Previews

Gamescom '14 Quick Pick - The Talos Principle is a heady mix of Portal-like puzzles and a metaphysical storyline

Checking in from Cologne

Gamescom '14 Quick Pick - The Talos Principle is a heady mix of Portal-like puzzles and a metaphysical storyline
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| The Talos Principle

This week, members of the Pocket Gamer and AppSpy crew are at Gamescom in Cologne. Between eating our collective body weight in sausages, we'll be bringing you quick-fire impressions of our favourite games on show.

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The Talos Principle is not the sort of game you might expect from Serious Sam developer Croteam. This one features no aliens, machine guns, or buckets of green blood.

Instead, it's a relaxing puzzle game in the same vein as The Room, Portal, and Jonathan Blow's upcoming The Witness.

You wander about lush environments - including forests and crumbling castles - solving puzzles involving laser beams and locked doors and the like. You'll eventually face turrets, too, and get to disrupt the flow of time.

These 120 puzzles are wrapped up in, according to the developer, a "metaphysical parable about intelligence and meaning in an inevitably doomed world." That heady storyline is penned by Tom Jubert (The Swapper) and Jonas Kyratzes (Infinite Ocean).

Talos Principle

The conundrums are suitably challenging, but you can wander off and finish over sections if you get stuck. Each area is split into easy, medium, and hard puzzles that can be solved in any order before moving on.

The controls can be a little tricky to control on mobile. Trying to plop down a repeater device to bounce a laser beam across a map was quite fiddly and involved various types of taps to pull off.

It is, after all, a PC and console game at heart and is coming to PC and PS4 and the like first. An Android edition will be available near launch, but exclusive to Tegra K1 devices (like the Shield Tablet) to match the graphical prowess of the main game.

A stripped back version for iOS and other Android devices will be out later. Expect The Talos Principle before the year is out.

Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer