It’s a bit self-serious at times, but then, it also throws in the occasional jarring Sam reference. And in theme, it’s a meditation on mortality and entropy, and on finding meaning through obedience or defiance. Talos is a Portal-like - a first-person puzzle game, with precise solutions, marked by epiphanies about what the mechanics make possible. Sam is a first-person shooter, overblown and deliberately stupid, about fighting vast hordes of ridiculous aliens in messy, chaotic battles. Which is flabbergasting to remember, given the vast difference in both gameplay and tone. No coincidence, either: Talos and Sam were created by the same people. But in fact the game keeps multiple autosaves, in a biggish queue that reminds me of the quicksaves in Serious Sam. So it wasn’t clear to me how final and irrevocable the endings were. Normally, you don’t need to access the saved game interface directly at all you just select “Continue” from the main menu at the start of each session. If I had understood the way the game handles saves better, I might not have held back. The reason I hadn’t finished the game before was my stubborn insistence on completing all of the secrets before plunging into any ending. There’s a sort of hierarchy there: an obvious ending that you can get just by doing exactly as you’re told, then a more satisfying ending - what feels like the real ending - where you rebel against your instructions in the obvious way to access a sequence of optional puzzles, and finally a secret ending that you can only access by solving a bunch of extra-hard puzzles hidden throughout the normal ones. And so I’ve been playing it on and off, starting over from the beginning, and finally reached an ending a few days ago - three endings, in fact, one after another. I already had this game on Steam, and had even played it, but seeing it come up there reminded me that I had never actually finished it.
A couple months back, Epic Games made The Talos Principle briefly available for free on their storefront.