By nature, The Talos Principle 2 cannot help but de-mystify aspects of the first game, as it answers almost all of its lingering questions in explicit detail. You learn exactly what happened immediately after exiting the simulation, what the new humans do, and what the state of the earth is.

As much as I appreciated the minimalist storytelling of the first game, as well as its open-ended climax, I love that the sequel tells a traditional tale driven by character motivations and goals. The first game was about the individual; this game is about the many. There are multiple characters to talk to, learn about, and debate with, and the game provides you with plenty of dialogue options so that your character can express your opinion on the events of the story. Although your choices may not have a drastic effect on the narrative, the themes that its sequel explores are fascinating as fiction, yet also terribly poignant to our own history, and so being made to choose from various ideas and opinions made me think more abouy where I might actually stand.

It might come off as a little heavy-handed in some places — the references to Greek mythology are a bit Philosophy 101 — but the themes are not just preachy “really makes you think” brainteasers. The questions being asked are woven into the story perfectly so that the characters have real reasons to ask them.

Red light, Blue light

If you asked me, I would have told you there was no way you could create dozens more puzzles with nothing but coloured lasers and a few gadgets, but Croteam has proven me wrong. Returning from the first game are crystal ‘refractors’, which are used to relay a colour-coded laser from one place to another to activate switches, and jammers that can disable walls that block your way. Many of the new devices introduce ways to manipulate or transport the coloured lasers around, and it’s astonishing just how many great puzzles can be made out of different combinations of these devices.

The difficulty of the puzzles is quite fair; each environment has eight of them, all labelled 1-through-8, with the difficulty scaling upwards as you go. There are always 2 bonus puzzles within each environment, which you can complete instead if you are stumped by one of the main puzzles, and as a last resort, you can use a Prometheus token to bypass a puzzle completely; though these are rare and well-hidden in the world.

These bonus puzzles and a handful of extra environmental puzzles go towards unlocking a set of mysterious golden gates. I don’t know what lies beyond them at the time of writing; although a little birdie told me it might be some forshadowing for Talos Principle 3!

The Talos Principle 2 breaks up its puzzles with decent periods of exploration and dialogue with your fellow expedition teammates. This helps pace the game and can serve as a much-needed break from throwing yourself at puzzle after puzzle. You can also find interactive terminals similar to the ones in the first game, with what must be more than a hundred different messages from ancient and robotic humans alike that each share a little more of the world with you. Most are completely skippable, but if you’re a fiend for readables like me, you’ll love finding each one.

I did experience some stutters and lags, and even a few crashes in my time playing. The game warned me that its performance was better when played on a solid-state drive rather than a hard disk drive, which is what I’ve been playing on, but I hardly think that explains quite the number of lags and crashes I experienced. The lags sometimes cause dialogue to cut out or end early. Luckily, the very frequent autosaves mean it doesn’t drag the experience too much, and performance can always be fixed in later patches.