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I wish TP2 had a faster run mode (that didn't toggle off when you let go of the W key), these maps are *huge* and empty.
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Nov 13, 2023 23:42
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You can at least set run to a toggle in the settings to alleviate some pinky strain (or play on controller and have a Steam Input layer that keeps the sprint button held down), but yes, I agree.
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Nov 14, 2023 00:00
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Superrodan posted:I intended people to potentially miss two things, mostly because I like in detective stories when the reveal is 90 percent "I knew it!' and 10 percent "Oh, how did I miss that?". The first is the book you mentioned, and the second is the Original candy advertisement with the old initials. Most people find the curt case when searching for the financial pieces of the mystery. The "Aha!" moments were really well done, I loved every time I went down a rabbit hole and went "uh-huh yep okay that's int--waaaaaait one goddamned second" with how flat the delivery was on some stuff that was a major revelation. It really felt like combing through an old town newspaper and striking paydirt inside the most banal small-town stories lol I wish I could finish Obra Dinn, i have tried several times now and i forget so much if i dont play it in one sitting/one weekend that i feel lost. 
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Nov 14, 2023 00:32
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Superrodan posted:I know everyone is super busy with TP2, but I released a puzzle game today inspired by Obra Dinn and Her Story. It's free to play in-browser, though don't think of it as a flash style game (it takes between 7 and 8 hours to beat minimum.) Please, feel free to check it out and give it a go. If you know anyone outside of SA who is looking for more puzzle recommendations, feel free to share it wherever. I'm just trying to get it out there. Thanks! This sounds like my jam. Stupid question: I have a flight tomorrow. Can this be played offline? I see it’s on itch but no download option. If I load it in a browser while on wifi will it continue to work when I have no connection in the air? How about saving progress?
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Nov 14, 2023 03:57
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Evil Trout posted:This sounds like my jam. Stupid question: I have a flight tomorrow. Can this be played offline? I see it’s on itch but no download option. If I load it in a browser while on wifi will it continue to work when I have no connection in the air? How about saving progress? Are you playing on a PC/Laptop? I can just give you the most recent standalone build. EDIT: I just DMed you a link just in case, Don't wanna risk missing your reply before you have to jump on a plane. Superrodan fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Nov 14, 2023 05:02
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I'm pretty close to the end of Talos 2. I won't spoiler-tag this because it's not a revelation or major reveal, but I guess skip the next part if you're super sensitive about consuming any information before finishing the game. I'm having a lot of fun with West-3. Instead of adding a new tool or puzzle element, most of the puzzles just require a weird new way of doing something you've been doing all along. The puzzles are short and fairly simple, except that you have to think outside (or sometimes on top of) the box more than you had to previously. Probably to get you ready for the post-game puzzles? Anyway, it's been a great ride. I like that even the more difficult puzzles are more compact and less convoluted than the late-game/expansion puzzles in Talos 1. It rewards clever thinking rather than trial-and-error, which is what I tend to resort to when overloaded with options. It does mean that occasionally I'll solve a new puzzle in under 30 seconds, but for the most part the challenge has been thinky but not frustrating.
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Nov 14, 2023 21:39
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I recall feeling that Talos 1 leaned into giant puzzles with lots of moving pieces by the end to push the difficulty curve, while Gehenna realised the same through a more minimalistic approach - some of its hardest puzzles have only two or three moving parts. I feel like Talos 2 is a continuation of the latter in terms of its puzzle design ethos. I will also say that one of the west areas (I think W1) is the only one to give me so much grief that I used four Prometheus flames in it. Something about the mechanics there just threw me for a loop.
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Nov 14, 2023 22:03
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I've been playing through Road to Gehenna in bits and pieces over the last month, and I can tell you that the puzzles in this game are by and large way bigger than most puzzles in Talos 1. Some of the puzzles here have to be the most complicated in the franchise.
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Nov 14, 2023 22:12
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I remember the only regular puzzle in the original game I was absolutely stuck on was some convoluted mess of two ventilator fans blowing you over a little island, which both needed to be activated so you could come to a stop there. I think that was Gehenna.
