Croteam and Devolver Digital have announced that The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna, the sweeping expansion to the award-winning first-person puzzler The Talos Principle, will launch July 23 on PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam.
The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna will consist of four episodes that take experienced players through some of the most advanced and challenging puzzles yet. Players will return to a strange, hidden part of the simulation as Uriel, Elohim's messenger, and attempt to free the souls trapped in this mysterious place.
The Talos Principle writers Tom Jubert and Jonas Kyratzes have returned to pen the expansion and show players an entirely different side of Elohim's world through a journey to Gehenna filled with new characters and a new society with its own history and philosophy.
“The original plan was to divide The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna into over 100 different $5 DLCs but the Devolver Digital DLC Ethics Department advised against it,” noted Devolver Digital CFO Fork Parker. “That particular department has subsequently been disbanded.”
Build 243520 for The Talos Principle is released.
If you have previously opted into public beta, you already have this.
Here are the changes:
New features:
- Prepared for Road To Gehenna DLC.
- Added experimental support for SteamVR. To enable it, right click on The Talos Principle in your Steam Library, then click on Properties / Set Launch Options, and add the following parameter: +vr 1
- Added support for the newest ATI GPUs.
Gameplay/visual improvements:
- Improved behavior of wide plasma walls: players will no longer be pushed to the original point of entry, and touch effects should sound more natural.
- Improved the appearance of soft shadows on vegetation.
- Added support for viewer-facing cloud particles, which should look more natural.
- Deliberate glitching will no longer occur while player is using a terminal.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed several cases where connectors would lose their connections when using time recorder.
- Fixed SSAO artifacts on certain resolutions and buffer scales.
- Fixed an issue causing some crumbs to be rendered black (e.g. black grass).
- Fixed artifacts along object edges lit by fast lights when using MSAA.
- Shader caching and texture loading progress screen will now render correctly on triple screen setups.
- Improved translations for several languages.
Optimizations:
- Major overhaul of crumbs rendering. There should be a noticable increase in performance on lower-end PCs.
- Optimized visibility system for distant lights, which improves performance on lower-end CPUs.
- Improved performance of plasma wall rendering on ATI cards.
Got completely stuck on a non-star puzzle so taking a break for now. Seems like there's four areas, each with four puzzles and maybe four stars? (I haven't checked closely)
So far it's more Talos Principle, though the story is really interesting.
It's friggin' hard. I've lost at least an hour just kinda running back and forth squinting at puzzle components. Surely, if I stare at this laser long enough, a solution will appear.
It's friggin' hard. I've lost at least an hour just kinda running back and forth squinting at puzzle components. Surely, if I stare at this laser long enough, a solution will appear.
Yeah wow. The first puzzle took me a bit to figure out and it only involved the laser beacons.
I got stumped on a couple because I forgot some basic things; I imagine one would have an easier time if you had just played the main game instead of having done it months ago. Most of the regular puzzles were challenging, but not impossible, thankfully.
Those star puzzles are downright diabolical though. Fucking hell. One of the ones in level 2 was nothing short of a slog. Still got one more star in level 3 and all four in level 4 before I'm done.
Okay, I finally finished the Talos Principle expansion "Road to Gehenna" This was a fantastic expansion that managed to find the exact right "hook" to justify its existence when it looked like there'd be no narrative way to do so. In fact, in some ways it may be better than the original. (Probably not, but its up there)
The story has spoilers for the end of Talos Principle so I'll put it in tags
The game takes place during the end of the original game, while the world is being erased due to the Process being completed. As a last act, Elohim decides to free several.. we'll call them dissidents.. (former AI's who either failed or displeased him), allowing them to become part of the final upload. Only he can't free them directly, so he creates a literal copy of his messenger, Uriel, and sends him into the prison area, slowing down time enough for him to free everyone. The area is a typical Talos Principle setup, with a hub world that connects to four "levels" each with 4-5 puzzles in them (and a bunch of stars). Though rather than getting sigils, you're freeing people.
