So, Croteam, the creators of the Serious Sam series as well as the Talos Principle game have just announced the sequel to the Talos Principle, The Talos Principle 2, is set to release a little over a week from this post, about 9 years after the first game came out. I was always a huge puzzle fan and so I loved the first game, as well as its story, so I’ve been looking forward to this ever since it was announced like a year ago. Just recently the team released a demo for the game, which is also quite astonishing in this day. I know the occasional game has released a demo here and there every other year or so, but I think I remember the last demo I played was Skate 3’s back in 2010. I’m not quite old enough for it, but I do know that it wasn’t that long ago where every game had a free demo. Sometimes they were shit, sometimes they were totally unique experiences, but they all allowed you to at least experience some part of the game before you bought it.
I don’t know how to word this more properly, but it just felt so nice actually being able to play a game before it comes out, without having to be a famous youtube reviewer or having to attend a ridiculously expensive convention. I don’t want to be too optimistic here, but I’m far more optimistic for the release after playing this demo than I have ever been for most other AAA releases that only show trailers and developer promises.
And not only that, but it also advances the story in a pretty spectacular way. The original game has multiple endings but the canon ending is sort of a cliffhanger and they expand on the story in that direction, so if you’re a fan of the original and want to get a head-start on the game’s story then I highly recommend checking it out.
Anyway, I like it when studios are at least semi-transparent like this. It’s nice to see them put out something tangible that people can interact with before choosing to buy something. Who knows, maybe the full release will be the usual buggy mess next week, but after playing the demo I don’t get that feeling as much.
edit: and to top of it off, even on medium settings this game. looks. amazing. It felt like something you’d see created by Cyan (another puzzle game company), not by the people who made Serious Sam
edit2: here are my key takeaway from the demo, marked in spoilers because well they are kinda spoilers:
spoiler
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The usual croteam janky voice acting, which is honestly to be expected considering how Serious Sam’s voice acting usually is.
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There are animals in this game, I saw some but I’m unsure about how much interactivity there is with them. They all ran away from me :(
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The world appears to be extremely open, probably more similar to the gameplay and exploration style of The Witness. There were many puzzles that seemed very different on the outset from the original game but I couldn’t attempt them because this was a demo.
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The new mechanics are crazy. Seriously. I’ve never seen a game do a mechanic like the Driller except the portal games. Hopefully that gives you lazy folk a reason to try the demo.
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The RGB mechanic isn’t as hard to figure out as it seems. Just subtract the color you want to get from RGB, and the remaining two are the ones you need to combine. Hopefully it’s not a tough challenge for colorblind folks though.
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I mentioned cyan earlier and I could really see it in the design of the second world. Almost alien architecture in a very Earth-like setting. It reminded me a lot of the design in Myst II: Riven.
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Judging by the world map I got a quick glimpse of near the end of the demo, this game is looking to be utterly massive in terms of puzzle games. The first game was already crazy huge, but there’s like 12 “worlds” with probably 15 puzzles each, + secret areas that didn’t look like puzzles + you can just walk around each one and they’re all massive. I assume if you do more exploration in the demo than I did you’ll find more stuff.
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Despite the aforementioned new mechanics being “crazy,” they still felt really intuitive to me as a veteran player of the first game. It felt like the logic for them still made a lot of sense when combined with the logic of the original lasers, buttons, fans, turrets, and mines. I’m interested to see if this logic holds up when one goes further into the game. As is all the puzzles were still pretty easy, maybe medium difficulty for a complete noob.
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I was disappointed not to see more of New Jerusalem, although I guess that makes sense. Devs probably didn’t want there to be too much downtime. The warning at the start of the demo said some of the story was deleted or condensed for the demo so maybe there’s more exploration in the full game.
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The story didn’t go too much into it, but I can already tell it’s going to be about philosophy again (yay!) specifically around religion. “Do not say the Founder’s name in vain” was a pretty clear clue.
Talos 2 is very promising in terms of gameplay, the first one is one of my favorite games and I played through it many times, and I’ve already played this demo 3 times.
