Philosophical pondering and first-person puzzling returns this year with The Talos Principle 2. The sequel was discreetly announced many moons ago, but developers Croteam and publisher Devolver Digital debuted its first trailer at last night’s PlayStation Showcase. Come take a look below and maybe contemplate robo-sentience while you’re at it.
]]>Whether you like to visit space, indulge in an RPGs or a grand adventure, get spooked by horror or get uber techy with hacking, the chances are that there's also a puzzle game for you - hence our list of the best puzzle games on PC. The queen genre straddles many others, so our list of the 25 best puzzle games has all that we just mentioned and more. Take a look to find a new favourite puzzle game today.
]]>Not-so-serious publishers Devolver Digital have announced today in a not-so-serious post that they've acquired Serious Sam developers Croteam. Seriously. Well, the tone of the announcement isn't serious but it has seriously happened. It's a business love story for the books.
]]>Put the 9mm down, for crying out loud. Not every game is about shooting your enemies in the shin bones. Honestly. Give me that, here, take this trowel. Now, follow me, through this tranquil landscape of blooming daffodils and perfectly arranged stone paths covered in happy moss. Yes, that’s it, you want a turn around the garden. A bit of soil on your fingers. And there's more where this came from. Here you go, 8 peaceful gardens in which to calm your trigger-happy soul. Breathe it in, shooter. Breathe it in.
]]>Here's one for the space-goggles crowd to jump on. Croteam, the plucky studio behind the Serious Sam series and the lovely philoso-puzzler The Talos Principle, are running a 26th anniversary Steam sale for the next two days. While offering good deals across the board, the most surprising thing is a bundle of all their virtual reality games, currently going for 92% off its usual price. A cheap and cheerful way to pad your library if you're skint after spending hundreds of quid on exotic headgear. Below, the must-haves of this sale.
]]>Hope your Christmas shopping is already done, because Steam's Winter Sale is liable to drain what remains of your holiday funds. No awful minigames like in summer - this sale's twist is a virtual advent calendar here, where you can click a door each day for a handful of Steam wallpapers, chat emoticons and holiday-themed fluff. Beyond that, users can cast their vote on the The Steam Awards nominees and get a fistful of trading cards for your effort. The sale ends on January 3rd, and I've got some personal stocking stuffers picked out below.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
What was the logical next step for the developers of dual machine gun toting, beheaded bomber slaying Serious Sam? A thoughtful, philosophical puzzler in the vein of Portal, of course.
In The Talos Principle [official site] you play as a robot, guided through the game by a disembodied voice calling itself Elohim. Imagine the Stanley Parable narrator but with more pompous severity and you’ll have a good idea what you’re in for.
]]>Dark days for the world. Maybe videogames can save us? Haha yes of course they can haha.
Here are some really good videogames, though. They'll take you to a better place for a while. These are the RPS team's 13 personal favourites from the current Steam Summer Sale: we believe in these games, and we believe that you should play them too.
]]>The Talos Principle 2 is coming. At some point. In some form. That's all I can tell you. Croteam's Alen Ladavac confirmed it during a talk at the Nordic Game conference this morning, and that's all. It is coming. Which is grand!
The Talos Principle [official site] arrived in December 2014 so, although the philsophical first-person puzzler is pretty great, it got a little lost in the usual December busyness. But the Serious Sam gang followed it up with a fine expansion in 2015 and evidently all is right in the world, because a sequel is coming too.
]]>The games that fly under publisher Devolver Digital's banner are often funny, sometimes silly, and always quirky. Frantic shooter Not A Hero revels in its messy, hedonistic chaos; Dropsy tells the tale of sad, social misfitting clown; and The Talos Principle is a wonderful game about philosophy and mind-boggling puzzles, to name but a few. The Humble Devolver Bundle has them all and more and is live right now.
]]>There are thousands and thousands and thousands and oh God help thousands of games discounted in the current Steam Winter sale. Honestly, it's ridiculous. Where do you start? Where do you end? How many will you ever really play? How many do you have to buy in order to discover the secret Half-Life 3 release date? Well, we can't help with the more existential aspects of that, but if you're entirely stuck on what to get, what we can do is tell you which single game each member of the RPS staff would pick from the vast and endless digital discount shelves.
