Dave Critiques - Undertale: The importance of killing Toriel

Transcript

Hey Hey folks, Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I shall be talking about Undertale for those who have played it. If you haven’t, and are worried about spoilers, please pause the video and play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

Watching Dave talk about Undertale fills you with determination. That’s a joke, I say, a joke. Well ok, it’s a reference, and quite an easy one at that. I wanted to start off by talking about determination. The determination I’m most interested in is my determination to play the game non-violently. This again is no big shock. The game opens you up to this pathway right after meeting Toriel. Each enemy in the game has a way to defeat them non-violently. A lot of people who haven’t played Undertale yet know about this factor of the game (or they talk about “that bullet hell RPG”). Back when the PBS Idea Channel talked about Undertale, they said that one reason this is so remarkable is that unlike most videogames, the violence in Undertale is a choice. Nothing is stopping you from murdering every creature you come across (and the game has its own path for this decision), but the characters are so delightful, and the world so full of joy and whimsy, that I don’t even know if I could attempt such a thing. I’m the kind of person who when finally trying his first Renegade run in Mass Effect turned it off after 15 minutes because I couldn’t stand what a jerk Shepard was being.

Toriel teaches you the path of nonviolence. She’s Undertale’s female goat Gandhi. She also arranges it so that you are stuck living with her forever once you reach her house and have put her philosophy into practice. To continue with the game, you must go against her wishes and follow her into the basement. To prove that you’re strong enough to face what the rest of the game has in store for you, you must fight Toriel. Now like every other fight in Undertale, it is possible to win this without bloodshed. There’s even a hint of how to do it earlier on. I guarantee that most first time players miss this. I certainly did. When sparing Toriel didn’t work, and talking to her didn’t work, I thought my only recourse left was to maybe get her health down enough so that she would surrender and you could spare her. After all, that’s how it works in Pokemon.

There’s a mechanic in Undertale related to critical hits and how much health your enemy has. In the final fight against Asgore, I noticed this for the second time in the game (as this is another battle where it seems like you must fight your way through). In fact, this increased damage saved my bacon against Asgore as I was on my last sliver of health. Remember what I said about my Pokemon idea? So I get Toriel down to about a third of her health and still I can’t spare her or talk to her. I think perhaps it needs to be a quarter or less so I attack again. Critical hit. Toriel dies. The ensuing cut-scene happens and the title plays. I was devastated.

I considered reloading my last save point and trying again. I’m sure many who killed Toriel thought of this or actually did it. Despite having to fight her, Toriel is gentle, kind, and lonely. It’s easy to empathise with her and her actions, and that makes the fight and her death even more poignant. As painful as it was, I decided to forge ahead. Here’s why. It has to do with David Cage. I know, I know, but listen. Back when Heavy Rain was released, Cage remarked that he didn’t want people replaying his game. You control 4 characters in Heavy Rain, and in most perilous situations, if you fail, the character you are controlling will die, and the game will continue. This leads to many possible scenarios. Cage’s thoughts were that the story you ended up with would be your unique story. I like this idea. It especially opens up a conversation with others who have played the game, as you can compare your notes on what happened and who survived. When Bioshock came out it was semester break at university, and returning to classes, all my friends started discussing our various strategies for combat. It gives each player a certain amount of ownership over their experience. Of course this idea goes against the notion of replayability which has been a sought after feature by gamers and game reviews for decades now.

And Undertale is chock full of replayability. Not only are there three main endings, but on those paths, there are some choices that will lead to different outcomes. Not all of these change the nature of the game, some are just changes in dialogue among individual characters, but it remains that Toby Fox put a lot of thought into anticipating player decisions and accounting for them. It’s the best use of player anticipation I’ve seen since The Stanley Parable. When a game has so many pathways open to it, a decision on when to stop playing has to be made. I have almost never played through a game a second time straight after completing it. All the other pathways, all those other decisions I leave until I feel like playing the game again someday in the future. Of course I am afforded this opportunity because I can buy my own games. I’ve always thought replayability was only a hook for younger players. If you only get a new game on your birthday or Christmas (if even you get one that often), no doubt you’re going to be playing a game with multiple paths over and over again until you exhaust all possible outcomes. Even then you’ll learn to master the systems and make your own fun within the game space. That’s certainly my experience as a kid, and I had some pretty awful games to do that with too.