This one is more ambitious, the environments are bigger, there’s more content, the art style is fantastic, BUT… I can’t help but feel a deep sense of technical jank that is shared by many players. The game is a constant state of desperately loading stuff and stuttering due to shader compilation, and you can feel all of it every time you turn around or walk in a new area. Even on ultra with native upscaling, the game only looks good if you stay still, as soon as you move you get smears from every object, the grass stops moving, you can clearly see problems with lighting like shimmering and bleeding, the water and vegetation have no physics whatsoever (the first one at least had water ripples), and despite using raytraced AO they’re still using those horrible screenspace reflections (the first one had actual reflections). To top it all off, settings don’t always apply correctly until you restart the game, and sometimes the game reverts them to whatever it feels more appropriate for your hardware with no indication whatsoever that it’s happened. I’ve yet to see an UE5 game that doesn’t have these issues, that engine just… doesn’t look good in motion. To quote AVGN, it feels like driving an old beat up car, you’re always afraid it’s going to break down.
Also, one of the developers said they don’t want to support Linux, not even through Proton, then another one said they’ll try to get it to work. Get your shit together, the first one had a native port!
This is based on my experience with a 5800x, and a 6900xt, in 1440p, so your mileage may vary and I know they’re hard at work to improve the situation.
So yeah, respect for croteam for making what it’s undoubtedly going to be a great puzzle game, but shame on them if they release it in this state.
Try Immortals of Aveum, it’s a full UE5 game and runs really good for my bare 6800XT at 1440p->2160p. I even have recordings of my game play up at 60fps on YouTube.(you can look for the same ID I use here.)
Honestly without going into too much detail, UE5 developers should limit the options available to gamers if they can use the config then game literally runs ugly like what you mentioned. My work place is doing engine upgrade so I am aware of all those things but honestly, it can be done proper but we do have to take away those finer controls. Because some settings turn off features that another needed to run properly. There are “wrong” config default value from UE5 source that cause excessive smearing cause their temporal super resolution upscale is still consider beta at 5.1-5.2, how would players know what presets works together to avoid bad combination? Devs should just interlock cvars or provide basic presets only in this case, otherwise there will be videos after videos claiming UE5 looks bad and perform bad under whatever combination they run into. Those combination aren’t suppose to be used together.
That said, I haven’t played the demo yet, but it is very likely that TP2 aren’t fully UE5. I will update my comment once I played the demo.
Edit: found source, @[email protected] try reset your graphic settings and only apply the big preset but not other detail settings individually, it should make your experience better.(oh, and just in case, don’t set AA quality to Epic.)
sounds like you’re a bit more of a gamer than i am
I know the occasional game has released a demo here and there every other year or so, but I think I remember the last demo I played was Skate 3’s back in 2010.
That’s… pretty on-you, I have to say. Something like 2/3 of my gaming time is free demos off steam or the nintendo eshop. Steam just had their yearly Next Fest, with over 900 games dropping demos this month.
That’s… pretty on-you
funny, considering i wrote the post. would be weird if it weren’t on me as the post author.
My point is that you implied it’s that the game industry isn’t putting out demos. “The occasional game here and there every other year or so”. But that’s a false statement, the lack of demos in your life is your own doing
If nitpicking had an award’s ceremony I’m sure you’d be invited. Thanks.
It’s hardly nitpicking. It’s the foundation of the entire first paragraph.
It’s mostly AAA games that don’t bother. A lot of smaller games do, because they know it’s worth it unless you’re riding a crazy hype train with wild expectations.
And even if they don’t have a demo, Steam’s refund system makes basically any game a demo; since you can refund for any reason in the first 2 hours, you can play the first ~90 minutes for free
Great write up @bermuda. Croteam deserves a lot of praise for their great work.
If you’re into this game series, join us at:
Just on the topic of demos, I feel like they are making a comeback these last few years (speaking as a PC gamer).
Steam has their Next Fest, which is all about demos, and I’ve found a few games there I bought later or put on my wishlist.
As for Talos 2, while I haven’t checked out the demo, I really liked the first game, so I was gonna get the sequel anyway eventually, unless the reviews thrash it for some reason.
The graphics are great, like you mention. They aren’t particularly high fidelity, so performance is good, but they creative and artistic, which is better. I’m glad they didn’t just go full realism. The first game sometimes felt like they just placed assets around (although that plays into the story of the game, so it’s fine), but this one is >!in the real world!< and I was worried it’d be too realistic.