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Nov 14, 2023 22:22
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The first hub in Gehenna has a puzzle where you have to use two angled fans to float a connector in mid-air between them and string a laser around a massive area. Half of the challenge was picturing how the connectors were supposed to line up since you couldn't see one end from the other and it took forever to run across the area. The other half was figuring out the convoluted order of connections you had to make. That area had another puzzle with fans and a recorder that was much smaller but probably more complicated due to all the buttons and connections you had to make with the limited resources at your disposal and restricted means of travel between the two sides of the puzzle. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Nov 14, 2023 23:40
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:The first hub in Gehenna has a puzzle where you have to use two angled fans to float a connector in mid-air between them and string a laser around a massive area. Half of the challenge was picturing how the connectors were supposed to line up since you couldn't see one end from the other and it took forever to run across the area. The other half was figuring out the convoluted order of connections you had to make. Oh god, was that the huge semicircular puzzle? I hated that. Actually solved it myself, but it took literal hours. I only had to look up one solution in Talos 2, and it turns out I was doing it right, but it's the one puzzle I've encountered so far where there was a bit of fiddly physics/grabbing. I forget which area it was, but you have to grab a fan off a crate from the wall above, and if the box is in the wrong place along the very long wall, you just barely can't grab the fan. I should finish the last of the regular puzzles tonight. I'm super excited to get into the star puzzles.
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Nov 15, 2023 02:23
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Talos 1 and half of 2: The goal of the Simulation was to create intelligent beings with free will, but I think they didn't completely succeed at the intelligent part. For some reason 1k can't figure out that his body fits through the holes made by drillers just fine if he'd just, y'know, bend over.
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Nov 15, 2023 02:57
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Thoom posted:Talos 1 and half of 2: The goal of the Simulation was to create intelligent beings with free will, but I think they didn't completely succeed at the intelligent part. For some reason 1k can't figure out that his body fits through the holes made by drillers just fine if he'd just, y'know, bend over. You can't even blame it on the driller being unsafe equipment because you can fall through the holes you make on horizontal surfaces
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Nov 15, 2023 03:12
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It's funny what puzzles in Talos 2 stump me and which ones don't. Complicated laser setups I tend to have trouble with, and for some reason the item swap ones really get me. Most of the other ones I've found pretty simple though.
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Nov 15, 2023 03:20
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I just finished all the main puzzles in talos 2 and gonna start doing the gold ones; so far I've been a bit stuck on like 3 puzzles and each time the reason was I didn't know about a certain mechanic yet and I figured it out when I came back later with more experience. This doesn't mean it's too easy though; puzzles are almost never boring to do, and most feel good to solve. Exceptions: the tetronimo bridges. Always feel like a chore instead of a puzzle... and every climactic moment so far was built around rotely plonking down Tetris pieces in (way too large) amazing environments. The star shrine puzzles are pretty boring with a few Pandora exceptions, and although I do miss the hidden/out-of-bounds/glitchy secrets in the first game, I'm glad they focused their efforts on making the main puzzles a ton of fun and sanding down the frustrating parts of talos 1. Good game, highly recommended.
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Nov 15, 2023 10:32
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The main draw for me honestly it's the environments, they're just really beautiful sculpture parks. I'm trying to figure out how the weather changes work to try and force certain lighting to take shots. I can't seem to get the sunset lighting to appear on some areas, I'm wondering if some only cycle between a few weather presets, and they're not shared between all of them.
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Nov 15, 2023 11:30
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Your Brain on Hugs posted:It's funny what puzzles in Talos 2 stump me and which ones don't. Complicated laser setups I tend to have trouble with, and for some reason the item swap ones really get me. Most of the other ones I've found pretty simple though. The swapper mechanic was definitely my least favourite (but on the other hand I really liked all the other additions). I think it's because, unlike other mechanics, it introduces a restriction rather than a capability: with the other mechanics you think "so what can I do with this", and with the swapper it becomes "so what *can't* I do because of this", and I didn't enjoy this. That said, it does enable some clever puzzles, and it was quite satisfying to finally reach the solution, just the process itself was less enjoyable for me. Edit: my other problem with the swapper is that I didn't find them particularly distinct in terms of visuals. So very often I'd go "Oh, there's a jammer there, I just need to get to it", and once I'd reached it, I'd go "Oh gently caress, it's on a swapper, and I didn't bring anything with me", which was an additional source of frustration. Bemused Observer fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Nov 15, 2023 |
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Nov 15, 2023 12:12
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I appreciate the swapper. The core structure of most Talos Principle puzzles is leapfrogging -- using one puzzle piece to free up an earlier one to progress you, which then frees up another earlier piece, etc. The swapper allows for concise but still tricky leapfrog puzzles without enormous sprawl or a dozen different pieces, by keeping the total number of pieces in play at any given time down to 2-4.
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Nov 15, 2023 20:01
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Thoom posted:I appreciate the swapper. The core structure of most Talos Principle puzzles is leapfrogging -- using one puzzle piece to free up an earlier one to progress you, which then frees up another earlier piece, etc. The swapper allows for concise but still tricky leapfrog puzzles without enormous sprawl or a dozen different pieces, by keeping the total number of pieces in play at any given time down to 2-4. Yeah, the swapper was obviously less exciting than most of the new gadgets but I appreciated how it let them set up these kind of standard restrictions (you can’t take the fan without leaving the connector behind, etc) without needing to set up a custom room for each one. I wouldn’t be surprised if every puzzle with a swapper could be replicated without one by just setting up the right room that accomplishes the same thing in a more elaborate way. In some ways it’s more fun to have these rules emerge organically from the environment than to just have a hardcoded lock for it, but it also means making an environment that’s much larger and harder to parse at a glance for the same fundamental puzzle.
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Nov 15, 2023 20:38
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The swapper puzzles felt like I was fully in my element. They just clicked.
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Nov 16, 2023 00:41
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Finished Talos 2 a couple days back. An absolute masterpiece of a puzzle game. I think the only thing I actually disliked, and the only thing I had to look up, was the Pandora star in W2. And that's less because of it being a bad secret, and more just because W2 is such a pain in the rear end to traverse and search fully compared to the other areas. I do think the story kind of fumbled at the end, and the thing that the gold puzzles unlock kind of cheapened some of the earlier story beats, but it got me thinking in the same ways as Talos 1 did and overall I feel pretty positive about it. Now to eagerly await Gehenna 2.
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Nov 16, 2023 02:41
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South 3 was the last straw for me. I'm just going to look up guides for the rest of the Pandora stars and move on with my life. Activate the receiver on top of the tower? That's fine. Then find the tiny connector that it unlocks at the top of the tower that the game can't even properly render from that distance? Testing my patience. Then somehow intuit that this would unlock a hidden compartment with another connector in Puzzle 3? No. gently caress all the way off, Croteam. Your puzzle is bad and you should feel bad.
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Nov 16, 2023 03:22
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Yeah, the ending didn't really sit right with me, either. There's apparently no non-magical path towards progress. The "compromise" option is barely a compromise. It feels like the game punishes you for not firmly picking a side—New Jerusalem ends up embroiled in political infighting and stagnation with only a vague hope that maybe they'll figure something out in the future. But the two sides the game presents are patently ridiculous: either you jump headfirst into a poorly understood world of magic where humanity can basically do or make anything anywhere at will, or you stop the clock at 1000 humans and that's it. I don't know, I feel like I wanted an actual compromise option, but the game doesn't give you one. Maybe this is a part of the game's message, that we need to take a bold stance to save our species and our planet before it's too late, but it felt like instead it was saying that the only path toward sustainable progress and the fulfillment of our "cosmic duty" is some magic technology that will only ever exist in the world of fantasy. It also felt like the game was trying to teach us a lesson about how this is a problem humanity has to face together (what with Miranda dying and Athena losing her way due to them trying to do everything apart from New Jerusalem), but then in the end you just step into Athena's shoes and take her place rather than any kind of true collective solution being found. Everything leading up to the ending was pretty great, and the game does a decent enough job of interrogating your beliefs and making you seriously consider the issues being presented, but yeah, not the biggest fan of the ending itself. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Nov 16, 2023 |
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Nov 16, 2023 03:23
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Thoom posted:South 3 was the last straw for me. I'm just going to look up guides for the rest of the Pandora stars and move on with my life. Activate the receiver on top of the tower? That's fine. Then find the tiny connector that it unlocks at the top of the tower that the game can't even properly render from that distance? Testing my patience. Then somehow intuit that this would unlock a hidden compartment with another connector in Puzzle 3? No. gently caress all the way off, Croteam. Your puzzle is bad and you should feel bad. I don't think it unlocks a hidden compartment in puzzle 3, I think that one's always tucked away in the corner there - I found it before even noticing the receiver on the tower. I'm finishing up the south regions and the hardest thing so far has been finding the mandatory labs - twice now I've cleared all the puzzles and gotten all the stars and then needed to turn on the compass to find the actual lab. I don't know what that says about me.
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Nov 16, 2023 03:27
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Snake Maze posted:I don't think it unlocks a hidden compartment in puzzle 3, I think that one's always tucked away in the corner there - I found it before even noticing the receiver on the tower. That's less-bad if true, but I still don't like the design. Somewhere in the middle of North, the Pandora stars go from insultingly easy to "wander around to every puzzle with a connector and waggle it at every exposed region of the sky praying for some invisible thing to light up". The search space is just too big and the connectors are too hard to see. The only one I thought had a decent flow was South 2. If holding a connector caused distant connectors to light up, I'd probably hate them a lot less. I also found a weird bug in the dialogue system. If you're hovering over a response and middle click to check the log, you'll get locked out of that response. At first I thought the game was locking me out of some options based on my past choices and just telegraphing it poorly, but then I discovered I could select the unclickable ones by plugging in a controller.