As a further example of this, after completing the game, I guess I got the neutral ending. I had to fight Photoshop Flowey. That was a trip and a half. The game ends with encouraging you to replay to get the pacifist ending. I had killed Toriel after all. I was merciful to every other enemy in the game (even Flowey), but I had killed Toriel. And you know what, I’m kind of glad it ended up that way. The horror of accidentally ending Toriel’s life after she had been so kind to me, after I tried my hardest to find a peaceful solution, that stuck with me for the rest of the game. That crack I made at the start about determination, it turns out there’s truth to it. Killing Toriel filled me with determination. The determination to not end another life, no matter how difficult. I didn’t always have the answer, especially for most of the boss battles, but that determination made me look up the solution to these fights online. Strange huh. I didn’t want to reload my save file because this is the path I had chosen, but at the same time, I was going to find a way to complete the game nonviolently by any means necessary. It also gives me something to accomplish for a future playthrough.

I entertained playing through Undertale again straight afterwards. I actually played the first hour. I was able to spare Toriel, and then get a ways into Papyrus’ traps but then decided that my original playthrough was all I needed to make this video. The pacifist playthrough is something I can look forward to one day. Not only to see what happens but because I know there are many things I didn't do. I never made friends with Undyne. I never went on a date with Dr Alphys, and I’m sure there’s so much more that I missed. That’s the benefit of a game with replayability, more often than not, it’s close to impossible to see everything the first time through. Of course the opposite can be true too. If you play through a certain way, get an ending that was unsatisfying, and then don’t play the game again, your experience of the game might be negative, regardless of the game’s quality. I enjoyed my time with Undertale. That’s good enough for now, and getting the pacifist ending in the future might change my perspective of the game for the better.

Thanks for watching.

Dave Critiques - The Beginner's Guide: Is it anti-critic?

Transcript

Hey Hey folks, Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I’m going to be discussing The Beginner’s Guide for those who have played it. If you are worried about spoilers (and this is a 90-minute game that has quite an impactful narrative revelation), please pause the video, and play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

I’d like to start this off with a quote by Ed Smith over at Kill Screen on The Beginner’s Guide.

“Everyone wants to look like they “get” games, or that they respect art, but ultimately their displays are hollow since they’re more interested in intellectual credibility than actually just speaking honestly about and enjoying the work.”

This quote may not have had the emotional impact that the end of The Beginner’s Guide does, but it affected me on a much deeper level. Such a quote brings into question the purpose of what I’m doing. Am I writing about games simply because I love games and want to express this love, or am I looking for intellectual validation? “Oh that Dave guy, he writes some smart stuff about games.” Heck, one of my favourite things is to share work I find intellectually stimulating or funny with others, to see reactions. I attach myself to the work I share, and get a measure of joy when someone reacts positively to it. I am aware that the work is created by another person, but I gain a measure of satisfaction from being the person who let someone else know about a piece of art I enjoy. It’s safe to say that I was very sympathetic and understanding of Davey Wreden’s motives and plight during this game.

It would also be disingenuous to say that I don’t enjoy the creation of these videos. Unlike sharing work, my criticism is the combination of two hobbies: playing games, and writing about games. Actually throw in voiceover and video editing in there as well. Basically, I found a way to turn playing videogames into its own form of artistic expression. Some people see critics as parasitic, attaching themselves to art to serve their own ends, but criticism is indeed its own artform. It’s part interpretation, part translation, and a whole lot of guess work. Half the fun of writing about games (or any art really) is choosing the angle you’re going to be writing from. Most often this choice is dictated by the uniquely human experience of the writer. I tend to focus on my emotions and choices when playing games, but then fall into discussing aspects of the games themselves I find interesting. It goes to show that with any piece of art, the finished product might not have been able to meet the artist’s intention.

It’s entirely possible to read The Beginner’s Guide as being anti-critic. Davey isn’t just walking us through the games of Coda, he has altered them to suit his pre-determined conclusions. His blatant disregard for the wishes of his friend lead to the game’s conclusion, and shows a lot of what I’ve just discussed turmoiling around in Davey. This need for external validation by sharing the work of another is one thing, but what about actually changing the art itself? Critics often are criticised themselves for the connections some make to support an interpretation, but there is a difference. An interpretation that causes any audience to think that the critic is stretching themselves past breaking point to justify said interpretation; such an interpretation can be argued, ridiculed, or ignored. It invites discussion and response just like a piece of art does. If you change the art to make your point however, well The Beginner’s Guide takes the position that there is a real problem with that and it can do a lot of harm to the artist.

