations with little to no hints of their whereabouts. I want to solve puzzles, not run around in circles looking for a corner that might have a secret in it.

Fortunately, both the secret stars and sigil puzzles are only minor aspects of the game. Sigil puzzles are usually fairly simple and the stars can be ignored altogether. The bulk of The Talos Principle is in its standard puzzles and in its philosophical ponderings, both of which are excellent. It’s rare to come across a game that doesn’t make philosophy feel forced and pretentious, but The Talos Principle excels at asking questions in an organic manner. The puzzles never wowed me with grand revelations, but I found them to be addictive in their simplicity. As a lover of puzzle games, I can’t believe that I put off playing The Talos Principle for so long. If you enjoy puzzle games, you owe it to yourself to play The Talos Principle.

Jusant (2023)

January 7, 2024 / stephensopinions / Leave a comment

I love when a game expands on a commonly seen mechanic that we take for granted. The prime example of this is how Death Standing turned both traversal and inventory management into its core gameplay hook. Running up cliffs and carrying hundreds of pounds of equipment is something that gamers have grown accustomed to, and Death Stranding made it so walking down a slight hill was a treacherous activity. Jusant does something similar, but for climbing. The entirety of the game is about the ascent up an impossibly high tower of rock. There’s no combat, no puzzles, fairly little exploration, and a story that is only told through the environment and the occasional note. Despite this, the meditative beauty of Jusant was enough to keep me going until the end.

Climbing has become a multi-purpose mechanic in a multitude of modern games. From basic traversal, to providing down time, to showing off the environment, to hiding loading screens, climbing has many uses and as such is absurdly common. Unfortunately, climbing is usually boring due to the simplicity of its implementation. Jusant makes strides to make climbing more interactive and thoughtful. You control both of the protagonist’s arms, grabbing onto handholds with each hand individually. This leads to a satisfying rhythm of alternating between the left and right triggers to ascend the terrain.

This simple change makes climbing far more engaging and immersive, but it’s not the only trick that Jusant has up its sleeve. You have access to a series of pitons and rope that always act as a safety system. You can never fall to your death; you only tumble a few dozen feet to where you last hooked into the wall. Pitons double as a self-managed checkpoint system and a way to place an anchor for some rope swinging. While Jusant isn’t terribly difficult, it is still nerve-wracking to swing and jump over a seemingly endless chasm.

Despite its efforts to make climbing fun, the biggest fault of Jusant is that it doesn’t do enough. There’s just not much thinking involved. You follow a straightforward path of handholds and ledges, just alternating between hands. The stamina system is barely worth mentioning as I never was in danger of running out of stamina. If you are running low, you just press a button and rest for a second to regain a large portion of the meter. I would have loved for the climbs to have a variety of routes to survey and choose from. Having to assess your options and think about how to reach your goal could’ve gone a long way to make the climbs more interesting. You could make more use of your tools, and there would be an actual threat of running out of stamina if you planned a poor route.

Even though I wish Jusant did more to make climbing more engaging, I still adored the surroundings of my ascent. The rocky tower is barren at its base, surrounded by miles and miles of desert. As you scale the tower you will find yourself in abandoned communities that have been carved into the sides of the mountain. Tiny collections of stone huts tell the story of tight knit communities that were deserted due to some ecological disaster. As you climb higher, you gain more hints about what happened to these people.

While Jusant has no dialogue, I found it told a poignant tale regardless. There’s a sense of mystery as to why the unnamed protagonist is determined to reach the summit with his frog-like companion. You find notes scattered throughout the journey which give a glimpse into the life of the people who inhabited the tower. Many players probably will skip these notes altogether, but I enjoyed piecing together how civilization crumbled. Seeing how the environment evolves as you scale gives you clues as to how this society functioned and then collapsed as the water dried up. Even without dialogue, the final scenes of Jusant manage to be emotionally impactful.

After the grueling nightmare of Alan Wake II, I needed a nice relaxing breather. And Jusant is perfect for that. The simple additions to traditional climbing mechanics make a normally boring concept more engaging. But I would have loved to see some more puzzle elements incorporated to encourage the player to carefully plan their routes. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the relaxing ascent and discovering more about this barren world. It is for these reasons that I give Jusant a 7/10. Transforming climbing into the main hook of a game and having it be fun is a tall order, and one that Jusant delivers on that.