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Nov 16, 2023 03:56
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Snake Maze posted:I don't think it unlocks a hidden compartment in puzzle 3, I think that one's always tucked away in the corner there - I found it before even noticing the receiver on the tower. The compartment is hidden but the trigger is solving the puzzle it is located within. Which has no laser elements. Thoom posted:That's less-bad if true, but I still don't like the design. Somewhere in the middle of North, the Pandora stars go from insultingly easy to "wander around to every puzzle with a connector and waggle it at every exposed region of the sky praying for some invisible thing to light up". The search space is just too big and the connectors are too hard to see. The only one I thought had a decent flow was South 2. If holding a connector caused distant connectors to light up, I'd probably hate them a lot less. It's no defense but a lot of the extra puzzles can be solved in unintended and simpler ways by smuggling pieces out of numbered stages similar to the first game. I had to look up the intended solution for the one in question and absolutely it's terrible and stupid, especially with all the temporal ghosting artifacts. I stared right at that little spire rising up while zoomed in and still had trouble distinguishing it until it settled into place. Looking to finish the game myself tonight, only a handful of gold doors remain 
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Nov 16, 2023 05:21
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Post South 3: Yaqut's transition from  to  to  when he has to solve a puzzle in the Megastructure was so cute.
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Nov 16, 2023 07:37
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Yeah, the ending didn't really sit right with me, either. I don't know, I feel like I wanted an actual compromise option, but the game doesn't give you one. Maybe this is a part of the game's message, that we need to take a bold stance to save our species and our planet before it's too late, but it felt like instead it was saying that the only path toward sustainable progress and the fulfillment of our "cosmic duty" is some magic technology that will only ever exist in the world of fantasy. My take on the ending was there's a dozen different fields of study that we can swap out "The Secret of Creation" for and have the point still stand. New Jerusalem is a society bound within The Goal, and some people have fully committed to the doctrine, even when Athena's words are laid out bare in front of them. Mayor Hermanubis would obviously not want this magic technology to get out there because it would disrupt the status quo, including his position of authority and his control over the populous, which he admits he's only trying to maintain because he believes he knows what is best for New Jerusalem and its people. New, dangerous, and life-altering discoveries like what Athena (and then 1K) can get a hold of could fundamentally change the course of human history forever, or cause more people to get hurt. We can see this example in New Alexandria, and also in what happened to Miranda. It would be better to hesitate, to not doggedly and publicly pursue this new technology, because of how universe-altering it would ultimately be. But it's still bullshit, because society is in decline, not stagnating. The status quo isn't a comfortable (yet boring) baseline that everybody can stick with, it's getting steadily worse in horrific ways and will continue doing that, faster and worse, unless we do something. And Mayor Hermanubis + his aides would like to stand over your shoulder and advise you that bad things have happened in the past, so we must continue to do things in the same way that we do them now, or else bad things could happen again. The bad things are already happening, and we are doing nothing to stop them! I think the biggest thing that stuck with me was talking with one of the robots about the Dome. They're working on finishing it, it's supposed to already be done, there were resource-scarcity issues around the perimeter of New Jerusalem,and now it's gotten worse because fewer and fewer expeditions are being done. They're thinking, optimistically, it could be done in more than a couple of decades. 1K and the rest show up on the island, and the first things that happens is 3 highrise-size laser-towers go up in an instant. The most pessimistic view I'd agree with is "we should probably figure out how the gently caress that happened, but at the same time, we gotta start building these infinite power generators/endless resource facilities yesterday." When we have the means to immediately feed, house, and power the world, with a proven success rate that far outpaces the potential dangers, we must pursue these means, to better society for everyone. I saw all the imposing concrete structures and couldn't stop thinking about nuclear power the whole time I was playing.