Coda is not making games for an audience, he is making games for himself, and he has chosen to share them with a small group of people, Davey being one of them. That the games are mostly unplayable on purpose is part of the art that Coda is making. This is a dilemma that might be unique to videogames. Not only a piece of art that can’t be finished, or that forces the audience to spend more time than they thought they were going to, but a piece of art that can be changed by another person to circumvent these problems (if you even see them as problems in the first place). If someone makes a 5-hour long movie filming a streetlamp, an audience member can fast forward it, or if it’s on YouTube, skip around. This doesn’t change the original video in any way. If you share that video with only one friend, they could edit it before sharing it with others. They could add sentences to your written story, they could change your painting with their own brushstrokes. Writing this now I wonder if The Beginner’s Guide is making a comment how once art is made it no longer belongs to the artist, or perhaps that’s only true when an audience is introduced, even if that audience is only one person. It does seem to take Coda’s side on the matter though. Like the relationship between artist and audience cannot coexist alongside friendship.

I don’t think The Beginner’s Guide is anti-critic however. As said earlier, Davey isn’t just interpreting Coda’s work, he is changing it. He is effectively making his own work on top of Coda’s and then reading into it to make himself feel validated as the audience of this game agrees with his views. That is if you believe what Davey is telling you. One of the core questions of the game that has been discussed a lot is how much of the game is actually real. Is the Davey Wreden of The Beginner’s Guide a fictional character, or is this an actual depiction of a betrayed friendship between two game designers that took place in the years around 2010? If the answer is anywhere on the spectrum between these two positions, then how much can we believe, and why? There are a lot of inconsistencies with the story. For instance, if The Tower was Coda’s final game, what is Davey playing in the epilogue, and how many of Coda’s games didn’t he show us to support his own findings. How many games didn’t Coda send to Davey? What if there never was a Coda to begin with, in reality or fiction? Why does The Tower seem to be Davey in real time when he needed to have played through the game to change it for you as the player?

While The Beginner’s Guide isn’t anti-critic, I think it speaks to the dangers of trying to understand an artist as a person from their artwork. You can gain glimpses into what they were thinking or feeling at the time they created the work, but even speaking to them about it won’t likely give you the whole story. The university game is the best example of this. You never know what other people are going through, why they do what they do, and why they create what they create. As a critic, the best you can do is interpret and make a case for a point of view. Since the criticism is filtered through your unique life experience (especially if you enjoy writing from a subjective viewpoint), then those that are the audience for your criticism encounter the same problem in understanding you as a critic from what you wrote. It’s interpretation all the way down.

Thanks for watching.

Dave Critiques - The Silver Case: It doesn't matter what it's about

Transcript

Hey Hey folks, Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I will be talking about The Silver Case for those who have played it. If you are worried about spoilers, I suggest you pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

In 2007 I played Killer7, and I think it changed my perception of what games can be. It’s kind of weird to say that and not have it be hyperbolic. Despite the unintuitive rail shooting, odd controls, and scattershot plot, when it finished it was like nothing I have ever experienced in a videogame before, or likely since. Heck, it made me read a 50-page plot FAQ to understand an interpretation of what I just went through. Granted I haven’t encountered many stories overall that play with characters being representative of more than one thing, but definitely not in a game. It made me a fan of Suda51 as a game developer. The year after, I bought No More Heroes, and while it wasn’t as grandiose in its ambition, it cemented my fascination with the man’s work. Also, it was one of the few games to really think about the controls of the Nintendo Wii in a genuinely creative manner. I’ll always remember the smile on my face during the first cell phone conversation with Sylvia Christel.

