The Talos Principle: Reawakened

Back in late 2014 Croteam surprised the world by releasing a new game that wasn’t Serious Sam, but a thoughtful puzzle game with great story called The Talos Principle. My experience with that game happened almost a year later, and while I really liked the game, I was so exhausted by the end of it, that I didn’t finish the Road to Gehenna DLC. In another shocking twist, in 2023 The Talos Principle 2 was released and did everything a great sequel should do. It was and still is one of the best puzzle games I have ever played and it has improved upon its predecessor in almost every conceivable way. Given that The Talos Principle: Reawakened is the remake of the original game that sticks very close to how that title felt and played, it feels a bit weird to reassess it. On one hand, it’s still a fantastic puzzle game. On another – it pales in comparison with the sequel. So yeah, this is a remake of the original The Talos Principle and not a simple remake at that. It is among the very small list of game remakes, where despite the clearly impressing underlying technical changes, the game plays almost identically to the original. I can assume that the reasoning behind this remake was with the team wanting to improve their mastery of Unreal Engine 5 that they have used really well in The Talos Principle 2 and will be using the already announced third game in the series. And the results are fantastic – the game looks amazing, while also running a great (and noticeably better than TTP2). The original game, that used their proprietary Serious Engine, still looks very good and for players with older hardware that version of the game can remain as a solid choice. But in almost every way the remake works as a superior substitute. Only a couple of things have changed in The Talos Principle and Road to Gehenna in comparison to the original game. The biggest change, I feel, is that the often criticized by many (myself included) Recording mechanic, where you record the state of tools and yourself and then solve the puzzle using the recording and your current self, has been made a lot more convenient. You can now create pauses in the recording, instead of standing and doing nothing for several seconds at a time, which removes a lot of the guesswork and time pressure from the puzzles using this mechanic. The second biggest change is that now apart from only resetting the state of the world you can rewind the game in small chunks. So you no longer need to redo the whole puzzle if you’ve made a mistake, instead you can just rewind a bit and avoid the mistake. And finally, in the main game the concept of “Messengers” was updated, so now they are available from the start, but you need to find new types of sigils to unlock them. And once unlocked, instead of giving you hints, they allow you to skip the puzzle, similarly to how it works in the sequel. Now, despite that final change, I still feel that the idea of Messengers is somewhat pointless and unhelpful. Because the overall structure of the game, the puzzles, the progression and everything remain unchanged. As such, by the time you will unlock these folks, you probably don’t really need them. And this mechanic is also entirely absent in both Road to Gehenna and the completely new story campaign In the Beginning. My memory of the game, with it becoming rather tiresome by the end, turned out to be true. Once again, I’ve felt that as soon as you get to the third section of the game, things become a lot more frustrating and not as polished. Which continues into Road to Gehenna, where some of the puzzles are very poorly communicated, though some are extremely good. And then things get completely dire with In the Beginning, where puzzles tend to turn into complete nonsense. I know there are fans of extremely convoluted puzzles with niche usage of mechanics and the need to plan 10 steps ahead, but I’m not that audience. So where some of the harder sections in Road to Elysium DLC for the second game were frustrating, but mostly manageable for me, majority of In the Beginning was just purely unfun. The story, however, is still very good. Different, too stuffy for my tastes, too bible, too up its own butt (by design, that’s what the characters are). And accompanied by solid music, that nonetheless makes me want to sleep. But once again – I’m just comparing things with how extremely fun, exciting and well paced the second game is. On its own, the original and the additional campaigns tell the story well and for it alone The Talos Principle: Reawakened is worth it. Yes, I like the sequel a lot more. But the original game still holds up. And The Talos Principle: Reawakened is just a better version of it. The only things missing from this version are a couple optional DLCs the original got, like prototype levels and Serious Sam voice instead of one of the characters. Personally, I didn’t like those DLCs at all, so their lack is a gain, not a loss. If you have played the original game before and really liked it, then I recommend planning the revisit with the Reawakened version. And if you have not played the original game, then just grab this new version instead. It’s a better version of a great game.