Deathloop (2021)

January 7, 2024 / stephensopinions / Leave a comment

I don’t think I’ve ever been as disappointed in a game as I was with Deathloop. Its lack of commitment to its core ideas and its distrust in its players made me question what the developers were thinking. To be clear, I don’t think Deathloop is an unplayable mess. The basic stealth and action can be a little fun when you just want to turn off your brain and assassinate some targets. But Deathloop could have been so much more. As a massive fan of Arkane’s previous work, such as Dishonored and Prey, I was shocked how restrictive and uninspiring the game is.

The hook of Deathloop is that you are trapped in a 24-hour loop on a lawless island controlled by egotistical maniacs. You have to assassinate the 8 architects of the loop in a single day to escape the loop. You have to learn their habits, their schedules, their secrets, and utilize your knowledge to dispose of all the targets in a single loop. When I heard about this game, I imagined a fully explorable world, maybe separated into zones, in which time flowed continuously. Figuring out how to quickly maneuver between areas and learning when and where your targets were vulnerable would require experimentation and mastery. Instead, Deathloop is split up into 4 discrete time periods across 4 zones.

I understand that the choice to have fully separated time periods was probably one made for simplicity. It’s a lot easier to design levels around the static timeframes of morning, noon, afternoon, and evening, then having to have time continuously flow as the levels evolve throughout the day. It’s just far less interesting and immersive than it could be. That being said, the implementation of having just 4 discrete times could still work, but Deathloop is overly restrictive in its design.

Learning the ins-and-outs of each level at each time of day is still a promising concept. At first, each target appears in a single area at a single time, making it impossible to kill more than four in a single loop. You have to explore and delve for information that can be used to influence your targets to appear in the same place at the same time. Given the nature of Arkane’s experience with immersive sims, a genre known for freedom of choice and simulated systems, it’s shocking that Deathloop only has two ways to dispose of each target. There’s the initial time and location for each target, and the correct time and location that you can trick them into going to so you can kill multiple targets simultaneously. There is not a wealth of options or methods to employ, just a single correct strategy. It’s massively disappointing to stifle the player’s creativity, and it’s made even worse with how blatantly Deathloop holds the player’s hand through the whole process.

The first couple hours of the game are a form of tutorial hell. You are completely on rails, given no freedom and are constantly bombarded with text pop-ups and overly wordy tutorials for even the most basic of systems. This is just a taste of what Deathloop has in store. The game relies on text documents and audio logs to reveal information, which is fine, but it also beats you over the head to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Anytime something important is revealed a text pop-up summarizes it, the main character comments on it, a cutscene plays after the mission explaining in detail what to do next, the quest log drills it into your head, and of course the game provides objective markers pinpointing your next goal. The developers did not trust players to make deductions on their own, which is infuriating.

Deathloop had the potential to be a solid knowledge-based game. You progress through the same loop over and over, gaining knowledge to access new areas and influence the future. I would love this. But it doesn’t let the player learn things, experiment, and make deductions organically. Even when it is obvious what to do, Deathloop leads you by the nose and says “GO HERE NOW”. It’s obnoxious.

The structure of Deathloop is a major missed opportunity, and the gameplay doesn’t make up for it. The game encourages you to play stealthily if you want, but to feel free to go in guns blazing. One common gripe about Dishonored was that it heavily disincentivized combat as any form of lethality would give you the “bad” ending. The unfortunate consequence of punishing lethality was that half of the game’s mechanics wouldn’t be utilized by many players, and tons of players (myself included) would reload saves anytime they were spotted. I appreciate that combat was encouraged, but it has gone too far in the other direction as stealth feels unnecessary.

There’s virtually no reason to play stealthily. Positioning yourself in a corridor or on top of a building and going guns blazing is quicker, safer, and more entertaining. There’s no shortage of ammunition or health packs, so resource scarcity isn’t a reason to avoid combat. Even if you do die, you have 3 lives per zone so it never feels risky to engage in combat. Enemies don’t have particularly good AI, so they often just funnel into you as you pick them off. The audio and visual feedback from weapons isn’t great, but it can be dumb-fun to just annihilate enemies with overpowered weapons and powers. It gets old quickly though as there is only a single enemy type and 4 maps, at some point you’ve done the same exact fight dozens of times and just want to get through it quickly. The only time that gameplay felt appropriately tense was during the PVP invasions.