Over the years I’ve kept up with his work and have enjoyed it to varying degrees. Subversive elements are hidden in big budget action titles like Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw, and Killer is Dead is the closest I feel we've gotten to recapturing some of that Killer7 magic. I even played Flower, Sun, and Rain when it was rereleased on the DS. That one is hard to get through. A groundhog day visual novel where the solution to every puzzle was hidden in a guidebook about the island your character was spending his reoccurring day in. It seems the further you go back in Suda’s work, the less user-friendly it is. You have to be willing to endure some levels of obtuseness or tedium to fully engage with the interesting elements. If anything, as Suda has made more games, he’s been able to hide the most interesting elements under the surface of mechanics and user interfaces that are more accommodating to your average player. With this in mind, I was fully expecting to have a difficult time with the remaster of The Silver Case; Suda’s first game under his own studio Grasshopper Manufacture.

The Silver Case like Flower, Sun, and Rain is a visual novel. You play a silent protagonist that is part of a special forces unit that gets slaughtered by a master serial killer who has escaped from a mental hospital. After this happens, you find yourself working at the heinous crimes unit of the police force and engage in some cases that all have something to do with Kamui the serial killer or the strange circumstances surrounding him. During this time you get to know most of the members of the force relatively well, but this is only half the game. The other half is following a journalist who has been hired by a mysterious benefactor to investigate Kamui. These episodes run in-between the case files and usually follow the events that you just played through as the heinous crimes unit. In some cases, your investigation spells out what just occurred during the case. This was beneficial during the case titled Parade where the CEO of a corporation gets kidnapped, and the background of why was very ambiguous in the case itself (or I just wasn’t able to put it together as I was playing it). Tokio’s section afterwards put the pieces together and made the whole thing a lot more impactful. Of course when the story kind of spirals inward on itself at the end, I found Tokio’s last section kind of confusing. The game doesn’t end in a satisfying manner. I won’t say there are more questions than answers as that actually isn’t the case. The story does wrap itself up nicely, but a lot of the details confused me. Either because they were introduced too late or I didn't see threads that might have been woven through the whole story. I think The Silver Case is one of those works of fiction that would benefit greatly from going through it a second time, if just to understand what’s happening as it happens.

The thing that you sometimes have to ask yourself playing a Suda game is if the annoying elements are there on purpose. For instance, Tokio’s investigative sections can become overly tedious. The only interactivity in these chapters is to walk to your computer to check your email, talk to your pet turtle, or answer the phone. It echoes the sections of the case files when you find yourself in your apartment, although the special forces character you play exits the apartment after checking his email or looking in the mirror to go work the case. That leads to more interactive opportunities, limited as they may be. Tokio just gets to walk around his apartment. When he goes out investigating, it’s a cutscene. The player is stuck in almost a Groundhog Day repetition of waking up, walking to the computer, checking it, and having the plot move forward. Perhaps this idea is what lead to the creation of Flower, Sun, and Rain, which uses these repetitive elements to increased thematic effect. The tedium still stands in both cases though. Is purposeful bad game design to make a point still bad game design? If not, how do you tell the difference? Papers Please was pretty overt in that the tedium of your job is part of the point, but when does a developer gain the benefit of the doubt in these matters? Is it when they have something interesting to say?

I will admit, there were times I thought about not continuing with The Silver Case. The plot had me lost, the interactive elements were almost non-existent, and boy is the game long for what it is; around 12 hours. There was something that kept me going though, and I think perhaps it was the ideas at play. I want to say it can’t be the characters. The reason I want to say that is that they’re written in such broad strokes. There are about as many uses of “motherfucker” as you’d expect in a Quentin Tarantino movie. There’s this veneer of machismo, that what makes a man tough is saying “fuck” every second word, and then threatening anyone who makes a joke at their expense. When we first meet Tokio and senior detective Kasubi, this is the impression we have of them. As we spend more time with these characters, we do see that this is a facade that they use to hide the real issues plaguing them, or perhaps it’s a response to the horrors that they have to deal with in their line of work. It doesn’t make it any less adolescent, but you start to accept it a little more because you know where it’s coming from.

But we do get to know these characters, or at least we thought we did until the end. All bets are off in the end. The whole plot is a vast conspiracy and it seems almost everyone is a part of it in some way or another. The corpses pile up in the last couple of cases, and even the epilogue suggests that the murder count and cause of all the problems are far from over. After all, the character you play is still alive. When serial killers are educated as children, brainwashed and controlled by the government, and you play a defected product of that experiment, well it probably would be a lot safer to not let such a person be walking around. Although I do wonder if that’s even what the game is about. There’s talk of crime as a virus, and how even the most abhorrent ideas can be praised by society. As the game was made in the late 90s, there’s a lot of talk about how the internet is going to affect people’s lives and society in the new millennium, and the ideas and concerns don’t seem altogether that dated. Hell, it even has a similar reveal as the first season of Psycho Pass as to what is actually needed to run this perfect system. It’s just a little more ludicrous.