These, as far as we're concerned, are the games you must must must pick up in the sale if you don't have 'em already.
]]>"ᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＡ!" is the only line of dialogue I can remember from any of the Serious Sam games.
Despite this, developers Croteam are bringing in some big wordguns for Serious Sam 4. Jonas Kyratzes, one of the writers of Croteam's fine philosophical robopuzzler The Talos Principle, and development/life partner Verena Kyratzes will be writing the screenplay for the backpedalling FPS, the gang announced today. My spies have managed to reconstruct shredded early drafts salvaged from the office bins, and I'm excited to exclusively bring you a line of actual 100% real genuine SS4 dialogue.
]]>The Talos Principle [official site] arrived very late in 2014, such that it erroneously missed out on the Game Of The Year accolades it unquestionably deserved. It had puzzles to match the exquisite Portal 2, and a story which fascinatingly and engagingly explored the philosophy of consciousness and existence. But hurrah, it can now return to our attention some seven months later with the addition of Road To Gehenna - an extensive expansion pack with a whole new story. Here's wot I think:
]]>A (hopefully) weekly series, in which the RPS hivemind gathers to discuss/bicker about/mock the most pressing (or at least noisiest) issues in PCgamingland right now. Hot Takes are go.
Alec: OMG THIS IS GOING TO BE THE MOST AMAZING HOT TAKE EVER. By which I mean, today we are discussing hype and videogames and if that helps or hurts them and helps or hurts us. The prompt for this is Hello Games’ chat with Pip last week, in which they mourned the crushing weight of expectation placed upon them as a result of having made some pretty good trailers for their space exploration game. I guess we’re going to struggle to avoid a touch of physician heal thyself here, but anyway. How do we feel about how the world feels about No Man’s Sky?
]]>Here's something I've been looking forward to for a few months (except I'd forgotten about *actively* looking forward to it and was more excited-but-put-it-on-the-back-burner-until-reminder-emails-arrived). The Talos Principle's [official site] expansion, Road to Gehenna, is out on 23 July.
That's soon!
]]>I'm with Graham on Make Frivolous Fun Things Day. I respect developers who come up with goofy jokes for April Fools' Day then actually follow through on them, though I'd like 'em even more if they made goofy things whenever they wanted rather than wait until the sanctioned day, a day when I'll be suspicious of everything odd even when its makers swears blind it is real.
So I was wary when The Talos Principle [official site] Croteam announced they'd added the voice of Serious Sam from the eponymous shooty shooty murderfest series to their quiet puzzle game. But no, they really have, and it's free for a few days. The game's on sale too.
]]>Listen up, fans of robot philosophy puzzlers: The Talos Principle [official site] is getting an expansion called Road To Gehenna.
Or, as Alice's first draft for this news story put it, "Talos Principle, that game about lasers and jumping, is getting more lasers and jumping."
The four-episode expansion is set in the same world as The Talos Principle but...
[SPOILERS WARNING FOR THE ORIGINAL GAME - TURN BACK ALL YE WHO HAVE NOT COMPLETED IT]
]]>I love puzzle games. But it’s not beating them that’s the exciting part: it’s understanding them.
Whether mulling over a cryptic crossword or somersaulting through Portal’s portals, there’s a moment of epiphany which, for me, pretty much transcends all other moments in gaming. But how do you design a puzzle to best provoke that eureka moment? What gives a puzzle its aesthetic, its pace and texture? Why does one puzzle feel thrilling while another feels like a flat mental grind?
I’ve asked three of my favourite puzzle game designers to demystify their dark magicks: Jonathan Blow, best known for the puzzle-platformer Braid and currently hard at work on firstperson perplexathon, The Witness; Alan "Draknek" Hazelden, creator of Sokoban-inspired sequential-logic games, including Sokobond, Mirror Isles and the forthcoming A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build; and Jonathan Whiting, a programmer on Sportsfriends and collaborator with Hazelden on Traal, whose own games are a regular Ludum Dare highlight.
