What’s most exciting about The Talos Principle is how disarming the series is. One minute, you’re exploring the ethereal digital landscape depicting arid deserts at sunset and green forestry amidst peaks and valleys, a metaverse that feels both impossible and familiar. Then you’re having philosophical debates over an old, dingy computer terminal with an AI. Or you’re getting your rear handed to you in the many bespoke and intricate puzzles found within. You don’t quite know if you’ve found yourself in Heaven or Hell. Or maybe somewhere in between.

The original was unbelievably effective, depicting this sensation back in 2014. The quasi-remaster quasi-remake in The Talos Principle: Awakened builds on these ideas and takes them to the moon.

The Talos Principle: Reawakened is billed as “more than a remaster.” That largely sounds like marketing speak, but it doesn’t take long in the experience to see the magic and work developer Croteam put in here. Yes, you’ve got the original game and its DLC, Road To Gehenna, packaged together, but they’re remastered so beautifully in Unreal Engine 5, painting its ethereal world more up to snuff with the likes of its sequel in 2023. On top of this, you’ve got a photo mode, a boatload of quality-of-life additions, compelling developer commentary and finally, a new prologue expansion titled In the Beginning that makes the entire Talos Principle story and package feel more complete than ever.

Back at it again

The Talos Principle story follows an unnamed android awoken and instructed by a disembodied, powerful voice known as Elohim to complete a series of puzzles in his domain. It doesn’t take long to realise, nor is it any secret, that this series of worlds you’ve found yourself in is a virtual reality, and you are an Artificial Intelligence program. What then ensues is philosophical debates and existentialism as you work your way through dozens upon dozens of test chamber puzzles (kind of like Portal but with more serene and less brutalist environments). You begin to question your autonomy as you blindly follow the voice’s instructions, completing each task and getting into platitude-offs with one another on the computer terminals you find about the world. You argue the definition of ‘consciousness’ and ‘human.’ Do I, as the Artificial Intelligence, have any say in the things I’m completing? Do I have hopes and aspirations? As you’re playing and frustrated at your lack of autonomy, suddenly, the mysterious great big Tower that Elohim tells you not to visit looks all the more tantalising…

All these themes and ideas for the game are heavily inspired by the Phillip K. Dick 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The book that went on to essentially become the Bladerunner movies. In case there was any shadow of a doubt about that, there’s a sequence where you can find a bed, go to sleep and dream of, well… you get the idea. It’s important then that you get the ideas communicated well visually. If you’re in a simulation, this sort of dream-like reality that you’re in has to look beautiful and familiar to everyday reality, but alien at the same time. The original Talos Principle captured this very well, setting biomes in Egypt, Ancient Greece and the like. You’d wander through temples solving puzzles all on the hunt for those little sigils that would then unlock the next door in the HUB that’s gating progression. There were vistas as far as the eye could see of rolling sands and pyramids or great lakes in the distance.

Beautiful sights nonetheless, but of course, like the simulation, meaningless as you could never really go to those places. This looked quite nice (if a little dated when you go back and look at original footage) at the time, but the engine upgrade and even further attention to detail are what catapult this new experience further.

Each campaign has delicious, bountiful cakes of thoughtful storytelling, working through and exhausting what feels like every possible philosophical question known to man. The base game captivatingly does so through the lens of questions you’d likely get from Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato. Road to Gehenna, much like The Talos Principle 2, has you playing a saviour to AI and explores what it means to save people and what sacrifice looks like and so on. The new In the Beginning chapter has you at ground zero for the simulation’s creation, walking through and testing recently created puzzles as a human controlling an android. It’s fitting then that this new content features the most story and voice acting to boot: you, like one of the creators, are trying out and working to break the puzzles themselves. Together, you both react in awe, experiencing these new complex Rube Goldberg Machine-esque puzzle sequences in real time.