But the best part, the absolute best part.. You should discover it for yourself but I'll put it in spoilers.
So everyone is basically jailed in Gehenna; but they essentially all have access to the database.. and each other.. and they basically built a forum to share information. Having nothing but time on their hands, they have taken to essentially creating art. Stories, poetry, artwork (in glorious ascii!) and even playable text adventure games! But what's even better, is we have full on "Robots trying to understand humanity" going on here. They're basically building all this creativity though emulating and being inspired by stuff in the database, and they fluxuate from being surprisingly insightful about their source material, to being utterly confused or just plain getting things wrong or mixed up or just not quite grasping things. It's some great dialog, IMO. There's a little more too it that I'll let you discover for yourself.
The puzzles are hard-fucking-core. The main 17 puzzles are reasonable if you're Talos Principle skills are fresh, though if you're like me, then there will be a few things here and there you've forgotten from the original. The 16 stars are fucking nightmares, though I've definitely overthough a couple of them (or just missed something obvious.) There's one star on Level 2 that is the most ridiculous shit I've ever seen in the series so far. Like, most stars have you "break" the game somehow.. this one has you break the game like 3 or 4 times. Damn.
Finally
There's a secret area (that's why you need those damnable stars!) with another seven puzzles you need to get a special ending. These puzzles are pretty much the most devious set in the entire game, almost requiring you to build NEW skills as you find even further ways to exploit the system. You feel brilliant once you solve them.
Overall, hardcore puzzles (maybe a wee bit too hard for some people), a great story and more of that great gameplay from the original, this was a great expansion to a great game. If you liked Talos Principle, (even the later, hard puzzles) I can't recommend it enough.
Been playing through the Prototype DLC and it's interesting. It's just barebones puzzles in levels without any real artistic design and no story. (So it's pretty good podcast fodder so far). It's neat to see puzzles I recognize from the main game, and to see how they got changed or not. More intersting is puzzles I don't recognize and guessing why they got cut (One was basically just a maze of mines and there wasn't really any thought to it, it was just timing your movements.). Biggest flaw is that the puzzles are arranged sequentially in packs of 20, so once your doing one chain of puzzles, your committed to the end.
Not sure if it's worth $5 since it's a lot of repeat puzzles from the main game, but if you can snag it for cheap you might want to check it out.
Posts
http://steamcommunity.com/games/257510/announcements/detail/47635655596075623
http://www.amazon.com/Talos-Principle-Deluxe-PlayStation-4/dp/B00X67FWNY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436888511&sr=8-1&keywords=Talos+Principle+PS4
That wasn't in the thread title all along was it? Because that would make me feel dumb...
Nah, I added it in.
I honestly forgot there was even going to be a PS4 version, which is funny considering it first showed up at a Sony press conference.
So far it's more Talos Principle, though the story is really interesting.
Yeah wow. The first puzzle took me a bit to figure out and it only involved the laser beacons.
Those star puzzles are downright diabolical though. Fucking hell. One of the ones in level 2 was nothing short of a slog. Still got one more star in level 3 and all four in level 4 before I'm done.
The story has spoilers for the end of Talos Principle so I'll put it in tags
But the best part, the absolute best part.. You should discover it for yourself but I'll put it in spoilers.
The puzzles are hard-fucking-core. The main 17 puzzles are reasonable if you're Talos Principle skills are fresh, though if you're like me, then there will be a few things here and there you've forgotten from the original. The 16 stars are fucking nightmares, though I've definitely overthough a couple of them (or just missed something obvious.) There's one star on Level 2 that is the most ridiculous shit I've ever seen in the series so far. Like, most stars have you "break" the game somehow.. this one has you break the game like 3 or 4 times. Damn.
Finally
Overall, hardcore puzzles (maybe a wee bit too hard for some people), a great story and more of that great gameplay from the original, this was a great expansion to a great game. If you liked Talos Principle, (even the later, hard puzzles) I can't recommend it enough.
Not sure if it's worth $5 since it's a lot of repeat puzzles from the main game, but if you can snag it for cheap you might want to check it out.