One of the more interesting aspects of Deathloop is how on select levels another player can load into your game as Julianna, your nemesis. They proceed to hunt you down and attempt to stop you from accomplishing your objective. This can be fun, as the key to success is to get the jump on the other player. Straight up shootouts aren’t common as there are so many avenues to sneak up on the other player. The person who is playing the campaign has the advantage because they have 3 lives, but Julianna has her own advantage in that the enemy goons are on her side. This actually made me play stealthily, as getting spotted by enemies would reveal me to the real threat: Julianna.

While I mostly enjoyed the invasions, there are a few points of contention. Sometimes I just want to progress towards my goal, especially towards the end of the game. These fights could be drawn out and take a while before you felt safe to go for an objective. I had multiple instances where I loaded into a level, Julianna invades, I sneak around the map, accomplish multiple objectives, get into multiple battles with normal enemies, turn off her antenna so I can escape, and leave the level without ever seeing the other player. The maps are huge with lots of nooks and crannies, and I feel like players just sit in a corner and hope their opponent walks past them unknowingly for an easy kill. I wish there was some sort of neutral objective that both players would desperately want to obtain so that they would have some reason to come out of hiding. My last issue with these invasions is less concrete: was the game simplified as a result of the inclusion of Julianna?

I’ve made it clear that the structure of the game felt like a simplified version of a better idea. But everything in the game follows that pattern. There’s only one enemy variety, stealth isn’t super complex, the powers aren’t super interesting, and the objectives are very straightforward. Moreover, while the levels do have some branching paths and alternative routes, they are never near as complex or interesting as the levels from Dishonored 2. I can’t help but wonder if Arkane held back on a lot of more interesting ideas as they would have conflicted with PVP invasions. Which would be a shame if that were the case.

Another aspect of Deathloop that feels off is its progression system. As you progress through loops, you collect weapons, trinkets, and slabs that you can infuse. Infusion lets you keep gear permanently, and anything that isn’t infused disappears when the loop resets. I think this is ok, but I personally got some powerful weapons very early on and didn’t feel the need to care after that point. The slabs are the most interesting aspect as they are unique powers that can be upgraded with additional effects. All other loot is tiered, so a rare shotgun is more powerful than a basic one. Tiered loot doesn’t work in Deathloop because it forces the player to spend a ton of time in menus sorting through crap and deciding what to infuse and what to scrap.

For a high-profile game that came out a couple years ago, I was shocked how many game-breaking issues I encountered. The game crashed on me a couple times, and there were also times that I got stuck in a menu and it wouldn’t close. And once the “X” button on my PS5 slowly stopped doing anything, forcing me to restart the game. This is all unacceptable on its own, but it’s particularly bad because it happened in the middle of exploring which then required me to replay the entire level. This altered my habits because I felt discouraged from exploring or spending a long time in levels as the threat of a crash was always looming.

The story of the game is fairly nonsensical. The main character, Colt, wakes up not remembering anything. He learns from floating text and other versions of himself that he should break the loop. It’s a neat idea that a colony of criminals and psychos have isolated themselves from the world by looping through the same day over and over. But why do only Colt and Julianna remember anything from the previous day? It’s a glaring plot contrivance. And it’s never properly explained why Colt came here in the first place, or why he betrays the other “visionaries” to break the loop. Maybe I missed something, but not much of anything is explained.

So, you may be thinking if there is anything about Deathloop that I did enjoy. For one, the art direction is definitely stylish. As previously mentioned, I do think that the game can be some mindless fun. It’s fun to go on a rampage and tear through enemies with the best weapons and slabs. It’s fun to methodically pick off enemies with headshots from my silenced gun. It’s fun to kick unsuspecting enemies off the side of cliffs. It’s fun to blast through the maps once you get familiar with them, and more so once you master them. And it’s fun when you eliminate Julianna after a particularly well-fought battle. But these aspects just get old rather quickly, and I was frustrated with how much potential was left on the table.

Deathloop isn’t a smart game. It wastes the fantastic idea of a looping assassination mystery by oversimplifying at every step. This could have been an innovative structural achievement, but instead it’s just a generic stealth-action game. It doesn’t give the players the freedom to indulge in some creative problem solving, and it doesn’t even trust its players to figure out the most basic of mysteries on their own. The middling gameplay doesn’t do much to save the game from its letdowns. It is for these reasons that I give Deathloop a 5/10. A single word summary of my time with Deathloop: disappointing.