Adding to this is the brand-new developer commentary tracks issued throughout each campaign. Serving as little interactive objects you can walk into and trigger recordings from members of Croteam spanning anywhere from 10 seconds to several minutes, they’re thoughtful nuggets that build out the bigger picture. Unlike its sequel, The Talos Principle is a lot more discreet with its storytelling, leaving it up to the player to interpret the vibes and meaning behind the writing you find in and outside of the in-game terminals found around the maps. It’s refreshing and amusing to hear a level designer explain how they were stuck on creating a puzzle for months until that one eureka moment, why this other one had to be added later to function as a tutorial to a mechanic and so on. What’s even more vindicating is recordings from the Talos writers explaining what they meant by some of the littler harder to read moments, including one incredibly sincere moment from Tom Jubert where they juxtapose some of the story in the universe with our real world, begging and pleading to end this current world’s obsession with a war on ideas and who is “wrong or right” rather than being more compassionate.

Thinking time!

Ask almost anybody who’s played the series, and they’ll tell you how unbelievably difficult The Talos Principle can be at times. Coming in as a newcomer, I’m not afraid to admit I was deceived by just how hard it gets. It’s a game about moving a bunch of blocks, redirecting lasers and interrupting forcefields. How hard can it really be? The fact of the matter is that, though it doesn’t seem all that much of a far cry from what you’ve done in puzzle games a million times over, Talos is cut from a different cloth. It’s in a whole other league of difficult.

Test chambers will cleverly be cordoned off in ways that very rarely allow for you to cheese and complete a puzzle in any way other than Croteam’s direct intended means. This means you have to use your wits and the tools a puzzle gives you which can include: boxes, jammers that can interrupt forcefields and other electrical equipment, connectors used to connect one source of a laser to another point, playback recorders to record movement and fans to launch yourself or other objectors into the air and over obstacles. With these items, you must, more often than not, work towards getting a laser towards a goal to open up the exit.

The feats you’re accomplishing in a puzzle are nothing short of amazing when they all come together. Yes, there are sections where stopping and starting can ruin the flow of solving a puzzle. Still, when you pull off a sequence of events such as making a fan blow a cube holding a container up into the air, threading over a wall and finally meeting its goal, it’s a thing of beauty. Croteam even went as far as to touch up small oddities and frustrations. The recording machine mechanic sees you making a clone of yourself via a recording to essentially create two of every prop to get more spread across a puzzle environment. While inventive, I imagine it to be the least popular puzzle-solving mechanic from the community due to how finicky and trial-and-error it can be. This has been made breezier thanks to the fact that Croteam have fine-tuned this mechanic to add pause points in the recording timeline so that your clone stops on replay rather than jumping through hoops on making a clone idle on a button for too long.

This kind of change shows the team genuinely care about their community and the experience, but if I were to suggest one more change that would’ve been welcome? A ping button to locate all the objects available in a puzzle. Those darned things get lost too easily in the bigger puzzle arenas.

Thankfully, the strength of puzzle designs also applies to the new In the Beginning campaign. Though it’s on the earliest part of the Talos timeline, they haven’t hesitated to make the content filled with perhaps the hardest puzzles they’ve ever done. This really works, as its content is designed to be played following everything else. Additionally, it matches what’s going on narratively: You’re exploring early versions of the simulation, and therefore, the puzzle designs are a little more funky and rough-edged in unique ways. They feel more designed to bend and break, begging for experimentation. Expect a lot of suspending a cube and connectors mid-air with a fan to thread lasers to one corner of the map and then to a goal. Devious.

Even then, there’s also level creation to keep the fun rolling. The creation suite isn’t exhaustive, but it’s got everything you need in there to make inventive puzzles. It’s intuitive to use, and everything snaps together well, leaving little fuss. I checked out some of the creations people made in the demo build for the game, and there are already ridiculously challenging and heavily involved puzzles to work through in there. Come full launch, I’m excited to see how the community runs with it all. There are likely going to be some dastardly creations.

I can’t overstate enough how this genuinely does feel like more than a remaster. Most already consider The Talos Principle one of the puzzle genre’s greats. If there were any doubts about that status, Awakened has done with them entirely, providing a dense and satisfying package filled with stuff to do and puzzle greatness to unravel.