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.
Wow!