And it’s not a style over substance thing either. Even though one thing that struck me was, I have never seen a videogame that looks like this before. The background movement, the colour schemes chosen for different cases, the portioning off of the screen for small pieces of animation, or the use of video along with the mix of 2D and 3D art. It definitely makes an impression. There is substance here. It’s just not told in a straightforward manner, and the game 's not really as engaging as one would expect a game to be, even a visual novel. I think it’s more interesting as an entry into the games of Suda51 to see a style and sensibility start to emerge. To be able to track that from the beginning, to where the gameplay becomes more important, and yet how the ideas have not been sacrificed.

Thanks for watching.

Dave Critiques - Child of Eden: Perseverance pays off

Transcript

Hey Hey folks, Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I will be discussing Child of Eden for those who have played it. If you’re worried about spoilers, please stop the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

Child of Eden is a game that has been sitting in my PS3 library for years. It’s been on my mind ever since I bought a console capture device back in April, and it’s sad it’s taken me this long to record another PS3 game with it. Well, the stars aligned, and it looks like after a brief play Child of Eden is what I would call the spiritual successor to Rez.

Right away I was struck by, I guess you could call it a sense of synaesthesia. Child of Eden tries its best to fully capture three of the body’s five senses and twist them around in a tumble dryer. The surreal visuals mix with the pulsing soundtrack which is reinforced by the subtle yet ever present vibration of the controller. As each stage continues, all three aspects keep building to a crescendo. Most of the time, that crescendo is a boss fight, but all of the stages play with this simple idea of building to cathartic release in different ways. For example, stage 1 has the boss quite early on, and then the action starts building all over again afterwards. Stage 4 has you fighting the boss at the outset, in the middle, and finally at the end, and stage 5 is sort of a boss rush, where all the previous bosses appear in different forms. Luckily you don’t have to fight all of them, but the variations on their original encounters undoubtedly resulted in some panic.

I’ve strayed a little from my synaesthesia point so let me talk about my first play session with the game. In that session, I played through stage 1 and 2. At the end of stage 2 when I turned off my PS3, I felt like I had just been on a hallucinogenic ride. I felt like I needed to come down. So potent was the game, and I was so focused on playing through these stages that it physically affected me. The reason I want to bring this up is this is one of the pitfalls of writing about videogames. You can watch someone play through game footage, and especially if they're commentating, you can get an idea of what is like to play the game yourself, but it is a poor substitute for what it feels like to be plugged into the machine so to speak. And I was just playing on a standard TV using a controller. Child of Eden supports 3D television and either the Kinect or Move depending on what system you play on. I tell you, I would have definitely appreciated the finesse of motion controls over using the analogue stick as I played through stages 3 and 4.

I had no idea the game would get this hard. I seemed to be alone in that thought too, as most of the help on the internet was along the lines of, “What?! It’s easy!”. It does seem that the actual challenge of Child of Eden is in 100% purges and 5-starring the level, but just making it through was a nightmare for me. And unlike a lot of other games, there are no cheats and no walkthroughs to help me when I get stuck. No, this is a game where I must use my skill to get further and the only way to improve that is to play these levels over and over again until I become intimate with them.

Part of my slow progress was taking an inordinate amount of time to work out the whole regular enemy / purple enemy divergence. Once this was realised, the 3rd stage, ‘Beauty’ was not as daunting and it only took me a couple of tries to best it. Stage 4, ‘Passion’ is where I almost considered giving up. And it wasn’t the stage either, it was the boss. Child of Eden has no checkpoints, so a 12 minute stage has to be played through again if you lose it at the end, and did I lose it at the end, time and time again. The patterns of purple projectiles it pelted me with were insurmountable. Even if I had saved up my euphorias (a screen-clearing bomb that you can hold up to 3 of), it wasn’t enough to stop the onslaught. I was becoming frustrated and disillusioned. Sure, you can farm previous levels for stars to unlock the later stages, but upon acquiring 20 stars to unlock the final stage, I realised I had to complete Passion before I got a chance at it.

