The Talos Principle 2

Forced tutorial level with very basic puzzles (boring for who played Talos 1!) and many cutscenes, dialogues and unskippable animations, all before you step into the first puzzle. "Please consider visiting the city (and talk to more robots) before we go to puzzle island" -Sure! Lots of wandering around on big empty maps. Enjoy all the vegetation and useless buildings on your way to the next puzzle. If Talos 1 felt like puzzle rooms stitched together into a hub world, here it feels like huge environment design demos with isolated puzzle enclosures scattered around. There is a compass that points to all relevant locations and "secrets"(if you can still call them so), as if the devs themselves realized how boring exploring these huge maps was. General low difficulty of the puzzles. Every area introduces a new interesting puzzle tool and mechanic, but creativity and difficulty never really ramp up, and then the puzzles are over and you are back to tutorial-like puzzles in the next area. The secret stars that in Talos 1 required you to literally think "outside the box", are here very easy to get: just find a switch, connect a laser to that same statue, or follow a particle effect. Annoying useless NPC companions talking often, making lame meaningless comments about what you are obviously doing. "Is that a puzzle?" -almost clicked the uninstall button there. The voice chat group calls that fill the screen and halt your gameplay are genuinely terrible. You cannot load a specific level of the campaign from the main menu, at least the ones you completed once. My save file got broken and I had to start all over. The game often crashed when I ran to a button right after entering a new puzzle or I spammed grabbing/dropping the puzzle tools. Core gameplay mechanics... The scenery is gorgeous, especially on Ultra settings, until you look closely at the screen and notice how blurry it is. I guess that's Unreal Engine 5 for you. There is a ugly grainy fog on the water and rocks are popping out like crazy during cutscenes. Performance is ok. But I have a powerful PC and I have seen older games looking good with 2 times the fps. Soundtrack is good but same background music in the first 3 areas gets repetitive quickly. Sound design is great though, puzzle tools have different ticking/clanking noises. I quit after entering the pyramid and finding more big distances to traverse and more needless talking, but so far the story did not seem interesting. The game is like constantly telling you what to think through what the NPCs say and trying to sound serious. But most of it never feels believable. EDIT: I spoiled myself the rest of the plot, and I can confidently say you are not missing anything here. The entire plot revolves around a single specific theme, and all the characters throughout the story will do nothing but discuss the same dilemma over and over, always giving the same answer, never changing sides. There are no actual twists, no memorable characters and the ending is predictable.