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Nov 16, 2023 08:22
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the first trip to the island is a bit like being an american and going to europe or china for the first time and finding out if they want new train lines they just build them
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Nov 16, 2023 08:45
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The funny thing for me is that for all the game's interesting talk about the direction of humanity and its place in the new world, my decision in the ending didn't really have much to do with that. For me, the question simply came down to: "Do we study this potentially useful new technology, even though it could be unbelievably dangerous if improperly used?" And I don't really see how you can argue that it would be better to keep it hidden. I feel like the best real-world comparison would be nuclear power: if you stick enough radioactive material together in the right way, you can generate power with few emissions, but radioactivity can be deadly, and if you put the material together in a different way you get a devastating bomb. But the thing is, if someone discovers this and decides not to pursue it further, it doesn't stop being true. Radioactivity is a fundamental property of physics, regardless of whether someone is studying it or not. And declaring "we're not going to study this, it's dangerous" doesn't cause radioactivity to cease to exist, it just delays its study. Someone elsewhere will eventually come along and discover it, or someone in the society forbidding its study will decide that the rule is stupid and investigate it in a way that's probably more dangerous. So the only rational choice is to learn more about it now, and discover both its uses and dangers. The alternative does absolutely nothing but delay the inevitable. The Theory of Everything is treated as being straight-up magic in Talos, but the way the real world understands the term, and the way it's described in-game (something like "I've discovered how the entire universe fits together in a single equation, and it's beautiful") suggests that it's just as much of a fundamental property of physics as radioactivity is. So yeah, you could declare the Theory to be too dangerous to study, or you could go further and blow up the Megastructure, but the Theory wouldn't stop being true, and someone else would eventually discover it. So why even consider those options? The only rational choice is to use the knowledge that Athena has already gained for the benefit of humanity. Attempting to suppress it is just cowardice, and will ultimately fail anyway.
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Nov 16, 2023 09:55
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I actually used the photo mode zoom-in a lot for the later Pandora puzzles.
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Nov 16, 2023 10:01
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If the all-powerful everything-solving MacGuffin is seriously called the Theory of Everything, at least tell me they address the connotations that the term usually has, because yeesh, that's Avatar-level naming conventions.
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Nov 16, 2023 10:12
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Yeah, the Talos 2 ending "choice" doesn't really make sense As someone else said, New Jerusalem is declining and they're screwed unless they do something. There are social media posts going "Our batteries are crap and failing quickly these days, what's going on?" But I enjoyed it far more than Talos 1. When I go "They can't expect me to pull off this awkward fiddly nonsense, surely?" in Talos 2, it's because they don't and I'm overthinking things. In the previous game they frequently did. Having said that I'm going to look up my missing stars as I can't be bothered wandering around aimlessly any more.
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Nov 16, 2023 11:19
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Two Owls posted:Yeah, the Talos 2 ending "choice" doesn't really make sense Talos 1 wasn't actually that bad about that. I remember one early puzzle was called something like "the correct angle". You could solve it by a super tediously precise positioning. But alternatively, you could use a box, to climb up a wall to have a way better angle from above.
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Nov 16, 2023 11:28
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In terms of story and atmosphere I enjoyed TTP1 much more, but the puzzle design is much better in the sequel - they're much less fiddly, the difficulty pacing is better, and there's much fewer situations where you need to perform a long sequence of actions with any stumble sending you back to square one.
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Nov 16, 2023 15:09
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Irony Be My Shield posted:I actually used the photo mode zoom-in a lot for the later Pandora puzzles. You can zoom in during normal gameplay by clicking the middle mouse. (I haven't messed with photo mode so maybe you already know that and it has a stronger zoom)
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Nov 16, 2023 15:27
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whyyyy does Cocoon insist on including action segments that are at odds with the strengths of the rest of the game. i'm OK with the boss fights (even though I think "one hit and you have to restart the whole thing" is a bit harsh for what's not primarily an action game) but these shooting-gallery segments seem to demand much more precision and narrow timing than anything else in the game. I'm 90% through and am not sure I'll actually finish
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Nov 17, 2023 18:08
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Remember when all the big action adventures and RPGs had to have a few ill-fitting puzzle sequences in them even though they were a poor fit to the game overall? It’s the same thing in reverse. I haven’t actually played Cocoon j.peeba fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Nov 17, 2023 |
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Nov 17, 2023 19:46
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I am very upset that ill-fitting puzzle sequences have fallen out of fashion in action adventure games and RPGs. I need something every hour or two that breaks out of the monotony of the core gameplay loop. That's why I love FF7 Remake so much -- it faithfully preserves and expands upon the tradition of ill-fitting puzzle sequences. Is the part where you make Aerith climb around on a robot crane arm scintillating gameplay? No, it is not. But it's a much needed respite from smashy smashy, talky talky, squeeze through narrow passage for 5 seconds to disguise a load time, repeat. That's also why I love the random terminals and social media posts in Talos Principle (to at least pretend that I'm being on-topic).
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Nov 17, 2023 20:29
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Or even RPGs where puzzles are an integral part of dungeons, and often quite challenging (Lufia 2)!
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Nov 17, 2023 21:20
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