]]>Finalists for the 2015 Independent Games Festival awards have been announced, and it's a good-lookin' list full of many-splendoured things. Croteam's The Talos Principle, Klei's Invisible Inc and 11 Bit's This War Of Mine are the most recurrent PC games (that we're all able to play already) in the list, but there are quite a few other splendid titles you might have seen on RPS over the last few months in there too. A whole bunch I really need to check out myself, too. I hear particularly good things about Grand Prize finalist Outer Wilds, which is perhaps the most outsiderish contender in there. Anyway: everything in the running is below. What do you make of the line-up this year?
]]>It's a pleasant fantasy to think that holidays mean long weeks of playing games, but in reality there's trains and planes to be boarded, family to be visited, lives to be unavoidably lived. Gaming during holidays is therefore similar to gaming at any other time, about stealing moments to sneak away to a quiet corner and catch up on backlogs or curl up with comforts. Some of you told us what you played over the break yesterday, but here's what RPS played between the parsnips and presents.
]]>Croteam's The Talos Principle has a combination of neatly designed puzzles and philosophical pondering. It tickled my brainbuds and got inside my head in that way which sees you drawing diagrams of levels while on the tube or puzzling them out as you lie in bed pretending sleep might turn up at any moment. It's one of my favourite games from 2014.
The game breaks neatly into two parts: there's the Portal-esque first person puzzle element where you figure out how to reach and collect tetromino puzzle pieces which are used to advance you through the world; there's also a philosophical/existential aspect which gradually feeds you scraps of text from a corrupted archive and asks you to consider things like the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human.
I'll talk about the puzzles first.
]]>The embargo for talking about The Talos Principle is over but I'm still pondering my way through a few of its more obscure puzzles. Consider this, then, a kind of placeholder for our review. A placeholder that tells you that so far (about three quarters of the way through?) it's been a really good experience. One of the standout games I've played in 2014.
]]>You can now play a slice from The Talos Principle for free, if you like. Which I think you should, because a philosophical first-person puzzler from the makers of Serious Sam that seems genuinely awesome is as rare as a kirin in France. Editorial overlord John Walker says that The Talos Principle is a "surprising new direction" for Croteam. Gone are the guns, the manic humor. In their stead stands writing from Jonas Kyratzes and FTL's Tom Jubert, neither of whom seem to be very frantic nor very frivolous. The "public test" will let you explore "four increasingly difficult complete puzzle levels." Why? Because the developers want to use you and thousands like you for their additional stress and compatibility testing.
]]>The Talos Principle is a very clever, very calm creation. Which is a surprising new direction from Croteam, who have previously given us the splendid madcap frenzy of Serious Sam shooters. While clearly sharing the same fast-paced twitchy controls of the Serious Engine, and a similar design ethic of ruined civilisations, beyond this Talos is dramatically different. It’s a captivating first-person puzzle game, more influenced by Portal than Doom, with an intricate back-story questioning the nature of consciousness and personhood told through fascinating interactions with an AI. I've had a play of its first, extensive chapter.
]]>'Free-lude' - a terrible term never to be used again in reference to a prelude given away for free. Sigils of Elohim is just such a thing, being a puzzle game that you can download and play right now without spending a penny. The video below does a good job of explaining the format of the puzzles, which seem easy enough but will undoubtedly cause me to pummel my keyboard with my fists as they become increasingly complex. I've got about as much spatial awareness as this chap. Success with the sigils will "unlock helpful items and relics within The Talos Principle", which is the philosophical first-person puzzler due from Croteam later this year. Crap at puzzles I may be, but I'll be playing for the writing of Tom Jubert and Jonas Kyratzes, and hoping to blunder through.
]]>The Talos Principle is an attractive first-person puzzler from Croteam. The short trailer contains lasers bouncing off mirrors, crates being shifted around and Tetris blocks locking togeter in a pictureless jigsaw. These are the puzzle game equivalents of zombies, terrorists and Nazis. It really is a handsome thing though and there are two intriguing writers on board. Tom Jubert, of The Swapper and FTL, and Jonas Kyratzes, whose Lands of Dream games have been occupying a unique space in gaming for years. They're writing "a metaphysical parable about intelligence and meaning in an inevitably doomed world" so I guess there might be a conversational potato?
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