14 DAY TRIAL // The relative paucity of big launches that affects the first two months of almost every year means that gamers have more time to look back to the previous 12-month period and see what video games they might have missed and they might want to try out.
For me, still struggling to get out of my Dragon Age: Inquisition habit, filling time is not an issue but a change of pace is required, and the title which appeals to my sometimes peculiar tastes is The Talos Principle.
When the game was first announced as the new project of the team which created Serious Sam, I decided that I would not pay attention to it during the development cycle, so I was surprised to see it getting solid reviews, with plenty of gamers praising the way it mixed puzzles and philosophy to create an interesting and engaging world.
I decided to play The Talos Principle and see what it had to offer, and just as I was about to spend my money via Steam, I realized that I had not dealt with serious puzzles in a video game environment for quite a while.
Solutions, clues and time
When I was young, my father tried to make me see how good classic adventure titles were, but while playing, I always struggled with the puzzles and relied on his help to get through them in order to experience the story and the dialogue.
I know now that some of the logic powering them was weird and that people older and smarter than me struggled to find solutions which sometimes made little sense.
Since then I’ve always struggled to solve puzzles in video games, and since the Internet has become widely available, I tended to rely on walkthroughs and videos to solve them as fast as possible.
But the nature of The Talos Principle suggests that cheating when it comes to its own logical conundrums might actually decrease my enjoyment, so I am torn between facing one of my old video game fears and choosing to play something more simple and straightforward.
Gaming is so varied at the moment that it’s easy to simply ignore genres or mechanics that one hated in their past, but I know that there’s value in facing these kinds of fears, so I plan to take The Talos Principle for a spin soon, even if I do it knowing that I can rely on community knowledge for backup if I fail to progress.
