Recent reviews by ThorClock🧙

This is like two good games that combine to make a game that's worse than either of them would have been alone. It is less than the sum of its parts.
On the one hand, you have a pretty decent Myst type mystery exploration game, and on the other hand you have a roguelike deckbuilder time game. What a horrible idea.
Imagine you're playing a sudoku puzzle, but every time you need to put in a number in the puzzle you need to roll a dice until you get the right number. That's what this game feels like. Many, many times you will have the solution to a puzzle in your head, but then you just will go a dozen days in a row without getting the specific combination of rooms or specific combination of room and item required to enact the solution. Of course, there are ways to manipulate the odds of things appearing in various ways. However, even if you play with flawless tactics and maximize your chances, and even if you keep multiple goals in mind at the same time to opportunistically pivot towards, there's still a strong chance you'll just do a dozen runs with nothing to show for it because the slot machine keeps coming up wrong.

Another major issue with this game design is that the devs like to waste your time. There is a library with books that hold useful information. But you can't just read the books in the library; oh no. You have to draft the library, then order a book, then wait a day, then draft the library, then read the book. One a time. So, to read five books, you need TEN game runs. But these are books you're renting from a library, surely the books you BUY you can read, right? Oh no. Even when you BUY a book you still need to order it from the library one at a time. As far as I can see, this system was designed with no purpose other than to take a long amount of time to do a trivially easy task that requires zero thought.
But the WORST thing is trying to solve any puzzle that requires building a contraption in the workshop. What a nightmare.

Despite all this complaining, I still give this game a thumbs up because there's a fun Myst type game and a fun deck builder. It's just a shame that they have such extreme anti-synergy in the game elements.

In this review I'll mostly be contrasting TP2 with the original Talos Principle.

The Talos Principle 2 feels like "the talos principle, but more" in many ways, both good and bad. The puzzles are very similar in both quality and difficulty, with a variety of new puzzle elements (and a small number of removed or replaced puzzles elements) to add a new twist to the familiar formula of the first game. Some of the puzzles may have you scratching your head for a few minutes until you have that "ah ha!" moment, but the solutions were never overly cryptic or nonsensical. I think the difficulty was well tuned. Some of the new puzzle elements are really interesting.

The original Talos Principle had a very unique religious/philosophical setting and a somewhat distant post apocalyptic setting which gave it a very unique aesthetic as a backdrop to the puzzles, with the story being told mostly through optional text dumps and short audio logs. By contrast, The Talos Principle 2 has the story very front and center. There are large chunks of game time with no puzzles because you're wandering around talking to NPCs or going through cutscenes. The story was decent, but I think it ultimately just felt like time wasting bloat. There's only so much Philosophy 101 a person can listen to before it stops being thought provoking and just becomes pretentious noise. Nothing about the story was particularly interesting. The only unique thing about the story is that most of the characters involved are intelligent and written intelligently, which is pretty rare for any kind of story.

Graphically and in terms of art direction, the game looks pretty good and has an art style that makes good use of scale to evoke awe and augment the themes of the game. Graphically it feels very similar to the first game.

Aside from the mediocre plot and story, the only major gripe I have with this game is how tedious it is just getting around. The zones are huge and you're going to spend a LOT of time running in a straight line from point A to point B. This is made worse by the fact that you're going to need to traverse the maps often several times such as to solve star puzzles or to search for secrets. I really wish you could at least fast travel to any puzzle you've completed from the map menu. Funnily enough, you CAN fast travel to any puzzle you've completed.... if you walk all the way back to the start of the zone first, which defeats the purpose.

Overall this is a great puzzle game. I highly recommend it. IF you haven't played the original Talos Principle and DLC yet, I would recommend playing that first and coming back to this game later.

Very good Roguelike with a unique leveling system with unlockable skills

The Neverhood is one of my all time favorite games. That's why it's such a disappointment to me that this game is bad.

The very very few parts of the game that are purely claymation look great, but most of the time it's a set cobbled together with sprite of individual claymation objects, which makes it look disjointed. The fake shadows and smoke are really noticeable and bad looking. It's apparent a lot of the time that objects were not made at the same "scale" but were just scaled when they were put into the game, so the level of detail is wildly different for two objects that are right next to each other and the same size. There was even one case were they needed a taller version of an object, so they just STRETCHED the sprite! It looked horrible, like some kind of joke.

The voice acting hurts the game and you gain nothing. The story is told well through just the actions of the charters, there's no reason for the bad voice acting. I wish it was like neverhood were only 1 or 2 characters speak understandable words. The feel of the game is also ruined by real life pop-culture references.

The game is full of bugs. It's like they didn't even beta test it. The audio cut out frequently, and the save function crashed my game many times before it actually worked. Based on the community hub, these are common problems.

The game is short. For the price, it's not bad, but I only got about 4 hours out of it.

Fun combat mechanics. You can save the life of every character, but that doesn't make it just a talking game. You still can enjoy the bullet dodging as you duck spear thrusts to unleash your tactical hugs. Of course, you can also kill everybody. The different playstyles of the game are so vastly different in every way that it's almost like 2 different games. Lots of detail in the world building! The developer seems to have thought of everything, as many strange actions you can take actually get a reaction from NPCs.

If you do both major routes, it's about a 10 hour game, and well worth $1 an hour IMO