So was I going to give up? I told myself that I had more than enough footage to talk about this game. I also told myself I made a commitment, and if I used a play session to keep playing Passion over and over again, I’d eventually have to win. So I bought myself a 3.5mm jack cable extender so I could plug my headphones into my television (as there’s no way to use headphones connected to the PS3), and set my intentions to finally making it through. I beat it the first try that evening. After hours of defeat, I made it through… barely. My heart was pounding, and my adrenaline was soaring as it came down to the wire between the boss and me. I had one health left and had used my euphorias. Could I pump enough damage into it before the projectiles overcame me again? I could!

So I had one final decision to make. Would I play the last stage through normally, or go to ‘no damage mode’ to scope out the lay of the land? To those wondering why I wasn’t playing on ‘no damage mode’, you don’t get scores or unlock stars for using that mode. Nothing counts. You can’t progress. Well, I made the decision to try the final level on normal. My adrenaline was high, and I thought I was in the zone enough to be able to take on whatever came my way. And you know what? I was right. After all the replays of ‘Beauty’ and ‘Passion’, I finished ‘Journey’ the first time. Child of Eden was over. I could now relax as the credits played. It's like a mini epic. I faced what seemed like impossible challenges, I thought about giving up, I decided to keep at it, I persevered, and I am glad I did. It resulted in triumph.

Thanks for watching.

Dave Critiques - The Talos Principle: What does it leave behind?

Transcript 

Hey Hey folks, Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I will be discussing The Talos Principle for those who have played it. If you are worried about spoilers, please stop the video, and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue!

When explaining The Talos Principle to others, I describe it as “Portal, with existential philosophy instead of humour”. Having completed all three endings of Talos on two occasions, I have to say that the description still stands. You enter a number of puzzle rooms that prompt you to use the tools at your disposal to solve them. As you do not use a portal gun and your character can jump, this is where the differences end (not to mention the complete divergence of theme and purpose). To take some of the headache out of first person platforming, jumping is almost turn based in that footsteps will appear on ledges, showing you where you will land if you hit the jump button. This is the first of many clever things about this game.

A lot has been written and discussed on the topic of mechanics as metaphor. Essentially it is the game imparting narrative information through the gameplay itself (its rules and systems). The Talos Principle links most of how it looks and plays to what it is about. The puzzle rooms have a purpose, the gorgeous locations have a purpose, the QR codes from other players have a purpose, and listening to both Elohim and the MLA have a purpose. What is that purpose? For starters, I think it speaks to the development team and project lead setting out to make something they really cared about. Something they could only express through this medium.

At every turn, the game is rewarding and vexing the player, often simultaneously. The puzzles can be fiendish, but you have a wide variety of them to choose from in your quest to retrieve any one sigil (the reward for solving said rooms). Exploring the world reveals lost audio logs, new computer terminals, QR messages, and even glitches in the system. Conversation is actually an important game mechanic. Once you make contact with the Milton Library Assistant, it will start to ask you very tough questions about what it means to be alive and to have consciousness. There is no right answer as any answer given will result in the MLA coming at you from a different angle. These conversations were my favourite part of the game. Although my desire to be cordial to the MLA in the face of its insults lead to it not wanting to speak to me anymore the first time through, in my second playthrough, I became friends with it, and we eventually fused into one being.

Even cooperation is a mechanic. Not only can you find paintbrushes that allow you to leave messages (that friends on your Steam account can see in their game), but the conversations between characters give great insight into how the other children of Elohim are faring. This all culminates at the top of the tower when you have to solve puzzles alongside Samsara and The Shepard (two characters you would be quite familiar with by this point). This section of the game leads towards the second of three endings, and after playing through it, I read their messages littered around the game world with a lot more understanding. Oh, and let’s not forget the playback machines, where you have to use a recorded version of yourself to help solve puzzles. If you think cooperating with other people can be maddening, try cooperating with yourself!

