The Talos Principle is one of video game’s most well-known happy accidents. Before its release, players knew developer Croteam for their Serious Sam games. Each Serious Sam game couldn’t be any further from the kind of game that The Talos Principle is.

That’s why it was no surprise to me when I learned that development for The Talos Principle began as development for a new Serious Sam game. Basic puzzle elements featured in The Talos Principle were conceived as a way of navigating the war-torn world of Serious Sam and eventually morphed into what became the 2014 puzzle game.

More than a decade later and a year after a full-blown sequel, we have The Talos Principle: Reawakened, a remaster of the original game and its Road to Gehenna expansion, plus a new expansion called In the Beginning. This remaster is more than just a new set of levels. Everything has been given an Unreal Engine 5-style facelift, with better lighting and textures to provide you with even better-looking scenery while you blankly gaze at a puzzle you’re stuck on.

There’s also a new puzzle editor that lets you create your own puzzles, though admittedly, I did not get to try that out while reviewing the game on PS5. The puzzle editor is only available on the game’s PC version, though Croteam has already stated on the game’s Steam page that it’ll try working the puzzle editor into the console versions of the game post-launch.

I most enjoyed the developer commentary out of all the new additions in this remaster. For context, just like how The Talos Principle was born out of a happy accident, so was my playing it. As a fan of puzzle games, it remained one of my blind spots in the genre. I’d heard plenty about it over the years and been told to play it by some friends, but I never got around to it.

That’s why I was intrigued to review it when the opportunity came, because pretty much by accident, I got to have my first experience with The Talos Principle be the best version of the game so far, complete with the kind of developer insights I love to hear about while playing something calm and meditative. In more ways than I could have expected, The Talos Principle is precisely my kind of game, and I should have listened to my friends sooner.

Playing through The Talos Principle and the Road to Gehenna expansion for the first time, I experienced many of the same feelings players had 11 years ago. Some puzzles made me feel like an absolute genius when I solved them, while others were so easy to solve that I could run through them, doing whatever came to my head first without taking my finger off the sprint button. Not a contemplative moment was had in many a puzzle, and that kind of power fantasy only gets you so far in puzzle games before you get bored.

Then, all at once, towards the end, plenty of puzzles had me in that blank gaze for longer than I care to admit. Re-treading steps I’d already done that didn’t work the first time, to see if something would click into place. And when it finally did, I was relieved, instead of thrilled, to move on to the next puzzle, which is not the feeling you want to have when playing a puzzle game.

This also comes down to the lack of new mechanics in The Talos Principle. I got tired of connecting lasers much faster than, say, opening portals. But by the time I was deciding whether to climb the tower, my motivation to continue hinged more on uncovering the story than it did on solving another laser puzzle.

Playing through the original game and its expansion also meant that I was experiencing the story of The Talos Principle for the first time, which also felt like its own puzzle. Discussing the meaning of life or trying to define personhood and consciousness sounds like a conversation I might have with a friend over coffee. This is another reason why The Talos Principle is my kind of game.

I loved the writing throughout, and tired as the trope may be, it’s likely not a shock to you at this point that I love rooting through cryptic notes and audio logs to piece together a game’s story. It makes my experience with a game feel all the more unique. Even if I’m acquiring every piece of the narrative in the same order another player did, there’s no way for me to know that. On that note, I was disappointed that the narrative and the puzzles never weaved into one another in interesting ways.

The QR code notes helped make some humorous connections at times, but otherwise, my conversations with Milton felt separate from the rest of the game, which detracted from the experience. Road to Gehenna changes that, with the object of the puzzles being to free other robots from their prison. The newly added In the Beginning expansion includes more storytelling from Alexandra Drennan, which again helps to weave the storytelling a bit more into the puzzles.

Speaking of the new In the Beginning expansion, for my money, these are the most difficult puzzles across the entirety of The Talos Principle: Reawakened. The fact that 16 of the 18 puzzles in this new expansion were made in collaboration with some of The Talos Principles’ biggest fans again did not surprise me. Getting through these puzzles felt like Nintendo had brought on popular kaizo designers for the next 2D Super Mario game.

Unfortunately, the difficulty of these puzzles made what should be The Talos Principle: Reawakened’s shining star its biggest frustration. The bits of narrative you get from In the Beginning were just as, if not more interesting as what you can find in the base game and the Road to Gehenna DLC, but getting to them was such a struggle that I had a better time playing everything besides the In the Beginning expansion.

Maybe that’s because my freshness to The Talos Principle and its inner puzzle workings isn’t on the same level as those who’ve been with this game for a decade. Still, the challenge these levels offer shouldn’t stop anyone else like me, who enjoys a good puzzle game and has somehow not played The Talos Principle since its original release, from picking up The Talos Principle: Reawakened.

Reviewed on PlayStation 5 (code provided by the publisher).

8.3

WCCFTECH RATING

The Talos Principle: Reawakened