I’d like to take the time to address how a puzzle game like The Talos Principle works when playing through it a second time, as I did to acquire this footage. I last played the game in late 2015 so almost a full year has gone by. I had a much easier time with the majority of the puzzle solutions, and I don’t think it has to do with remembering how the puzzles were solved. A month or so before playing Talos I played a couple of hours of The Witness to see if I wanted to critique it (I do, and that video will be on its way sometime in the future). The Witness’ approach to puzzle design is not so much presenting you with puzzles to solve but rather teaching you the language that you need to solve the puzzles in the first place. That’s what caused the most grief my first time through The Talos Principle. The solutions to the puzzles often required the use of puzzle elements that I didn’t even know was possible. Returning to the game, I knew the puzzle language and had a much smoother time of it. There were still many red sigil puzzles that gave me grief, but more often than not, reading a messenger hint was enough to grease the gears of my brains sufficiently to lead towards acquiring the sigil.

So now we get to the question that is most pertinent, just what is going on? Well if you’ve completed the first ending, you’ll have a sense of what this computer construct’s goal is and what it is aiming for. Sadly the first ending means your character fails at what it set out to do, which is why I refer to ending two as the ‘real ending’ (and not just because we get a proper credits sequence). The second ending creates a sense of autonomy, and of anti-authoritarianism. It’s also only possible by benefitting from the work of others. It sort of mirrors that Isaac Newton quote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

The second ending leads to a new age of the Earth. As far as I can ascertain, the whole game is set within a computer simulation that contains archives of all of human knowledge (or as much as they could archive before they were wiped out). Elohim, the MLA, the puzzles: they’re all there to create the perfect artificial intelligence to take physical form, and go out into the reality that humanity has left behind. The ‘talos principle’ itself refers to a concept that for all our philosophising, we’re still tied to this world in corporeal form, and thus have to come to terms with the limitations that brings. The character you are playing is trying to achieve physical form. Elohim and the MLA are watchful computer systems whose purpose is to mould the intellect of those that are training to ascend and become more than themselves.

Rather than expanding on this, the third ending seems like a letdown but is a missing piece of the puzzle. It’s kind of inversely proportional to the work required to activate it. You have to gather all the bonus stars in the game, and then solve the grey sigil puzzles in the star worlds. The stars are the most ingeniously guarded of all the game’s prizes, often using elements from multiple puzzle rooms to solve (or keen observational and deductive reasoning skills). Some of the stars are hidden in quite a beautiful way, such as the star on messenger island C, but most of them I never would have found if not for a walkthrough.

My first playthrough I started using a walkthrough about halfway through the sigils in Temple B. There were still puzzles I solved on my own, but you know how this works. The more you use a walkthrough, the easier it is to go back to it time and time again when you get stuck (and it took me this long to discover how easy it is to use the Steam community guides in game). I would say I solved around two-thirds of the puzzles on my own, and ended up using a walkthrough for everything else (including the bonus stars and the larger tetromino fields). On the second playthrough, I only needed a walkthrough for 2 of the red sigil puzzles, and about half of the grey sigil puzzles (plus once again, most of the tetromino fields).

I think what this means is I am admitting that the game is smarter than me. I feel like one of Elohim’s failed children (of whose desperate messages I read so much of during my playtime). The caveat is that while I felt defeated, I still was able to succeed thanks to the work of others. Very similar to the second ending in fact. Perhaps if I was like one of the programs whose only purpose was to solve these puzzles, I might have persevered, but as that was not the case, I did what I had to do to gain the answers I required. And then the third ending didn’t feel like such a let down because as I was helped in my quest to finish the game, I can now help others in their quest. All the work to find the stars made a little more sense. To truly help others, you must be fiercely dedicated and sure of your own purpose.

Finally, after the task of completing all three endings, I wondered about everything in the game that I had missed. I skimmed most of the text files in the computers, and I’m sure I missed a couple QR codes and audio messages. I wonder how many more easter eggs were present in the game, and what they entailed. More than anything I thought of the developer’s motives for making the game.

What were they trying to say? As the game revolves around philosophy, perhaps they weren’t trying to say anything, at least in an absolute sense. It almost feels like a thought experiment. Not only how computer intelligence would regard our collected history, but how such intelligence is formed, what it means, and how it wrestles with the same questions we wrestle with. Perhaps all that matters is what we leave behind. In this game, humanity is gone, but the combined efforts of the species have been passed on (as much as it can be I guess). Perhaps The Talos Principle is a similar process of the development team passing on their ideas to those that come after them. If that’s not the purpose of life, there’s a good argument to be made for it being the purpose of art.